The Joy of Data
Exploration of the word of our age - data - with mathematician Hannah Fry. What is data? How is it stored, shared, made sense of? And what does data reveal about us and the world?
A witty and mind-expanding exploration of data, with mathematician Dr Hannah Fry. This high-tech romp reveals what data is and how it is captured, stored, shared and made sense of. Fry tells the story of the engineers of the data age, people most of us have never heard of despite the fact they brought about a technological and philosophical revolution.
For Hannah, the joy of data is all about spotting patterns. Hannah sees data as the essential bridge between two universes - the tangible, messy world that we see and the clean, ordered world of maths, where everything can be captured beautifully with equations.
The film reveals the connection between Scrabble scores and online movie streaming, explains why a herd of dairy cows are wearing pedometers, and uncovers the network map of Wikipedia. What's the mystery link between marmalade and One Direction?
The film hails the contribution of Claude Shannon, the mathematician and electrical engineer who, in an attempt to solve the problem of noisy telephone lines, devised a way to digitise all information. Shannon singlehandedly launched the 'information age'. Meanwhile, Britain's National Physical Laboratory hosts a race between its young apprentices in order to demonstrate how and why data moves quickly around modern data networks. It's all thanks to the brilliant technique first invented there in the 1960s by Welshman Donald Davies - packet switching.
But what of the future? Should we be worried by the pace of change and what our own data could be used for? Ultimately, Fry concludes, data has empowered all of us. We must have machines at our side if we're to find patterns in the modern-day data deluge. But, Fry believes, regardless of AI and machine learning, it will always take us to find the meaning in them.
Last on
Clips
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Data - the word of our time
Duration: 02:14
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Marmalade, socks and One Direction
Duration: 03:01
Music Played
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The Beach Boys
Good Vibrations
Credits
Role | Contributor |
---|---|
Presenter | Hannah Fry |
Production Company | Wingspan Productions |
Producer | Catherine Gale |
Director | Catherine Gale |
Executive Producer | Archie Baron |
Graphic Designer | Flock London |
Broadcasts
- Wed 20 Jul 2016 21:00
- Thu 21 Jul 2016 03:00
- Mon 25 Jul 2016 23:00
- Mon 28 Nov 2016 21:00
- Tue 29 Nov 2016 02:35
- Tue 18 Sep 2018 02:00
- Wed 20 Mar 2019 22:00
- Wed 9 Oct 2019 02:00
- Thu 21 Jan 2021 14:00成人快手 Two except Scotland
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