A "hipster" is "a person who is unusually aware of and interested in new and unconventional patterns (as in jazz or fashion)." Or so says the eleventh edition of Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary. The extent to which that definition is insufficient and unsatisfactory in the modern era boggles the mind. So, naturally, during the past decade lots of people, publications and websites have attempted to fill in the Williamsburg-sized gaps in our understanding by crafting better, more expansive definitions. These efforts often fall short as well. To be fair, devising a comprehensive yet pithy definition is not easy in this case. (Give it a try. It’s like attempting [...]

If you think of all the information encoded in the universe from your genome to the furthest star, from the information that's already there, codified or un-codified, to the information pregnant in every interaction, "big" has become the measure of data. And our capacity to produce and collect Big Data in the digital age is very big indeed. Every day, we produce 2.5 exabytes of information, the analysis of which will, supposedly, make us healthier, wiser, and above all, wealthier—although it's all a bit fuzzy as to what, exactly, we're supposed to do with 2.5 exabytes of data—or how we're supposed to do whatever it is that we're supposed to [...]