Big Data

British computer scientist working at CERN in Geneva, invented the internet. He didn’t – his contribution was the Web.
The internet is an infrastructure for connecting computers. It’s literally an ‘inter-computer network’. It developed organically in the 1970s, growing out of a US military network called ARPANet, which from its 1960s beginning had become a significant presence in US universities

You can have as much data as you like, with perfect networked ability to collate it from many locations, but of itself this is useless. In fact, it’s worse than useless. As humans, we can only deal with relatively small amounts of data at a time; if too much is available we can’t cope. To go further, we need help from computer programs, and specifically from

One potential danger of big data is that it isn’t big enough. We can indeed use search data to find out things about part of a population – but only the members of the population who use search engines. That excludes a segment of the voting public. And the excluded segment may be part of the upsets in election and referendum forecasts since 2010.

In the real world, we hardly ever have complete data; we are always susceptible to black swans. So, for instance, stock markets generally rise over time – until a bubble bursts and they crash. The once massive photographic company Kodak could sensibly forecast sales of photographic film from year to year. Induction led them to believe that, despite ups and downs, the overall trend in a world of growing technology use was upward. But then, the digital camera black swan appeared.

As of 2016, Moore’s Law, which predicts that the number of transistors in a computer chip will double every one to two years has held true for over 50 years. We know it must fail at some point, and have expected failure to happen ‘soon’ for at least twenty years, but ‘more of the same’ has done remarkably well.

Oxford English Dictionary admits that using data as a singular mass noun – referring to a collection – is now ‘generally considered standard’.