Software As Sensors

I love it when someone gives a talk or writes an article that gives you a new way to look at the world. Mike Dewar did this today in his talk about data scientists from (what looks like it was an awesome conference) The Conference with his talk about how a bit.ly link is a sensor - about how it lets you use it to sense things about your audience, and how bit.ly can use it to sense things from the aggregate of all the “sensors” that have been deployed.

That’s a lovely way of communicating what analytics, etc. do.

The rest of the talk is really good too - a great introduction to what data science is. Well worth watching.