“Facebook Is a Bigger Source for Political News than CNN, Fox” headlined a Mashable article last week. Oh, really? This provocative phrase kept showing up on my Twitter feed. The article was one of many that splashed news headlines after the Pew Research Journalism project issued a report on the news habits of Americans. But […]
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Big Data and the Survival of the Scientific Method
Five years ago, Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine, wrote a provocative article entitled, “The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete” (2008). He argued that hypothesis testing is no longer necessary with google’s petabytes of data, which provides all of the answers to how society works. Correlation now “supercedes” causation. […]