WhatsTheBigData

Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Kenneth Cukier, authors of the just-published Big Data: A Revolution that Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think,  reacted sharply when I asked them if they are cheerleaders for big data, as one reviewer implied. ”We are messengers of big data, not its evangelists,” said Cukier. Added Mayer-Schönberger: “The reviewer did not read the book.”

I did. Big Data is an excellent introduction for general audiences to what has become a topic of conversation everywhere, faster than any other technology-driven buzzword in recent memory. To those who may react to “big data” as today’s incarnation of “big brother,” Mayer-Schönberger and Cukier offer a comprehensive and highly readable overview of the benefits and risks associated with big data, which they define as “the ability of society to harness information in novel ways to produce useful insights or goods and services of significant value.”    Continue reading →

“Let us cultivate the mathematical sciences with ardor, without wanting to extend them beyond their domain; and let us not imagine that one can attack history with formulas, nor give sanction to morality through theories of algebra or the integral calculus”–Augustin-Louis Cauchy, 1821, quoted by Matthew Jones, Columbia University

“…the common language of business is not going to be Chinese or Spanish. It’s going to be math”–Michael Rhodin, IBM

“The future is going to be owned by people who are comfortable in the quant world but have deep business knowledge”–Christine Poon, Max M. Fisher College of Business, Ohio State

“[One false promise that some proponents of Big Data hold out is that somehow vast oceans of digital data can be sifted for nuggets of pure enterprise gold.] It is not going to happen magically. The software only finds correlations, not causations. In order to find causal relationships you have to do work. If you take any sufficiently large data sets, you are going to find correlations. You need a human in the loop to work out which are important”–Stephen Sorkin, Splunk