Zagaja.com

An interesting slide deck on something that I think most professors already knew and noticed. Students often skip lectures and attendance drops off near the end of the semester. This happened in both my undergrad and in law school. My general sense is that a lot of students felt they could simply learn through self-study and did not get much value out of the lectures. If you can pull it off it’s probably not a huge problem, but for students who struggle to get good grades I think that this kind of data will be critical in trying to figure out how to engage them and help them improve their performance.

My friend Lon Seidman explains how he used data to learn about his YouTube audience and improve his videos:

The other day, to much applause by the Internet community, Tom Wheeler announced that the FCC would issue regulations to ensure network neutrality. This Wall Street Journal article tells the story about how this victory was achieved. For startups and small businesses that are unable to negotiate special deals with ISPs this keeps the playing field level. It is a win for capitalism and the Internet.

Rather than write out a long post today I wanted to link to a bunch of interesting data related developments:

Today Fred Wilson asked his audience about the ethics of algorithms and pointed to a post on his firm’s website. I recently read a good article by Steven Levy on Google’s deep learning efforts and have been thinking about this issue quite a bit. I adopted a comment I wrote on the Union Square Ventures website into today’s blog post.