Jennifer Valentino-DeVries

If you want to communicate more securely, encryption can be a good solution. For email, I use a tool called PGP, which stands for “pretty good privacy” and which relies on a system of “keys” to lock and unlock data. PGP does a good job of protecting the content of your messages, but using it isn’t exactly simple, especially for the average person.

I’ve gotten a few questions in the past several months from journalists and others who want to email in a more secure way but don’t yet know how to use PGP, so I figured I’d provide some basic instructions. If you have any further questions, please feel free to let me know.

Before you get started, a word of caution: Using encrypted email can protect the contents of your messages, but it doesn’t hide the fact that you were sending the message in the first place.

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This fall, The Wall Street Journal obtained a set of documents from a secretive trade show for surveillance and intelligence tech. The marketing materials reveal an industry that has grown rapidly in the past 10 years to supply the increasing demand from governments.

In addition to the usual articles in print and online, we wanted to give readers a chance to see the documents themselves. To do this, my fellow online journalists Zach Seward and Jeremy Singer-Vine suggested a service called DocumentCloud — part of Investigative Reporters and Editors, a nonprofit organization dedicated to investigative journalism. DocumentCloud lets journalists upload documents, annotate and categorize them and then use them in interactive graphics and the like. Documents are automatically run through an “optical character recognition” system, so they’re easily searched. Readers can view the journalists’ notes or download the original document as well.

As a new user of the system, I found DocumentCloud to be slick and incredibly easy to use. We couldn’t have completed our project so quickly without this tool. There are, however, a few things I’d love to see, including the ability to categorize annotations. This sort of finer control would allow readers to see only annotations related to glossary definitions of words, for example, or notes that correspond to certain stories. The folks at DocumentCloud are regularly updating the features. If you’re a journalist who regularly uses original source material, you should check it out.

The graphic above is part of a project Albert Sun, Zach Seward and I did for The Wall Street Journal that looks at a week’s worth of data from Foursquare — which is a mobile app that lets people “check in” to different locations. This was one of those projects that was done in our “spare time” — of which we have very little — so it took us a few months. Foursquare is still kind of a niche technology, used by only a small percentage of people, but it’s fascinating to see just what information you can get even from people who are willing to freely give up their data.

We looked specifically at New York and San Francisco, two cities with many early Foursquare users. Much of the data showed us what we already knew, for example that people in New York have weekday lunch in Midtown and go out in the Lower East Side on Friday nights. But there were some interesting tidbits as well. Among my favorites: The most disproportionately male locations were gay bars and … tech start-ups. And San Franciscans love coffee shops, while New Yorkers love bars. For more, see our graphic and blog post.

I spent three glorious days at the Strata conference on “big data” earlier this month — in sunny Santa Clara, surrounded by statistics nerds. The confab, put on by the folks at O’Reilly, proved to be fertile ground for potential stories, as well as for new ways to convey them based on data.

But one question still nags me about this field: What is “big data” in the first place? After all, large data sets have been around for years — although it’s true that we’re now talking petabytes instead of lowly terabytes. Something else that isn’t so new: “data mining,” or the parsing of said data to find patterns, often using artificial intelligence. Furthermore, it’s not always the size of the data that matters; the visualization techniques being discussed at Strata, for example, could very well be used with smaller data sets.

What’s new isn’t just the size of the data involved, or even the fact that it’s being analyzed, but how important and accessible it now is. The point is that data are now everywhere, being scattered like so many breadcrumbs. Tyler Bell at O’Reilly Radar has a good post on the many metaphors being used to describe the concept — like “the new oil,” “data deluge” and my personal favorite, “data exhaust.”

Several folks at the conference posed “data science” as an alternative term to “big data,” and I think that works. It certainly broadens the subject and seems more understandable.

One of my relatives, a speech therapist, mentioned to me recently how enthusiastic her students were about the iPad. It turns out she’s not alone.

In a Wall Street Journal article in October, I wrote about how the rise of mainstream tablet computers is having unforeseen benefits for children with speech and communication problems — and how it has the potential to disrupt a business where specialized devices can cost thousands of dollars.

The story involves a subject that I find fascinating — the way kids use technology. They seem to take to new gadgets more quickly than adults and are less afraid to experiment. But during the course of researching this article, I also found that there are seemingly simple things they have particular trouble understanding — like volume controls, or the proper use of the “home” button on the iPhone.

If you’re looking for more information on software and devices for speech therapy, I’m afraid I’m not an expert. (I’ve been getting a lot of requests along these lines.) But a good place to start is the American Speech Language Hearing Association.

