Tomorrow’s Data, Tomorrow’s Water, and Tomorrow-Land

Uncharted: Big Data as a Lens on Human Culture by Erez Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel

The nutshell: Scientists Aiden and Michel invented the Google Ngram Viewer, which allows users to analyze the evolution of language as captured in the millions of books Google has digitized. In Uncharted, they tell the story of how they developed this tool, explain some of their most trenchant findings, and demonstrate the potential of this data to illuminate the world we’ve …

More In: The Six-Point Inspection

This Is Your Brain On Apps, ‘Minecraft,’ and Fracking

Risk-averse. Dependent. Superficial. Narcissistic. All of these are adjectives employed by developmental psychologists Gardner and Davis to describe the Web 2.0 generation. They argue that today’s kids are dependent on …

A World That’s Overdeveloped, Fatter, and Sadder

For years, University of Colorado–Boulder and Vermilion Sea Institute biologist Hirsh has brought a class of college students to Baja California to study the ecology and history of the Sea …