Big Data

Denmark Built a Complete Copy of Itself in Minecraft

Denmark is a beautiful country. You really should check it out. And now, thanks to the Danish government, you can just that without leaving the comfort of you own home. Just open up Minecraft, and go exploring. It’s all there. No seriously, all of Denmark is now in Minecraft, and it’s there to send the…

Tech News Adam Clark Estes Apr 25

How does Big Data help us understand the vastness of space? Ask us now!

Members of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab’s Data Science community — including Rob Witoff, Tomas Soderstrom, and Andrew Hart — are here to answer our questions about using data, visualization, modeling, and just what we might be able to do with it all in space. Top image: A visualization from the IT data science team analyzing…

io9 Ria Misra Feb 11

New York City Is Using Data Mining to Fight Fires

Helmets? Check. Breathing tanks? Check. Hoses? Ditto. Algorithms? Yep: the New York City Fire Department is using data mining to predict which of the city’s buildings are at highest risk of catching fire. Now that’s metadata we can get behind. FDNY officials are using a 60-facet algorithm to determine which department-inspected buildings pose the greatest…

Tech News Bob Sorokanich Jan 25

Is our data outrunning our science?

You’ve probably heard the term “big data” — it refers to the enormous databases full of information generated by everything from social media to sensors measuring weather patterns. Computers have ushered in a golden age of data-gathering. The problem is we’re not sure how to analyze it yet. Image by Yuta Onoda Over at Quanta…

io9 Annalee Newitz Oct 7

An Interactive Timeline of Every Protest on the Earth Since 1979

Using a wealth of data amassed by The Global Database of Events, Language, and Tone (GDELT) and tools made available through CartoDB, political scientist John Beieler has created a captivating animated map of global protest since 1973. Writes Beieler on his blog: The number of events recorded in GDELT grows exponentially over time, as noted…

io9 Robbie Gonzalez Aug 23

Big Data Brokers: They Know Everything About You and Sell it to the Highest Bidder

Data companies are scooping up enormous amounts of information about almost every American. They sell information about whether you’re pregnant or divorced or trying to lose weight, about how rich you are and what kinds of cars you have. Regulators and some in Congress have been taking a closer look at these so-called data brokers…

Privacy & Security Lois Beckett - Pro Publica Mar 18

What Is Big Data?

The human race produces 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every day—far too much to crunch using conventional desktop applications. Mining this mountain of data for nuggets usable information is one of the biggest challenges facing modern society. But a new generation of analytic tools are helping us control the phenomenon that’s becoming commonly known as…

Tech News Andrew Tarantola Dec 3

How the Obama Campaign Uses Your Personal Information to Get Your Money and Your Vote

In 2008, the Obama campaign enlisted the help of Facebook and Google bigwigs to help raise massive sums from a lot of small donors. Back then, the key was just a few pieces of data—today, that data mining effort has been expanded to a huge and very creepy degree. Mother Jones has a great profile…

Tech News Mario Aguilar Oct 2

The Problem With Big Data Is That Nobody Understands It

The concept of Big Data—the practice of acquiring, analyzing and interpreting ridiculously huge data sets—is something much of the technology and business world is extremely excited about. But excited is about as far as it goes because, currently, there just aren’t enough practitioners to make it work. While there’s much fuss made about the endless…

Tech News Jamie Condliffe Apr 30

Could you really predict crime with a computer program?

In new JJ Abrams show Person of Interest, airing tomorrow night on CBS, a mysterious man named Finch (Lost’s Michael Emerson) has become disenchanted with his government job designing a system that sifts through massive amounts of data to find terrorism suspects. Now Finch is a rogue outsider with a backdoor to the system he…

Television Annalee Newitz Sep 21

Big Data, Big Problems: The Trouble With Storage Overload

We collect an astonishing amount of digital information. But as the Economist recently pointed out in a special reports, we’ve long since surpassed our ability to store and process it all. Big data is here, and it’s causing big problems. Walmart’s transaction databases are a whopping 2.5 petrabytes. There are more than 40 billion photos…

Social Media Brian Barrett Mar 17

Denmark Built a Complete Copy of Itself in Minecraft

How does Big Data help us understand the vastness of space? Ask us now!

New York City Is Using Data Mining to Fight Fires

Is our data outrunning our science?

An Interactive Timeline of Every Protest on the Earth Since 1979

Big Data Brokers: They Know Everything About You and Sell it to the Highest Bidder

What Is Big Data?

How the Obama Campaign Uses Your Personal Information to Get Your Money and Your Vote

The Problem With Big Data Is That Nobody Understands It

Could you really predict crime with a computer program?

Big Data, Big Problems: The Trouble With Storage Overload

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