As an attendee at the inaugural VISUALIZED conference last week in New York City, I was ready to experience, as the website described, “an inspiring two-day gathering with the brightest minds and social innovators from around the world who are changing how we understand and interact with data; and gain insight into designing data-driven narratives [...]

Depending on your perspective, Twitter can either be a valuable source of breaking news, or a fire hose of miscellaneous, often dubious information. Microsoft researchers are investigating whether the microblogging service could serve another, more scientific function—to spot signs of postpartum depression in new mothers based on changes in how and what they tweet. The [...]

The World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, is certainly better known for the business and policy leaders it gathers. But I enjoyed some sessions by luminaries from the worlds of science and technology today as well. Now that I’m back, I thought I’d write up a couple, starting with the first session I [...]

Your cell phone location information can be used to help you find restaurants or help companies serve you targeted ads. What if all of this data could also play a role in studying and fighting deadly infectious diseases, such as malaria? An international team of researchers has done just that—for an entire country. People can [...]

Music just ain’t what it used to be. At least, that’s the stereotypical lament of each receding generation of music listeners. It’s also one way to read a new study on the evolution of pop music in the past half-century. A group of researchers undertook a quantitative analysis of nearly half a million songs to [...]