If you’ve driven on the highway, you’ve seen it: The traffic jam appears out of nowhere and disappears just as mysteriously. We blame the cars around us for their poor driving skills, and slam on our own breaks. During an AAAS annual meeting session hosted by Northeastern professor Albert-László Barabási, Northwestern professor Dirk Helbing showed ...
On Friday I got to pretend I was a student again. I sat in on Auroop Ganguly’s graduate class, Applied Time Series and Spatial Statistics for the second of two guest lectures on the subject of forecasting. Last time, it had to do with forecasting the financial impacts of natural disasters like Hurricane Sandy, which I ...
In the coming months we will be inundated with political messaging from a host of sources. This is always what happens in the period leading up to a political election and this time it’s no different. Well…one thing is different actually: this time we can use new data visualizations from professor David Lazer’s lab to ...
Here’s a statistic for you: From internet and mobile phone use to credit card transactions and voting records, we now generate more socio-economic data each 1.2 years than we did during all of previous human history combined. That’s according to a McKinsey Global Institute Study cited in the first pages of the new open-access online ...