NPR, by Geoff Nunberg, December 20, 2012
Listen to the story here"Big Data" hasn't made any of the words-of-the-year lists I've seen so far. That's probably because it didn't get the wide public exposure given to items like "frankenstorm,", "fiscal cliff" and YOLO. But it had a huge surge in venues like Wired and The Economist, and it was the buzz of Silicon Valley and Davos. And if the phrase wasn't as familiar to many people as "Etch A Sketch" and "47 percent," Big Data had just as much to do with President Obama's victory as they did.
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What's new is the way data is generated and processed. It's like dust in that regard, too. We kick up clouds of it wherever we go. Cellphones and cable boxes; Google and Amazon, Facebook and Twitter; cable boxes and the cameras at stoplights; the bar codes on milk cartons; and the RFID chip that whips you through the toll plaza - each of them captures a sliver of what we're doing, and nowadays they're all calling home.
It's only when all those little chunks are aggregated that they turn into Big Data; then the software called analytics can scour it for patterns. Epidemiologists watch for blips in Google queries to localize flu outbreaks; economists use them to spot shifts in consumer confidence. Police analytics comb over crime data looking for hot zones; security agencies comb over travel and credit card records looking for possible terrorists.
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