Link tags: sampling

Unraveling The JPEG

A deep, deep, deep dive into the JPEG format. Best of all, it’s got interactive explanations you can tinker with, a la Nicky Case or Bret Victor.

VocaliD

You know how donating blood is a really good thing to do? Well, now you also donate your voice.

as days pass by — Collecting user data while protecting user privacy

Really smart thinking from Stuart on how the randomised response technique could be applied to analytics. My only question is who exactly does the implementation.

The key point here is that, if you’re collecting data about a load of users, you’re usually doing so in order to look at it in aggregate; to draw conclusions about the general trends and the general distribution of your user base. And it’s possible to do that data collection in ways that maintain the aggregate properties of it while making it hard or impossible for the company to use it to target individual users. That’s what we want here: some way that the company can still draw correct conclusions from all the data when collected together, while preventing them from targeting individuals or knowing what a specific person said.