Thursday, December 29, 2016

Other Ways to Measure the Year: Data Awards

Shortly after I published my own post of metrics for the year, I read a post on FiveThirtyEight about the best and worst uses of data for 2016. This is the second time they've had these awards and so they named many awards after the previous year's winner. Here are some highlights:

The Trudeau Prize For Governance went to the Bureau of Justice Statistics for finally offering data on the number of Americans killed by police.

The Boldest Sacking Of Experienced Humans In Favor Of Untested Algorithm went to Facebook, who fired their human journalists and replaced them with an algorithm that began promoting fake news.

The “Are We Still Doing This?” Award For Willful Misinterpretation of Government Statistics went to Donald Trump for his claims that the unemployment rate could be as high as 42%, which would be true if you counted people who weren't actually looking for a job.

The Ashley Madison Memorial User Data Leak of the Year went to Yahoo, who announced that over a billion accounts had been compromised.

And yesterday, they published a list of 11 stories they wished they'd written; two of those stories I covered (here and here) on Deeply Trivial.

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