In his recent Financial Times article, Tim Harford explained the big data that interests many companies is what we might call found data – the digital exhaust from our web searches, our status updates on social networks, our credit card purchases and our mobile devices pinging the nearest cellular or WiFi network.
As an unabashed lover of data, I am thrilled to be living and working in our increasingly data-constructed world. One new type of data analysis eliciting strong emotional reactions these days is the sentiment analysis of the directly digitized feedback from customers provided via their online reviews, emails, voicemails, text messages and social networking
In his book Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation, Steven Johnson explained that “error is not simply a phase you have to suffer through on the way to genius. Error often creates a path that leads you out of your comfortable assumptions. Being right keeps you in
We sometimes describe the potential of big data analytics as letting the data tell its story, casting the data scientist as storyteller. While the journalist has long been a newscaster, in recent years the term data-driven journalism has been adopted to describe the process of using big data analytics to
While big data is rife with potential, as Larry Greenemeier explained in his recent Scientific American blog post Why Big Data Isn’t Necessarily Better Data, context is often lacking when data is pulled from disparate sources, leading to questionable conclusions. His blog post examined the difficulties that Google Flu Trends
Teller, the normally silent half of the magician duo Penn & Teller, revealed some of magic’s secrets in a Smithsonian Magazine article about how magicians manipulate the human mind. Given the big data-fueled potential of data science to manipulate our decision-making, we should listen to what Teller has to tell
Were you a mother who listened to classical music during your pregnancy, or a parent who played classical music in your newborn baby’s nursery because you heard it stimulates creativity and improves intelligence? If so, do you know where this “classical music makes you smarter” idea came from? In 1993, a
A new SAS survey uncovered a big data disconnect, with only 12 percent of organizations on board. Why weren’t more of the organizations surveyed taking steps towards a big data pay off? Without a doubt those that are implementing big data strategies will see a competitive advantage. And the longer they
Hadoop – it’s not just hype! The community has shown tremendous interest in our plans for Hadoop – what will be supported, when it will be available, and so on. We’ve been blogging about big data and provided early plans for Hadoop, including SAS/ACCESS support for Hadoop. Well, it's official:
Mike Ames and I recently had an opportunity to talk to Fern Halper and Judith Herwitz from Hurwitz & Associates as they are doing a 4 part blog series on vendor views on big data and big data analytics. You can view Fern's blog post about the SAS perspective here. Here
