Reflections on the 2 Bits Blog readings: Your impressions from two of the Bits Blog posts on Big data, and consider the following :

• What did you learn?
• Is there something that you admired / or caused you concern?
• Did the authors help you think of data and the web differently?

BIT BLOG ARTICLE 1 :

A Different Approach at Google Ventures BY CLAIRE CAIN MILLER JUNE 25, 2013 6:31 PM Comment Email Google Ventures is 10 miles and a world away from Sand Hill Road, the home of start-up investing. f Share As I wrote in an article published Monday, Google relies on cold hard data in a field dominated by intuition and connections. And all Tweet of its money comes from Google instead of outside investors, though many other companies also have venture arms, including 7 Save Microsoft, which on Tuesday announced the formation of Microsoft Ventures. More But the differences at Google Ventures run deeper than that. To start, there is the way it divides carried interest, the profits from BIG DATA 2013 successful investments. Known as A special section on the business and culture of big data. carry, it is how venture capitalists get super rich. And at the vast majority of firms, it is only available to partners. At Google Ventures, all 60 employees, from partners to assistants, get a share of the carry. Bill Maris, Google Ventures's managing partner, said other venture capitalists hoard carry because they were greedy. "But I'm greedy, too," Mr. Maris said. "The only way to be successful is to give everyone a stake, so if you work at Google Ventures, you have some financial interest."Data-Driven Aesthetics BY MARK HANSEN JUNE 19, 2013 9:43 PM Comment Email Looking out from a small control room, I scan the suspended grid of more than 200 iPhone-size computer screens for any sign of life. One flickers f Share awake, flips through a sequence of messages, too fast to be legible, and then holds on the sentence "I'm really not meant for him." After a short pause, a screen three columns over lights up, runs through more messages y Tweet and finds "I'm scared I'll lose my smile ..." Save The grid is "Listening Post," a decade-old artwork by Ben Rubin and me that tries to portray the conversations happening across the Web. It will be More shown as part of an exhibition opening Saturday at La Panacee, a new contemporary art center in Montpellier, France. Ten years ago, I was a statistician at Bell Laboratories. The idea that data might be the basis for creative BIG DATA 2013 work in the arts was new to me. But A special section on the business since then, I have collaborated with and culture of big data. artists like Mr. Rubin, designers, even an experimental theater company. From a speedometer to a weather map to a stock chart, we routinely interpret and act on data displayed visually. With a few exceptions, data has no natural "look," no natural "visualization," and choices have to be made about how it should be displayed. Each choice can reveal certain kinds of patterns in the data while hiding others. While these decisions are often made WORDS ALOFT "Shakespeare on technical grounds, they are also Machine" at the Public Theater. Courtesy of The Office for Creative questions of design. As Paola ResearchWhile these decisions are often made WGRDS ALUFT \"Shakespeare Machine\" at the Public Theater. Courtesy of The Office For Creative questions of des1gn.As Paola Research on technical grounds, they are also Antonelli, senior curator of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art, put it, \"Design and data look at each other as companions.\" Ms. Antonelli points to a reoent visualization by Giorgia Lupi depicting the \"Brain Drain\" in science. Ms. Lupi asks, \"What makes a researcher leave their home for another country?\" Her image is made up of compound, geometric shapes that represent different countries arranged to depict the relationship between researchers per million people in a country, and the percentage of its G.D.P. devoted to scientic research and development. The shapes themselves vary according to characteristics of each country's educational system and the balance of scientists entering and leaving the country. Ms. Lupi's visual borrows heavily from Mondrian and the language of abstract art. Artists working in data can also help to highlight the ambiguity or uncertainty intrinsic in a data set. Take the mysteries of biological life, for example. A recent art commission, "Signals,\" is a 48foot by 11foot mural at the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The assignment given to Casey Reas, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and Ben Fry, a principal at Fathom, an information design consultancy, was to create a visualization of how proteins oomrnunicate witbin a cell, and how this signaling changes for cancer cells. As art, however, their goal was to give a qualitative feel of the nature of the data. Mr. Reas and Mr. Fry worked closely with scientists on the project, and they used vast amounts of biological data. But, Mr. Reas said, We were actuallv obscuring it in order to get closer to the feel of it.\" Today, artists are working effectively with data at larger and larger scales. For example, Aaron Koblin, creative director at the Data Arts Team at Google, has designed a number of "classic" data visualizations involving large, complex data sets. These range from Web animations of airplane traffic over the continental United States to real-time representations of telephone and Internet traffic carried by AT&T into and out of New York City. Crowdsourcing can be a data source. Mr. Koblin was a creative director on "The Johnny Cash Project," a work inviting participants to contribute separate, hand-drawn frames of the music video to Cash's "Ain't No Grave." My latest collaboration with Mr. Rubin is again a piece that deals in snippets of text. Together with Jer Thorp, a data artist from Vancouver, we have created "Shakespeare Machine." It is a kind of data chandelier that hangs over the bar in the Public Theater in New York City. Each of its 37 blades displays text from one of the plays of Shakespeare. In this project, we benefit from the digital humanities, and specifically the MONK project, or Metadata Offer New Knowledge, which adds extra information to each word of Shakespeare's plays. In a kind of "anaphora mining," we combine the words, their parts of speech and something of their semantic content to identify common rhetorical structures. And so "the slings and arrows" in Hamlet matches "the prophets and apostles" in Henry VI and "the spies and speculations" in King Lear. Groups of phrases like these stream across the installation's blades. The visual presentation of quantitative information is an old practice. Artists and designers now work throughout the systems that collect, store and process data. They are even making their own tools, both hardware and software.And there are feedback loops - "Shakespeare Machine" is possible because the tools and techniques behind new forms of measurement for use in the arts are also producing new forms of data from the arts. A version of this article appears in print on 06/20/2013, on page FB of the NewYork edition with the headline: Data-Driven Aesthetics."The only way to be successful is to give everyone a stake, so if you work at Google Ventures, you have some financial interest." Then, there are the weekly meetings. At almost all firms, these happen on Monday mornings and include only Bill Maris, left, managing partner of partners. At Google, they are on Google Ventures, with Graham Spencer, who oversees its data Tuesdays and anyone, not just work. Annie Tritt for The New York partners, is invited. Times The Tuesday timing is to account for long weekends and to be available to RELATED ARTICLE Investing by Algorithm entrepreneurs for pitch meetings when other venture capitalists are busy, Mr. Maris said, and because no one likes to have a meeting first thing Monday morning. Inviting all staff members is part strategy, part culture, he said. Strategically, it helps to get more perspective on a potential deal. A researcher may have gone to school with an entrepreneur, or an assistant may have used a start-up's app, for instance. The investors also want to know if the design team wants to work with a certain rock star designer, or if the marketing team has enough time or interest to help a start-up in dire need of marketing advice. Culturally, Mr. Maris said that Google valued openness over hierarchy in general, and that he believed people were more likely to do a good job at work if they had a say in what they do. "What makes people happy at work is to get paid enough that you don't feel exploited and to pick what you work on," Mr. Maris said. "No one wants to be told, 'We decided to do this, now go do it." " And when investing partners propose new start-ups to finance, only Mr Maris has veto power So far he has never used it