Quotes & Sayings About Big Data

I've got data incoming. Do you want me to transfer it to my portable unit?"
"No, you stay here, finish the runs. I shouldn't be more than a couple of hours. When you're done with this, I want you to go find a hammer."
Peabody had taken out her memo book, nearly plugged in the order, when she stopped, frowned up at Eve. "Sir? A hammer?"
"That's right. A really big, heavy hammer. Then you take it into my office and beat that fucking useless excuse for a data spitter on my desk to dust."
"Ah." Because she was a wise woman, Peabody cleared her throat rather than loosen the chuckle. "As an alternate to that action, Lieutenant, I could call maintenance. — J.D. Robb

The authors, academics from Northeastern University, Harvard University, and the University of Houston, concluded that Google Flu Trends had wildly overestimated the number of flu cases in the United States for more than two years. The article, "The Parable of Google Flu: Traps in Big Data Analysis," concluded that the errors were, at least in part, due to the decisions made by GFT engineers about what to include in their models - mistakes the academics dubbed "algorithmic dynamics" and "big data hubris. — Clayton M Christensen

With billions of years, who knows what science might make possible? Why, it might even make it possible for an intelligence, or data patterns representing it, to survive a big crunch and exist again in the next cycle of creation. Such an entity might even have science sufficient to allow it to influence the parameters for the next cycle, creating a designer universe into which that entity itself will be reborn already armed with billions of years worth of knowledge and wisdom. — Robert J. Sawyer

Big data has been used by human beings for a long time - just in bricks-and-mortar applications. Insurance and standardized tests are both examples of big data from before the Internet. — Jose Ferreira

There's a whole company called Palantir that does nothing but derive and create algorithms riches to search through big data. We're not using their capabilities. For heaven's sake, some of this is just ineptitude. — Carly Fiorina

Third Wave technology will also change how we measure success in the classroom. What good is an annual standardized test, after all, once teachers and parents can get detailed reports with a wide range of metrics, comparing their students on a regular basis to others in their class or school or state? In this way, big data on individual students will do for education what standardized testing never quite could: bring quantitative precision to a qualitative learning process. — Steve Case

Marketers use big data profiling to predict who is about to get pregnant, who is likely to buy a new car, and who is about to change sexual orientations. That's how they know what ads to send to whom. The NSA, meanwhile, wants to know who is likely to commit an act of terrorism - and for this, they need us. — Douglas Rushkoff

From a mathematical point of view, however, trust is hard to quantify. That's a challenge for people building models. Sadly, it's far easier to keep counting arrests, to build models that assume we're birds of a feather and treat us as such. Innocent people surrounded by criminals get treated badly, and criminals surrounded by law-abiding public get a pass. And because of the strong correlation between poverty and reported crime, the poor continue to get caught up in the digital dragnets. The rest of us barely have to think about them. — Cathy O'Neil

We see most big problems as information problems, which means that with enough data and the ability to crunch it, virtually any challenge facing humanity today can be solved. We think computers will serve at the behest of people - all people - to make their lives better and easier. And we are quite sure that we, as a couple of Silicon Valley guys, will come under a lot of criticism for this Pollyannaish view of the future. But that doesn't matter. What matters is that there is a bright light at the end of the tunnel. — Eric Schmidt

We Facebook users have been building a treasure lode of big data that government and corporate researchers have been mining to predict and influence what we buy and for whom we vote. We have been handing over to them vast quantities of information about ourselves and our friends, loved ones and acquaintances. — Douglas Rushkoff

Social media has given companies access to unprecedented amounts of information on client behavior and preferences - so-called Big Data. But making sense of it all and turning it into actionable policy has been elusive. — Ryan Holmes

Big data will replace the need for 80% of all doctors — Vinod Khosla

I am completely opposed to the concept of big data. — Chris Toumazou

Big data is based on the feedback economy where the Internet of Things places sensors on more and
more equipment. More and more data is being generated as medical records are digitized, more stores have loyalty cards to track consumer purchases, and people are wearing health-tracking devices. Generally, big data is more about looking at behavior, rather than monitoring transactions, which is the domain of traditional relational databases. As the cost of storage is dropping, companies track more and more data to look for patterns and build predictive models". — Neil Dunlop

big data is usually dumb data. — Anonymous

It's time to wake up to the fact that you're just another avatar in someone else's MMO. Worse: From where they stand, all-powerful Big Data analysts that they are, you look an awful lot like a bot. — Raph Koster

Although the method is simple, it shows how, mathematically, random brute force can overcome precise logic. It's a numerical approach that uses quantity to derive quality. — Liu Cixin

