Eh, this looks like most academic personal pages, heavy or lightweight. Some promo of their books, minimal content and links to papers or presentations that are at least 2 years behind the current year (whatever the current year is).
Was out of it before the later developments presented this article (was maybe out of it when the author of the article was a baby :/) but most of it seems true, though I don't think I ever had any illusions about it being in any way a useful investigation of the topics.
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High school debate today is basically an intellectual game, not an exercise in truth-seeking.
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Was kind of the point. If I learned any "truths" it was about myself and the other weirdos on my team as people, not, Russian foreign relations or education or whatever the other topics were but that seems pretty valuable as well.
There are some projects to start bring FOSS ideas/ideals to building system controls and decision making like this, but I think there are significant difficulties in the variety of proprietary systems and reluctance to change due to capital costs and/or maintenance contracts.
Importing spreadsheets with column headings and data rows is bad enough - my biggest struggle is with spreadsheets used as fillable forms. I've spent tons of time working on generalizable tools for extracting this kind of semi-structured data but in the end each group of files requires a lot of custom work.
One cause of this seems to me to be that most things that people would want to show off (and then possible get smacked down for) have a high enough level of complexity that they can be hard to quickly and constructively criticize by someone outside of the process of making the thing.
Rather than try to seek out the good work that someone has done many levels deep in their code - a time consuming process that might depend on an intimate knowledge of the application, its requirements and the processes of those who made it - it's way easier to find a flaw (usually a flaw that you know is flaw because you've made the same mistake) and point that out. Or, rather than a real discussion of what assumptions the creator made and how they may have led to a less-than-ideal solution to a problem it's way easier to say 'wrong, next.'
Really serious review and criticism is great but it depends on a lot of effort in building context to make it useful for all the people involved.
Since the company has been acquired what are the plans for the service? http://labs.mitro.co/ says that "The service will continue to operate as-is for the foreseeable future." but there is a lot of ambiguity in 'forseeable.'
While I really appreciate the value of having the client and server code open sourced I don't want to run my own server nor do I want to sign up for a service that, with the changes that will likely happen after the acquisition, could disappear without a lot of warning.
The maps aren't great but Manhattan seems like a particularly bad example due to the point density. If you look at Chicago (https://www.mapbox.com/labs/twitter-gnip/brands/#11/41.8726/...) the distribution of phone types with regard to the economic status of the neighborhoods is a little clearer. Obviously it's all basic/easily misled visual comparison though.