NYU Data Science newsletter – July 10, 2015

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… we are introducing the new Amazon API Gateway. This new pay-as-you-go service allows you to quickly and easily build and run application backends that are robust, and scalable. Instead of worrying about the infrastructure, you can focus on your services.

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The API Gateway makes it easy for you to connect all types of applications to API implementations that run on AWS Lambda, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), or a publicly addressable service hosted outside of AWS. If you use Lambda (I’ll show you how in just a moment), you can implement highly scalable APIs that are totally server-less.

This paper draws attention to a powerful human motive that has not yet been incorporated into economics: the desire to make sense of our immediate experience, our life, and our world. We propose that evolution has produced a ‘drive for sense-making’ which motivates people to gather, attend to, and process information in a fashion that augments, and complements, autonomous sense-making. A large fraction of autonomous cognitive processes are devoted to making sense of the information we acquire: and they do this by seeking simple descriptions of the world. In some situations, however, autonomous information processing alone is inadequate to transform disparate information into simple representations, in which case, we argue, the drive for sense-making directs our attention and can lead us to seek out additional information. We propose a theoretical model of sense-making and of how it is traded off against other goals. We show that the drive for sense-making can help to make sense of a wide range of disparate phenomena, including curiosity, boredom, ‘flow’, confirmation bias and information avoidance, aesthetics (both in art and in science), why we care about others’ beliefs, the importance of narrative and the role of ‘the good life’ in human decision making.

Pittsburgh residents who dream of the day that the region’s bridges and roads can talk to their Internet-connected cars to plot the best pathway around potholes should be willing guinea pigs in Carnegie Mellon University’s latest experiment.

After claiming the title of the world’s first university with an integrated computer network in the 1980s, CMU is now gunning for the designation as frontier for the Internet of Things — a term for products with Internet connectivity built into them — by turning its Oakland campus into a living lab.

And it plans to make all of Pittsburgh part of the experiment.

Stop whatever it is that you're doing and listen to the latest @datastories, with @amandacox

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— Alberto Cairo (@albertocairo) June 26, 2015

Data Stories is a bi-weekly podcast on data visualization with Enrico Bertini (NYU Polytechnic) and Moritz Stefaner.