Apple knows a lot of data. Facebook knows a lot of data. Amazon knows a lot of data. Microsoft used to, and still does with some people, but in the newer world, Microsoft knows less and less about me. Xbox still knows a lot about people who play games. But those are the big five, I guess. — Robert Scoble

More than a building that houses books and data, the library has always been a window to a larger world
a place where we've always come to discover big ideas and profound concepts that help move the American story forward ...
Libraries remind us that truth isn't about who yells the loudest, but who has the right information. Because even as we're the most religious of people, America's innovative genius has always been preserved because we also have a deep faith in facts.
And so the moment we persuade a child, any child, to cross that threshold into a library, we've changed their lives forever, and for the better. This is an enormous force for good. — Barack Obama

Have you noticed the people most likely to be up in arms about governments apparently spying on us tend to be the most non-private people you know? The people launching petitions and wailing about Big Brother and data collection are most likely to be the most constant self-presenters. — Russell Smith

The human side of analytics is the biggest challenge to implementing big data. — Paul Gibbons

Big data is mostly about taking numbers and using those numbers to make predictions about the future. The bigger the data set you have, the more accurate the predictions about the future will be. — Anthony Goldbloom

'Data exhaust' is probably my least favorite phrase in the big data world 'cause it sounds like something you're trying to get rid of or something noxious that comes out of the back of your car. — Rick Smolan

What up Brit-Boy?"

"I was just wondering," he said,"about the significance of your canine collar."

Why was the collar such a big deal? Back home, half the girls wore them. "It was a gift from someone with twice the cojones you have."

He raised his eyebrows. "You only have the data to validate half of that statement," he said, letting his legs fall apart and glancing downward. "But that could be corrected. — Lee McClain

The key to a solid foundation in data structures and algorithms is not an exhaustive survey of every conceivable data structure and its subforms, with memorization of each's Big-O value and amortized cost. — Robert Love

A change in Quantity also entails a change in Quality — Friedrich Engels

As a digital technology writer, I have had more than one former student and colleague tell me about digital switchers they have serviced through which calls and data are diverted to government servers or the big data algorithms they've written to be used on our e-mails by intelligence agencies. — Douglas Rushkoff

(Godzillabytes: Nelson had an irrational dislike of 'petabytes', the recognized term for a particular, and particularly large, wodge of data. Anything that sounded like a kitten's gentle nip just didn't have the moxie to do the job asked of it. 'Godzillabytes', on the other hand, shouted to the world that it was dealing with something very, very big . . . and possibly dangerous.) Nelson — Terry Pratchett

I love that the world is data intensive ... unfortunately, it's called 'Big Data.' — Werner Vogels

The problem with data is that it says a lot, but it also says nothing. 'Big data' is terrific, but it's usually thin. To understand why something is happening, we have to engage in both forensics and guess work. — Sendhil Mullainathan

Code is not like other how-computers-work books. It doesn't have big color illustrations of disk drives with arrows showing how the data sweeps into the computer. Code has no drawings of trains carrying a cargo of zeros and ones. Metaphors and similes are wonderful literary devices but they do nothing but obscure the beauty of technology. — Charles Petzold

No matter how hard we try to reduce everything to deterministic brain chemistry, no matter how hard we try to reduce behavior to the sort of herd instinct that is captured in big data, no matter how hard we strive to replace sin with nonmoral words, like "mistake" or "error" or "weakness," the most essential parts of life are matters of individual responsibility and moral choice: whether to be brave or cowardly, honest or deceitful, — David Brooks

We get more data about people than any other data company gets about people, about anything - and it's not even close. We're looking at what you know, what you don't know, how you learn best. The big difference between us and other big data companies is that we're not ever marketing your data to a third party for any reason. — Jose Ferreira

As befits Silicon Valley, 'big data' is mostly big hype, but there is one possibility with genuine potential: that it might one day bring loans - and credit histories - to millions of people who currently lack access to them. — Evgeny Morozov

We all say data is the next white oil. [Owning the oil field is not as important as owning the refinery because what will make the big money is in refining the oil. Same goes with data, and making sure you extract the real value out of the data.] — Maurice Levy

Big data is the most disruptive force this industry has seen since the introduction of the relational database. — Jeffrey Needham

The existence of matter and energy in the universe did not require the violation of energy conservation at the assumed creation. In fact, the data strongly support the hypothesis that no such miracle occurred. If we regard such a miracle as predicted by the creator hypothesis, then the prediction is not confirmed. — Victor J. Stenger

