News
How fake is real enough? Privacy and synthetic data
In 2007, Netflix launched the second iteration of its annual competition where, for the grand prize of one million dollars, participants attempted to outperform the company’s movie recommendation system based on an anonymized dataset consisting of users’ viewing history and ratings. While the dataset was designed to protect users’ privacy, within a few weeks researchers at the University of Austin were able to re-identify a large number of users by combining the dataset with public ratings on websites like IMDB. Netflix was forced to cancel the competition in 2009 following a series of lawsuits alleging that the company had violated federal privacy laws.
By Achilleas Ghinis
News
How fake is real enough? Privacy and synthetic data
In 2007, Netflix launched the second iteration of its annual competition where, for the grand prize of one million dollars, participants attempted to outperform the company’s movie recommendation system based on an anonymized dataset consisting of users’ viewing history and ratings. While the dataset was designed to protect users’ privacy, within a few weeks researchers at the University of Austin were able to re-identify a large number of users by combining the dataset with public ratings on websites like IMDB. Netflix was forced to cancel the competition in 2009 following a series of lawsuits alleging that the company had violated federal privacy laws.
By Achilleas Ghinis
News
Enter our 2023 writing competition for early-career statisticians and data scientists
Are you an early-career statistician or data scientist with a talent for telling data-driven stories in an entertaining and thought-provoking way? Would you like to be published in Significanceand...
By Anna Britten
News
Significance magazine editorial board seeks new RSS members
Significance magazine publishes stories about statistics and data science, written by experts for everyone. We are looking for expert statisticians and data scientists to join our editorial board.
Editorial board members are...
By Anna Britten
News
Enter our 2023 writing competition for early-career statisticians and data scientists
Are you an early-career statistician or data scientist with a talent for telling data-driven stories in an entertaining and thought-provoking way? Would you like to be published in Significance and present your work at the Royal Statistical Society (RSS) conference?
By Anna Britten
News
Significance magazine editorial board seeks new RSS members
Significance magazine publishes stories about statistics and data science, written by experts for everyone. We are looking for expert statisticians and data scientists to join our editorial board.
By Anna Britten
Culture
How to lose a girl in two standard deviations
Imagine a movie where the female lead is in a STEM field. She is probably brilliant, exclusively interested in facts, unmoved by emotion, cold, and certainly not in love. How one-dimensional. How unrepresentative of female complexity. I, for instance, also happen to think of myself as a STEM woman. I teach introductory statistics and am a PhD student who has high expectations of myself and my students, believes in rigor, and enjoys pushing myself and others around me to think critically. I am also a hopeless romantic. I love nothing more than to watch a good rom-com (except for maybe forcing my reluctant partner to watch it with me).
By Veronica Carlan
Culture
How to lose a girl in two standard deviations
Imagine a movie where the female lead is in a STEM field. She is probably brilliant, exclusively interested in facts, unmoved by emotion, cold, and certainly not in love. How one-dimensional. How unrepresentative of female complexity. I, for instance, also happen to think of myself as a STEM woman. I teach introductory statistics and am a PhD student who has high expectations of myself and my students, believes in rigor, and enjoys pushing myself and others around me to think critically. I am also a hopeless romantic. I love nothing more than to watch a good rom-com (except for maybe forcing my reluctant partner to watch it with me).
By Veronica Carlan
