Post by dave on Mar 4, 2013 8:04:09 GMT -5
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The Big-Data Interview: Making Sense of the New World Order
By Robert McMillan
03.04.13
In April 2003, British and U.S. researchers declared the Human Genome Project complete. This decade-long computational marathon marked the first time that anyone had mapped out the sequence of the more than 3 billion chemical building blocks that make up Human DNA.
It was a pioneering breakthrough in computer science and biology. It was also an early “Big Data” problem — a computational challenge that calls for a supercomputer, not an Oracle database, to solve. Welcome to the Big Data era. Today, processing power has advanced to the point where the Human Genome could be sequenced in a day. And with more and more of the world being digitized — everything from Google Street View images to our history of Facebook Likes — a lot of people are talking about Big Data these days.
Enter Victor Mayer-Schonberger and Kenneth Cukier and their new book, Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think.
As the title indicates, Mayer-Schonberger, an Oxford professor and Cukier, an editor with The Economist, are excited by Big Data, but their book is more than simple sideline cheerleader. It’s a nuanced and remarkably readable account of the technological changes that have made the Big Data era possible, and a primer on many of the interesting things that are happening at the intersection of powerful computer processing, machine learning, and data analytics. They cover everything from Google’s thirst for new data to mine, to Steven Levitt’s data-driven analysis of match fixing in professional Sumo wrestling.
We caught up with Mayer-Schonberger and Cukier on the telephone to discuss their new book, which launches tomorrow. We wanted to know if Big Data is really changing our brains — and they gave us a few answers. The following is an edited transcript of that conversation.
Continued at:
www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/03/big-data/
I'm thinking of ordering a copy.
The Big-Data Interview: Making Sense of the New World Order
By Robert McMillan
03.04.13
In April 2003, British and U.S. researchers declared the Human Genome Project complete. This decade-long computational marathon marked the first time that anyone had mapped out the sequence of the more than 3 billion chemical building blocks that make up Human DNA.
It was a pioneering breakthrough in computer science and biology. It was also an early “Big Data” problem — a computational challenge that calls for a supercomputer, not an Oracle database, to solve. Welcome to the Big Data era. Today, processing power has advanced to the point where the Human Genome could be sequenced in a day. And with more and more of the world being digitized — everything from Google Street View images to our history of Facebook Likes — a lot of people are talking about Big Data these days.
Enter Victor Mayer-Schonberger and Kenneth Cukier and their new book, Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think.
As the title indicates, Mayer-Schonberger, an Oxford professor and Cukier, an editor with The Economist, are excited by Big Data, but their book is more than simple sideline cheerleader. It’s a nuanced and remarkably readable account of the technological changes that have made the Big Data era possible, and a primer on many of the interesting things that are happening at the intersection of powerful computer processing, machine learning, and data analytics. They cover everything from Google’s thirst for new data to mine, to Steven Levitt’s data-driven analysis of match fixing in professional Sumo wrestling.
We caught up with Mayer-Schonberger and Cukier on the telephone to discuss their new book, which launches tomorrow. We wanted to know if Big Data is really changing our brains — and they gave us a few answers. The following is an edited transcript of that conversation.
Continued at:
www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/03/big-data/
I'm thinking of ordering a copy.