New applications will have to deal with big data. We have to analyze it on the fly, so we have to have a system that is transactional and analytical at the same time. We cannot have a multi-stage system. This is too slow for modern applications. — Hasso Plattner

Huge volumes of data may be compelling at first glance, but without an interpretive structure they are meaningless. — Tom Boellstorff

When Git needs to create a working directory, it says to the filesystem: "Hey! I have this big blob of data that is supposed to be placed at pathname path/to/directory/file. — Jon Loeliger

Imagine the kind of quantum leap that human culture would undertake if we were all suddenly given a direct link to the knowledge and experience of everyone else on the planet - if, when we made a decision, we were drawing from not just our own limited experience and expertise but from that of billions of other people. Big data has enabled this quantum leap for the cognitive development of robots. — Alec J. Ross

We live, I regret to say, in an age of Big Data hype. — Oscar Wilde

The data does not support that high-income tax cuts are the main drivers of growth, so I don't think that uncertainty over what the tax rate will be for someone that makes a million dollars a year has that big an impact on the economic growth rate in the country. — Austan Goolsbee

The first wave of the Internet was really about data transport. And we didn't worry much about how much power we were consuming, how much cooling requirements were needed in the data centers, how big the data center is in terms of real estate. Those were almost afterthoughts. — Padmasree Warrior

Any enterprise that is serious about experiencing the power of Big Data in real-time should be looking at DataTorrent. — Jerry Yang

The great temptation of Big Data is that we can stop worrying about comprehension and focus on preventive action instead. Instead of wasting precious public resources on understanding the 'why' - i.e., exploring the reasons as to why terrorists become terrorists - one can focus on predicting the 'when' so that a timely intervention could be made. — Evgeny Morozov

Big Data processes codify the past. They do not invent the future. Doing that requires moral imagination, and that's something only humans can provide. We have to explicitly embed better values into our algorithms, creating Big Data models that follow our ethical lead. Sometimes that will mean putting fairness ahead of profit. — Cathy O'Neil

Jack's marketing books had been a part of her life for so long that she had ceased to register their presence, simply moving them from the couch to the coffee table, from the bed to the nightstand. How to Sell Everything to Anybody. Eight Great Habits of CEOs. They all seemed to involve numbers, as if you could simply count yourself to riches, like following sheep to sleep. — Erica Bauermeister

I think (fantasy football) has become something that needs to be looked at in terms of regulation. Effectively, it's day trading without any regulation at all. When you have insider information, which has apparently been the case, when you have people who use that information, use big data to try and take advantage of it, there has to be some regulation. If they can't regulate themselves, then the NFL needs to look at moving away from them a little bit, and there should be some regulation. — Jeb Bush

Management guru Jim Collins has some good words here. He and Morten T. Hansen studied leadership in turbulent times. They looked at more than twenty thousand companies, sifting through data in search of an answer to this question: Why in uncertain times do some companies thrive while others do not? They concluded, "[Successful leaders] are not more creative. They're not more visionary. They're not more charismatic. They're not more ambitious. They're not more blessed by luck. They're not more risk-seeking. They're not more heroic. And they're not more prone to making big, bold moves." Then what sets them apart? "They all led their teams with a surprising method of self-control in an out-of-control world."2 — Max Lucado

The most important question regarding Big Data at almost any company is: How much are your customers really worth? — Bill Lee

My advice was to start a policy of making reversible decisions before anyone left the meeting or the office. In a startup, it doesn't matter if you're 100 percent right 100 percent of the time. What matters is having forward momentum and a tight fact-based data/metrics feedback loop to help you quickly recognize and reverse any incorrect decisions. That's why startups are agile. By the time a big company gets the committee to organize the subcommittee to pick a meeting date, your startup could have made 20 decisions, reversed five of them and implemented the fifteen that worked. — Steven Gary Blank

Truly smart technologies will remind us that we are not mere automatons who assist big data in asking and answering questions. — Evgeny Morozov

We speak of 'software eating the world,' 'the Internet of Things,' and we massify 'data' by declaring it 'Big.' But these concepts remain for the most part abstract. It's hard for many of us to grasp the impact of digital technology on the 'real world' of things like rocks, homes, cars, and trees. We lack a metaphor that hits home. — John Battelle

Something really big happened in the world's wiring in the last decade, but it was obscured by the financial crisis and post-9/11. We went from a connected world to a hyperconnected world. I'm always struck that Facebook , Twitter, 4G, iPhones, iPads, ubiquitous wireless and Web-enabled cellphones, the cloud, Big Data, cellphone apps and Skype did not exist or were in their infancy a decade ago. — Thomas Friedman

