Everybody Lies: The New York Times Bestseller

Google data also suggests a reason people may be avoiding sex so frequently: enormous anxiety, with much of it misplaced.

You have become another victim of one of the most diabolical aspects of “the curse of dimensionality.” It can strike whenever you have lots of variables

Digital truth serum, on average, will show us that the world is worse than we have thought.

Once we find the counterintuitive result, we can use more data science to help us explain why the world is not as it seems.

Google search data and other wellsprings of truth on the internet give us an unprecedented look into the darkest corners of the human psyche.

If you are deluding yourself, you can’t be honest in a survey.

Americans, for instance, search for “porn” more than they search for “weather.”

One somewhat random topic I recently explored: how does pregnancy play out in different countries around the world? I examined Google searches by pregnant women. The first thing I found was a striking similarity in the physical symptoms about which women complain.

The days of structured, clean, simple, survey-based data are over. In this new age, the messy traces we leave as we go through life are becoming the primary source of data.

such as the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test, the meaning of which, I have to admit, I had forgotten. (It’s a way to determine whether a model correctly fits data.)