I don’t think having or not having a Facebook (or any other social media) account has anything to do with how productive someone is. You can shut down one source of distractions, but if the fundamental aversion to your work that is driving you to distraction is still in place, you’ll find something else.

Get ready for the onslaught of small data. Or non-data. Anti-data. Anything but big data.

Katherine Mitchell DiRico’s exhibition “Data Sets,” on view through Feb. 4 at Montserrat College’s Schlosberg Gallery, wants you to think about data, implies data, and establishes an aesthetic around data – all without any data. Her delicate, barely visible wall installations – pinned wire, some string, pencil marks, shockingly little color – look like carelessly copied musical scores, or perverse renderings of DaVinci’s geometric anatomical drawings. Pinned wire and string emanate from a central, tangled cluster, stretching out into incoherent, unequal directions.

We now spend 10 hours a day looking at a screen. That’s nearly half of our lives spent living in a virtual world. The iPhone was released just 10 years ago. Our existence has been radically transformed in a relatively short space of time. While it is hard to remember life before computers, research shows that we aren’t as effective on screens as we might think. We tested the effects of multi-screening on brand recall and found that when dealing with more than one device at a time, the mental strain decreases our attention and emotional response and eventually leads to cognitive collapse – which means people are looking, but they haven’t the mental energy to take more in (all too familiar a feeling in the connected lives we lead.)

The exponential rise in the adoption of telematics by companies is raising vital questions that every fleet manager should have answers to.

With the devices generating reams of data, there is a growing onus on those controlling fleet operations to ensure that they are acting on this information and not ignoring ticking timebombs which could land them, and their business, in court.

Modern commodity markets are fickle, with profits and penalties seemingly jumping out of thin air. At the 2017 Kansas Soybean Expo, Advanced Market Concepts consultant Darrell Holaday explained tactics for farmers to make futures markets more friend than foe.

Perpetual inputs cause extreme volatility in markets today, with information overload causing futures to “almost know too much,” Holaday said. While the prospect of jumping into unpredictable markets seems daunting to some, Holaday said today’s markets are more navigable than ever.

Financial dashboards have become one of the most saleable feature of an accounting software. Filled with colorful graphs and data visualization tools, these dashboards provide quick insights on how a business is performing.

The past year was a somber one for democracies around the world, as distaste for political institutions and political elites reached a breaking point. Brexit triumphed over common sense, and united defense, in England. Extreme right-wing politicians continued their march to power in continental Europe. And the U.S. Electoral College victory of Donald Trump secured the election of a populist demagogue who openly criticizes the democratic system.

The world has been transformed by the internet. Google, founded just 20 years ago, is a major force in online information. The company name is a misspelt version of “googol”, the number one followed by one hundred zeros. This name echoes the vast quantities of information available through the search engines of the company.

You might think it’s cute to snap a photo of your toddler running around in a playground or having a temper tantrum, and then posting it on social media.

But did you ever think it might be a mistake, or even illegal?

The French government earlier this year warned parents to stop posting images of their children on social media networks.

Under France’s rigorous privacy laws, parents could face penalties of up to a year in prison and a fine of €45,000 ($46,456) if convicted of publicising intimate details of their children without their consent.

It’s not easy to speak with one voice in 24 languages.

When what is now the European Union first took root in the 1950s, it included just six nations, and in three of them many people spoke French. It could sidestep national jealousies without trouble by designating most of the member nations’ main languages as official languages.