People are saying, 'Big Data is the new oil.' — Gary Wolf

predictive Analytics enabled the Big Data to deliver the actual usage and value to the businesses by putting the processed information to a real use. — Salvatore Gaukroger

The religion of Big Data sets itself the goal of fulfilling man's unattainable desires, but for that very reason ignores her attainable needs. — Ludwig Feuerbach

Security is a big concern on the social web. People are going to try to destroy social media just like they are trying to breach data in other areas. — Sandy Carter

One might ask why big business data is still so often used on faith, even after it has failed spectacularly. The answer is of course that big business data happens to facilitate superquick and vast near-term accumulations of wealth and influence. — Jaron Lanier

Big data in education has huge potential to improve learning materials. — Jose Ferreira

At the federal level, this problem could be greatly alleviated by abolishing the Electoral College system. It's the winner-take-all mathematics from state to state that delivers so much power to a relative handful of voters. It's as if in politics, as in economics, we have a privileged 1 percent. And the money from the financial 1 percent underwrites the microtargeting to secure the votes of the political 1 percent. Without the Electoral College, by contrast, every vote would be worth exactly the same. That would be a step toward democracy. — Cathy O'Neil

More data - such as paying attention to the eye colors of the people around when crossing the street - can make you miss the big truck. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

We're rapidly entering a world where everything can be monitored and measured. But the big problem is going to be the ability of humans to use, analyze and make sense of the data. — Erik Brynjolfsson

The future of marketing isn't big data, it's big understanding. — Jay Baer

We're so obsessed with [big] data, we forget how to interpret it. — Danah Boyd

The truth is that relative income is not directly related to happiness. Nonpartisan social-survey data clearly show that the big driver of happiness is earned success: a person's belief that he has created value in his life or the life of others. — Arthur C. Brooks

Automation, big data and mobile are massive trends that will change the way we communicate from a Content Marketing perspective for years to come. — Communicate And Sell

Until now, trying to stop this illegal trade has been more or less futile. The oceans are vast. Navies and coastguard patrols are small. Even finding those who are up to no good has been hard. That, though, is changing through the use of "big data". It is now feasible to synthesise information from sources such as radio transponders and satellite observations, in order to track every ocean-going vessel that is, or might be, a fishing boat. — Anonymous

By definition, big data cannot yield complicated descriptions of causality. Especially in healthcare. Almost all of our diseases occur in the intersections of systems in the body. — Clayton M Christensen

It is really hurting; how big media plagiarize everyday and no one judges them; The real heroes are those tiny and small self-funded websites and blogs that provide all primary data for them to survive and it will continue as far they exist — M.F. Moonzajer

The bigger problem is this: Logic can be tweaked to say anything you want it to say. Only guts tell the truth, and your gut says this could be big if you can get the momentum you need. Your gut is processing all the data from everywhere. And the idea feels good. — Leela Sinha M.Div.

Big Data isn't magic, and it doesn't tell the feds who's a terrorist and who's not. But it doesn't have to be magic to generate long lists of people who are in some ways red-flagged, elevated-risk, "people of interest." Most of the people on those lists will have nothing to do with terrorism. How confident are you that you're not one of them? — Jordan Ellenberg

We believe we're moving out of the Ice Age, the Iron Age, the Industrial Age, the Information Age, to the participation age. You get on the Net and you do stuff. You IM (instant message), you blog, you take pictures, you publish, you podcast, you transact, you distance learn, you telemedicine. You are participating on the Internet, not just viewing stuff. We build the infrastructure that goes in the data center that facilitates the participation age. We build that big friggin' Webtone switch. It has security, directory, identity, privacy, storage, compute, the whole Web services stack. — Scott McNealy

One [Big Data] challenge is how we can understand and use big data when it comes in an unstructured format. — Steven McDonnell

Brazil fell into recession in the first half of the year, according to official data which showed the economy shrinking by 0.6% in the second quarter and 0.2% in the first. The main reason was another big drop in investment. The government had said that it expects GDP to grow by 1.8% this year, but that now seems unlikely. — Anonymous

As we get more transparent with data sets about infrastructure and systems management, I have a feeling we'll see big changes in how we think about complexity and our relationship to our actions. — Aaron Koblin

Every company has big data in its future and every company will eventually be in the data business. — Thomas H. Davenport

A quantified family would be upper middle class. Likely working in big tech," said Theodore. "Their employers would have required it." Piece by piece, the projectors filled in the available data on the house, including on the kitchen wall, a large screen of blurred graphs, smudged letters and numbers, all in motion. "This is the hearth," he said. "The data flickering at the heart of the family. Location, activity, well-being." He squinted at the screen. "Can you bring this into resolution? — Matthew De Abaitua

