Interesting Quotes

Statistically, strength comes from pooling people together, but then the icing on the cake is when you individualize the findings.
— Patrick Wolfe, a statistician who studies social networks at University College, London.

Recent Read: big data and personal analytics

The Data Made Me Do It

The next frontier for big data is the individual

 

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/514346/the-data-made-me-do-it/

 

Would you trade your personal data for a peek into the future? Andreas Weigend did.
The former chief scientist of Amazon.com, now directing Stanford University’s Social Data Lab, told me a story about awakening at dawn to catch a flight from Shanghai. That’s when an app he’d begun using, Google Now, told him his flight was delayed.
The software scours a person’s Gmail and calendar, as well as databases like maps and flight schedules. It had spotted the glitch in his travel plans and sent the warning that he shouldn’t rush. When Weigend finally boarded, everyone else on the plane had been waiting for hours for a spare part to arrive.
For Weigend, a fast-talking consultant and lecturer on consumer behavior, such episodes demonstrate “the power of a society based on 10 times as much data.” If the last century was marked by the ability to observe the interactions of physical matter—think of technologies like x-ray and radar—this century, he says, is going to be defined by the ability to observe people through the data they share.
So-called anticipatory systems such as Google Now represent one example of what could result. We’re already seeing the transformations that big data is causing in advertising and other situations where millions of people’s activity can be measured at a time. Now data science is looking at how it can help individuals. Timely updates on a United Airways flight may be among the tamer applications. Think instead of statistical models that tell you what job to take, or alert you even before you feel ill that you may have the flu.

Recent Read: Experiments: What happened when one man pinged the entire internet

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/514066/what-happened-when-one-man-pinged-the-whole-internet/

A home science experiment that probed billions of Internet devices reveals that thousands of industrial and business systems offer remote access to anyone.

A  Map of all systems that were online and were pinged!

You probably haven’t heard of HD Moore, but up to a few weeks ago every Internet device in the world, perhaps including some in your own home, was contacted roughly three times a day by a stack of computers that sit overheating his spare room. “I have a lot of cooling equipment to make sure my house doesn’t catch on fire,” says Moore, who leads research at computer security company Rapid7. In February last year he decided to carry out a personal census of every device on the Internet as a hobby. “This is not my day job; it’s what I do for fun,” he says.