Big Data age, are you ready?

Recently circulated on the Internet such a story: A young man specializing in Shanghai high-end residential property management, himself with a scan gun, staring at the community garbage heap every day, see a bar code on the scan, the evening home to the data out, to get the community residents drink what water, what to eat oil, buy what clothes, The entire community of consumer goods and brand preferences are clear, and then form the report sold to large companies, the report value of hundreds of thousands of.

This is one of the small appearances of large data values.

2013 is considered the world's big data year, the data is called new oil, in the future, the data will be like land, oil and capital, as the economic operation of the fundamental resources. The big Data age, written by American Victor Maire Schoenberg, points out that the information storms of big data are transforming our lives, our work and our minds, and that big data has opened a major transformation of the times.

Victor Maire Schoenberg, known as "the first person in big data business applications", has a 14-page, forward-looking study of large data applications in the Economist as early as 2010, with the experience of teaching at several Internet research centers such as Harvard University, Oxford University, Yale University and the National University of Singapore.

What is Big Data

Large data, or a huge amount of information, refers to the volume of data involved in a large scale to not through the current mainstream software tools, in a reasonable time to achieve capture, management, processing, collation to help the business decision-making more positive purpose information.

The concept is very iffy, in fact, each person in the creation of data every day. Take Taobao for example, every day there are tens of thousands of transactions on Taobao, trading time, commodity prices, the number of purchases are recorded, more importantly, this information can be with the buyers and sellers of age, gender, address, and even hobbies and other personal characteristics of the information to match. Using matching data, Taobao can optimize store rankings and user referrals; businesses can make production and inventory decisions based on past sales information and "Taobao index", while at the same time more consumers can buy more favorite treasures at more favorable prices.

Similarly, Google and Baidu, Facebook and Renren, Twitter and Weibo ... The internet is generating data all the time, creating data oceans. What people have to do is how to get big fish from the sea.

How to use large data

There are a few cases:

One of the daily jobs of Paul Hotting, the chief executive of the Wall Street "de Winter capital market", is to use computer programs to analyze messages from 340 million of global Weibo accounts, to judge the mood and then to rate "1" to "50". According to the scoring results, Hotting decided how to deal with the millions of dollars in the hands of the stock. His principle of judgment is simple: if everyone seems happy, buy it, and if everyone's anxiety rises, sell. The move was remarkable-Hotting's company gained 7% per cent in the first quarter.

A supermarket in the United States sees pregnant women in the female clientele as the gold consumer of the shopping. In order to get this part of the target group to come before pregnancy, the supermarket listed dozens of kinds of shopping preferences, when a customer's cash register to display such goods, it will be identified as a pregnant woman or pregnant women in the home, the supermarket then sent to her pregnant products ads. Once, when someone to "home without pregnant women always receive the relevant product ads" as a charge of the supermarket, but found that the original is still in high school daughter pregnant.

The 2009 swine flu virus appears, in the absence of vaccines, public health experts can do is to slow down the speed of transmission, to do this, experts must first know where the flu appears, this can only rely on local doctors to find and inform the CDC, the information must be lagging. However, Google engineers have earlier judged where the flu spread, relying on the big data that Google has.

This is an example of the use of large data. You search on Baidu, forum speech, Sina Weibo, it is possible to become the data analyzed. The big Data Age is a detailed analysis of the most valuable applications of large data pioneers such as Google, Microsoft, Amazon, IBM, Apple, Facebook, Twitter, and Visa. How to use large data to develop the commercial value of it has become a general concern of investors, it industry and government public administration.

What changes Big Data brings

Victor believes that big data is a "people can do on the basis of large-scale data," the reference, is "people to acquire new awareness, create new value sources, or change the market, organizational structure, and the relationship between the Government and the civil method."

Victor reminds people to prepare for the "three shifts": first, in the large data age, can analyze more and even all the data, but no longer rely on random sampling; second, there is so much data that you can give up the precise allow for confusion, and thirdly, with data support, you can know it without knowing it From causality to relationship. These three judgments mean that the way people understand and form society will change radically, and that the legitimacy of certain disciplines will face the most severe torture in history, such as social science. "This discipline used to rely heavily on sample analysis, research and questionnaires. When people are recorded in a normal state, there is no need to worry about the bias in doing research and questionnaires. Now we can gather information that we couldn't gather in the past. Albert Laslo Barabasi's "eruption" even argues that human behavior 93% can be predicted by large data and power-law distributions.

In addition to change in thinking, the big data age has been triggered by "business change" and "Management Change". In these two parts, Victor cites a number of cases to reinforce the argument as follows: Everything can be "quantified"; At present, large data applications are only the tip of the iceberg, most of which are hidden beneath the surface--data innovation includes reuse, reorganization, expansion, depreciation, abandonment and openness; In addition, large data determines the future competitiveness of enterprises, thus, Data brokers and data scientists will emerge and rise in accordance with the trend.

However, in the optimistic, calm Victor also felt the big data empire fragile and uneasy, including industrial ecological environment, data security privacy, information fairness and publicity issues. So he warned the world to beware of the ubiquitous "third eye" and the existence of a data dictator. Based on this, he proposed the "responsibility and freedom of information management" framework to deal with the big data era, including: Personal privacy protection, from personal permission to let data users take responsibility; smash the black box, the rise of large data programmers, the anti-data monopoly tycoon and so on.

(Responsible editor: The good of the Legacy)