Big data is transitioning from a tool primarily for targeted advertising to an instrument with profound applications for diverse corporate sectors and for addressing chronic social problems. — Alec J. Ross

I'm not from a political family and didn't grow up dreaming of being George Washington. I started working in 8th grade and have held every odd job possible - working in a gravel pit, weighing big wheelers, ticket sales, data base management - but I knew if I worked hard and got experience, I could apply that experience to my next endeavor. — Aaron Schock

To clarify, *add* data. — Edward R. Tufte

In fact, the private sector is improving their algorithmic ability to search through big data month after month after month. And, of course, a big government bureaucracy isn't keeping up. — Carly Fiorina

With too little data, you won't be able to make any conclusions that you trust. With loads of data you will find relationships that aren't real ... Big data isn't about bits, it's about talent. — Douglas Merrill

The best data we have [concerning the Big Bang] are exactly what I would have predicted, had I nothing to go on but the five books of Moses, the Psalms, the bible as a whole. — Arno Hintjens

Without big data, you are blind and deaf and in the middle of a freeway. — Geoffrey Moore

Forget artificial intelligence - in the brave new world of big data, it's artificial idiocy we should be looking out for. — Tom Chatfield

One thing that's really interesting is not only the magnitude of the recent immigration into this country, but also its distribution and its investment in the country. About 9.3 percent of the population is now foreign-born [announced by the Census Bureau at over 10 percent a few days later]. What's really surprising is how well distributed those population groups are. Historically, we see new immigrants primarily on the coast and in a few big cities. I think the data are going to show a much wider distribution of the new population groups than we've experienced historically. — Kenneth Prewitt

As a result, there's always another billion-dollar company, and in the B2B space there is room for a few of them. With the waves of Big Data, cloud, mobile, and social setting the stage, it's not hard to imagine that the next twenty years of information technology will be even more exciting than the last twenty. — David Feinleib

Google released the basic algorithms for a program called TensorFlow for public consumption by the open-source community. TensorFlow is a set of algorithms that enable fast computers to do "deep learning" with big data sets to perform tasks better than a human brain. "By January 2016 we had a course online on how to use the TensorFlow open-source platform to write deep learning algorithms to teach a machine to do anything - copyediting, flying a plane, or legal discovery from documents," explained Thrun. — Thomas L. Friedman

I'm not brave. I'm just incredibly observant." Steve has discovered that the more you observe, the more data you collect, the more patterns you see, and the more boldly you can act. As Steve would say, "This is a big idea!"3 — Tina Seelig

We've already seen shifts happening in some of the big companies - Google, Apple - that now understand how vulnerable their customer data is, and that if it's vulnerable, then their business is, too, and so you see a beefing up of encryption technologies. At the same time, no programs have been dismantled at the governmental level, despite international pressure. — Laura Poitras

If Big Data's two running stories have been surveillance and money, for the last three years I've been working on a third: the human story. — Christian Rudder

[I]t seems to me that a lot of the stranger ideas people have about medicine derive from an emotional struggle with the very notion of a pharmaceutical industry. Whatever our political leanings, we all feel nervous about profit taking any role in the caring professions, but that feeling has nowhere to go. Big pharma is evil; I would agree with that premise. But because people don't understand exactly how big pharma is evil, their anger gets diverted away from valid criticisms - its role in distorting data, for example, or withholding lifesaving AIDS drugs from the developing world - and channeled into infantile fantasies. "Big pharma is evil," goes the line of reasoning; "therefore homeopathy works and the MMR vaccine causes autism." This is probably not helpful. — Ben Goldacre

Big Data is like teenage sex: everyone talks about it, nobody really knows how to do it, everyone thinks everyone else is doing it, so everyone claims they are doing it. — Dan Ariely

Junk food, empty calories and carbs are the Big Data of the masses — Karl Marx

The world that our children living in is going to be completely different because of big data. — Rick Smolan

I clearly say yes to Big Data, yes to greater security and convenience, but no to paternalism and Big Brother.' — Martin Winterkorn

When you're reading a novel, I think the reason you care about how any given plot turns out is that you take it as a data point in the big story of how the world works. Does such-and-such a kind of guy get the girl in the end? Does adultery ever bring happiness? How do winners become winners? — Elif Batuman

The fashionable term now is "Big Data." IBM estimates that we are generating 2.5 quintillion bytes of data each day, more than 90 percent of which was created in the last two years.36 — Nate Silver