For the past few months, my editor, Julia Angwin, has been leading a team looking into the use of information gleaned online and through other technology to compile dossiers of people and their preferences. The screen shot above provides a visualization of the primary database in this project — a look at the “trackers” on the 50 top websites, and the companies to which they send data about visitors’ browsing habits.

The full graphic, available here, gives a good snapshot of what’s going on in the burgeoning field of behavioral advertising, a complex and rapidly expanding field that is coming to rely on “big data.” And it raises plenty of questions for consumers; it’s not always clear what is done with the data or how long it is kept. Much of the data collected on browsing habits does not contain what’s known as “personally identifiable information,” such as name and Social Security number. But as dossiers become more comprehensive, researchers say such precautions don’t mean the profiles are actually anonymous.

As part of this series, which the Journal is calling “What They Know,” I wrote up some instructions for maintaining privacy online. And we’re working on some other exciting things. So stay tuned.

For most of my time at The Wall Street Journal, I’ve been a “Web producer,” laying out stories on the website’s home page, editing headlines and descriptions, that sort of thing. Recently I moved into a new role with the Journal’s Digits technology blog.

You can check out my work there. The blog looks at start-ups as well as major technology companies, but I’ve found that some of my favorite pieces involve tech research and technology policy. Recently I’ve looked at things like government use of technology in Manor, Texas, and whether doctors should Google their patients. If you work with these kinds of topics and have a tip for me, feel free to drop me a line at jennifer[dot]valentino[at]wsj[dot]com.

The tragedy of the earthquake in Haiti has obviously captivated people’s attention over the past few days. People are donating, tweeting and searching for news about the quake. So why do the most popular stories on many of the top news Web sites have nothing to do with Haiti?

The Haitian national palace. Photo by the U.N.

The top items at WSJ.com right now include an interview with Glenn Beck and article about pay at banks. And it’s not just that Journal readers’ politics make them more likely to be interested in those topics; the New York Times isn’t currently listing any Haiti stories among its most read either. On the BBC, stories about Haiti are trumped by a video of a dog that understands Polish.

The Times post linked above suggests that people can’t cope with the scale of the problem, and so they watch pet videos instead. I think that might be true — except for the fact that people actually are coping with the problem as much as can be expected. They’re donating in record amounts through text messaging and the like; it might not be much, but it certainly could be less. Most people realize they can’t physically go to Haiti and save people, but they aren’t being completely inactive, either.

So what’s the answer? I don’t know. I’d guess, though, that people are just successfully compartmentalizing the news and quickly making decisions about what actions (like donating) actually help them cope and what actions probably wouldn’t do much at this point except make them sad.

When I got married a couple of years ago, I spent a fair amount of time deciding whether to change my name. “Valentino” isn’t a bad name, and I’d never really thought I’d want to change it. But I happen to kind of like my husband, and I thought taking his name in some way was a nice thing to do. It made both of us happy. I’m aware that my name is long and annoying — 24 letters (four of them capitalized) plus a hyphen — but it’s my name.

Unfortunately, it’s not my name on Twitter. It’s too long.

Now, I can understand why my username on Twitter can’t be more than 15 characters. Usernames are added to outgoing messages, and they’re used within messages in retweets and so forth. You don’t want your entire 140-character limit on messages being taken up by a username. But what gets me is that real names on Twitter also have character limits. The restriction is raised to 20 characters (including spaces) to allow for people with longer names, but my name goes beyond even that. I’d imagine that many of Twitter’s female users might be known by two surnames as well. Plus, there are several nationalities with names that would easily test Twitter’s limits.

There’s a practical issue here — the ease of finding people in the Twitterverse. On Facebook, I can search for friends whether I use their married names, maiden names or even nicknames. On Twitter’s people search, which is notoriously problematic, I can be easily found with a query for “jenvalentino” or “Jennifer Valentino,” and that’s about it. If you search for anything involving “DeVries,” or even for “Jen Valentino,” you don’t find me, even though I list my full name in Twitter’s little “bio” section. It’s not that I think I have legions of fans who are dying to follow my anemic Twitter feed. But for a social-media service, this is a user-experience problem. Shouldn’t Twitter be facilitating my search for relevant people to follow?

I’m a big football fan, so I have to admit I was a little sad to see this paper by economists from Berkeley and UC San Diego. The researchers looked at NFL games and found that, all else being equal, upset losses in NFL home games lead to an 8% increase in domestic violence by men against women. The fact that there is an effect doesn’t surprise me, but 8% seemed pretty high. Apparently it’s roughly equal to the increase in domestic violence reported on hot days. But it’s much less than the increase on holidays. New Year’s Eve and Memorial Day are the worst, with violence increasing about 30%.