Stephen Baker

Vive le livre, says the City of Light

hardygreen.com — Everything is up to date in Paris, France-or just about everything, as I saw in a recent visit. The once ubiquitous Gitanes and Gauloises have made way for the increasingly popular cigarette electronique. Lunch-goers in the vicinity of the city's stock exchange can choose the Brasserie De La Bourse or, for the ironically inclined, the Café des Initiés (Café of Insider Trading).

How much are your personal data worth?

ft.com — Explore how valuable your data are with this interactive calculator. While the multibillion-dollar data broker industry profits from the trade of thousands of details about individuals, those bits of information are often sold for a fraction of a penny apiece, according to industry pricing data viewed by the Financial Times.

GOP plan: Bring Dubya back!

salon.com — Look beneath the surface, and a hot new plan for the party's comeback is really just George W. Bush redux Topics: George W.

My answers about government datamining

thenumerati.net — Q: Do you believe that data mining is necessary to keep the US safe? What occured in Boston was just the last of a series of attacks and I have read that American public opinion is divided right now between the ones who favour safety and those who defend privacy.

Leaks in a Big Data Age: Bloomberg Businessweek Opening Remarks

bloomberg.com — A very large Internet company once had the noble impulse to share some of its data with the research community. It made three months of log files from its search service available to all.