Our colleague and dear friend John Holcomb sent an email to Rob and I in which he asked if we had heard the phrase “Big data is the new oil”. Neither of us had, but according to Jer Thorp, ad executives are uttering this phrase upwards of 100 times a day.
Jer’s article is worth a read. While he points out in the title that big data is not the new oil, he astutely suggests that the oil/data metaphor does work to an extent.
It is time for the NCAA Basketball Tournament. Sixty-four teams dream big (er…I mean 68…well actually by now, 64) and schools like Iona and Florida Gulf Coast University (go Eagles!) are hoping that Robert Morris astounding victory in the N.I.T. isn’t just a flash in the pan.
My favorite part is filling out the bracket–see it below. (Imagine that…a statistician’s favorite part of the whole thing is making predictions.) Even President Obama filled out a bracket [see it here].
I had the privilege last week of listening to the dissertation defense of UCLA Stat’s newest PhD: Nathan Yau. Congratulations, Nathan!
Nathan runs the very popular and fantastic blog Flowing Data, and his dissertation is about, in part, the creation of his app Your Flowing Data. Essentially, this is a tool for collecting and analyzing personal data–data about you and your life.
One aspect of the thesis I really liked is a description of types of insight he found from a paper by Pousman, Stasko and Mateas (2007): Casual information visualization: Depictions of Data in every day life.
My colleague Mark Hansen used to assign his class to keep a data diary. I decided to try it, to see what happened. I asked my Intro Stats class (about 180 students) to choose a day in the upcoming week, and during the day, keep track of every event that left a ‘data trail.’ (We had talked a bit in class about what that meant, and about what devices were storing data.
For various reasons, I decided to walk this weekend from my house to Venice Beach, a distance of about four and a half miles. The weather was beautiful, and I thought a walk would help clear my mind. I had recently heard a story on NPR in which it was reported that Thoreau kept data on when certain flowers opened, a record now used to help understand the effects of global warming.
http://flowingdata.com/2013/01/22/data-points-first-look/
Nathan Yau has a new book coming out, this about working with data. Pre-order now!
Since posting last month about data-sharing concerns with some popular apps, I’ve since learned about Cluefulapp.com which, apparently, helps us see how are data are used by iOS apps. For instance, according to Cluefulapp, Google Maps can read my address book, uses my iPhone’s unique ID, encruypts stored data, “could” track my location, and uses an anonymous identifier.
Waze is somewhat similar. It “could” track my location [quotes are because I wonder what they mean by could—does it?
