“How can you get there if you don’t know the route? This may seem an odd question, but a tremendous number of organisations working hard to leverage data to their advantage have no real roadmap. To create one, companies must first use data to understand past performance and where their journey has taken them so far. Then, they can see where they are headed—or could go if they pointed themselves in the optimal direction. Behind every effort to effectively leverage data for insight into a business, and foresight into a path to strong performance, is a process involving smart hypotheses and savvy questions whose answers show the way” (from the executive summary, The Economist, Intelligence Unit paper, 2013)

Click to access eiu-oracle-insights-1930398.pdf

“[…] big data is about three major shifts of mindset that are interlinked and hence reinforce one another. The first is the ability to analyze vast amounts of data about a topic rather than be forced to settle for smaller sets. The second is a willingness to embrace data’s real-world messiness rather than privilege exactitude. The third is a growing respect for correlations rather than a continuing quest for elusive causality” (“Big Data”, 2013, Mayer-Schonberger and Cukier)

[from the abstract] “For several years now, the media, the business world, and information technology (IT) have often used “Big Data” to describe a new society-wide dynamic. It is characterized not only by the production of massive amounts of data, but also— and especially—by the huge potential benefits that new statistical data-analysis tools would confer. The proliferation of data is so extensive that data capture and
analysis are increasingly presented as exceeding human reach, thus necessitating the use of tools and IT methods for interpretation. Data extraction and analysis are defined as “data mining,” without presenting data production, access, and analysis as socially constructed (e.g., with ideological, political, economic dimensions). Instead, they constitute a means for deriving “natural” information (the Real). In this light, Big Data may be seen as a technique that dispenses with symbolic mediation and thus lies outside the field of politico-ideological debate. Our presentation deals with the potential consequences of models based on Big Data” (“Big Data and Governance”,)

Click to access mondouxcyberpaper.pdf

Big Data is emerging from the interrupt process because finally the dataspace of software is connected to the sensorium of the world. Have a lot to this entry 😉

“The interrupt fundamentally changed the nature of computer operation, and therefore also the nature of the software that runs on it. The interrupt not only creates a break in the temporal step- by- step processing of an algorithm, but also creates an opening in its “operational space.” It breaks the solipsism of the computer as a Turing Machine, enabling the outside world to “touch” and engage with an algorithm. The interrupt acknowledges that software is not sufficient unto itself, but must include actions outside of its coded instructions. In a very basic sense, it makes software “social,” making its performance dependent upon associations with “others”—processes and performances elsewhere. These may be human users, other pieces of software, or numerous forms of phenomena traced by physical sensors such as weather monitors and security alarms. The interrupt connects the dataspace of software to the sensorium of the world” (Interrupt, Yull, in Software Studies: A Lexicon, The MIT Press).

(from the preface) “The Information Age suffers from a glaring omission. This claim may surprise many, considering we are actively recording Everything That Happens in the World. Moving beyond history books that document important events, we’ve progressed to systems that log every click, payment, call, crash, crime, and illness. With this in place, you would expect lovers of data to be satisfied, if not spoiled rotten. But this apparent infinity of information excludes the very events that would be most valuable to know of: things that haven’t happened yet” (Siegel, Predictive Analytics, 2013)

“In other words, real-time denotes the ability to process data as it arrives, rather than storing the data and retrieving it at some point in the future. That’s the primary significance of the term — real-time means that you’re processing data in the present, rather than in the future. But “the present” also has different meanings to different users. From the perspective of an online merchant, “the present” means the attention span of a potential customer. If the processing time of a transaction exceeds the customer’s attention span, the merchant doesn’t consider it real time. From the perspective of an options trader, however, real time means milliseconds. From the perspective of a guided missile, real time means microseconds” (from “Real time Big Data Analytics”, Mike Barlow, O’Reilly, 2013).

Issue Contents

http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/hbem20/current

Some perspective on #Bigdata issue in a response of American Statistical Association about calls for comment on “how the National Science Foundation (NSF) can better support the statistical sciences…”

Click to access StatsNSF_ASA_response.pdf