What’s in a name? In “How Algorithms Shape Our World” (a Ted Talk from 2011), Kevin Slavin describes the mysterious work of algorithms to determine prices on Amazon, recommend movies on Netflix, and control institutional buying and selling in the stock market, sometimes even beyond human control. In the midst of these issues, he makes a general statement about the context of naming (beginning at about 6:00 in the video below), “And they do what we’ve always done when confronted with huge amounts of data that we don’t understand — which is that they give them a name and a story.” Continue reading “A Name and A Story”
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