Big Data

The Great Change

Everyone with a computer or cellphone knows that the “information revolution” has transformed the world. However, you might not know that another sweeping transformation is underway, one changing philosophical debates, disease control, retail pricing and many other facets of modern life. Big data drives this new revolution. The term originated in sciences like genomics and astronomy that deal with massive calculations, but it is spreading to “all areas of human endeavor.” Initially, the term “big data” referred to calculations that consumed so much information they overwhelmed computers. New techniques have been developed to deal with that scale of data, allowing people to utilize it without fitting it to a specific organizing format. The big data revolution calls for working on a massive scale to do things that you can’t do on a smaller scale.

Several factors fuel the big data revolution. Computers keep getting faster, and memory, cameras, video cameras and sensors keep getting cheaper. As more people go online – and as social media become more widespread – those faster computers have more data to work with. Everyone online has access to several hundred...