Talk at Harvard GSD on April 17, 2015 at https://datascales.wordpress.com/program-2/

1. !
The pigeon in the haystack
Dietmar Offenhuber
Public Policy and Urban Affairs
Northeastern University
d.offenhuber@neu.edu

2. What do we talk about when we talk about bias?

3. “Petabytes allow us to say: "Correlation is enough." We can stop looking for models. We
can analyze the data without hypotheses about what it might show. We can throw the
numbers into the biggest computing clusters the world has ever seen and let statistical
algorithms find patterns where science cannot.”
!
Chris Anderson. 2008. “The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete.” Wired Magazine, June
27.

4. Quantitative models as a way to make society legible
(= impose legibility)
!
James C. Scott, 1999, Seeing Like a State

5. Source: spurious correlations, www.tylervigen.com

6. Drawing on the most recent neuroscience research,
his own research and inventions in artificial
intelligence, and compelling thought experiments,
he describes his new theory of how the neocortex
(the thinking part of the brain) works: as a self-
organizing hierarchical system of pattern
recognizers

7. “A decade-old toasted cheese sandwich
said to bear an image of the Virgin Mary
has sold on the eBay auction website for
$28,000.”
BBC news, Nov. 23, 2004

9. Burrhus Frederic Skinner. 1947. “Superstition in the Pigeon.”
Journal of Experimental Psychology (38)
“there is a close relationship between pattern discovery and
superstition since humans and animals alike excel at finding structures
where there are none.” — Alexander Riegler

11. Truth and Bias

12. Bias as a pattern of systematic error

13. Case Study Boston
• Two different Interfaces (Citizens Connect and
SeeClickFix), integrated with the same CRM and 4+
years of data

16. Opacity
through
transparency

17. Urban Entropy (2015), Dietmar Offenhuber, Ars Electronica Center

18. When we talk about bias, we actually mean implicit
assumptions

19. Eric Schmidt: Every 2 Days We Create As Much
Information As We Did Up To 2003

20. Sorting out Cities
National Museum of Science, Tokyo
collaboration w/ Ars Electronica
Futurelab

21. NASA Night lights
composite
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/
Features/NightLights/

22. Implicit assumptions are shaped by design

23. P. Morville

24. interfaces regulate
spatial behavior
Dodge, Martin, and Rob Kitchin. 2004.
“Flying through Code/space: The Real
Virtuality of Air Travel.” Environment
and Planning A 36 (2): 195–212.

25. Infrastructure legibility
Kevin Lynch – the Perceptual Form of the
City 1954-59