Look at the world with "big data" and see the future

Large data, will soon become the oil, mineral category of new energy, new production factors and huge economic assets, opening a major era of transformation, heralding a new wave of productivity growth and the arrival of consumer surplus. It is the means of managing the country, the magic weapon of business operation, the hot spot of future inauguration, and perhaps the sharp weapon in the next round of globalization competition in developed countries.

2013 is called the year of large data.

There are more than 20 kinds of books on large data, the most prominent of which is Victor Maire-Schoenberg's big Data age-the great changes in life, work and Thinking (published by Zhejiang Publishing House).

Schoenberg is one of the first data scientists to have insight into the development trends of the big data age, a forward-looking study of large data applications was published in The Economist as early as 2010, and his consulting clients include top global companies such as Microsoft, HP and IBM, known as "the first in Big data business applications".

Below, we follow the Schoenberg "Big Data Age" of the context, understand what the big data means.

The essence of the world is data

In the weeks before the swine flu outbreak in 2009, Google's engineers predicted the spread of pandemic influenza in the journal Nature. Without distributing oral strips or investigating doctors, they set up a system that focuses on the link between the frequent use of specific search terms (such as "which are cures for coughs and fever", etc.) in billions of search instructions received each day, and the timely determination of where the flu will spread. The CDC will not be able to determine until two weeks after the flu outbreak.

Google's judgment is based on large data: the analysis of massive amounts of data in a specific way, to obtain products and services of great value or insights.

The traditional principle of economic statistics is based on sample representation, human understanding of the world, like a flashlight, clearly see the foot of a piece of stone, and the large data age of the information statistics contain such a large sample size, like a lantern, may not be accurate details, but can shine the whole environment and the road to where. The most primitive, seemingly trivial and useless information that is not very accurate, after proper analysis, gets us closer to the right

By analyzing hobbies, web pages, often-watched programs, and income estimates, Sino-British life has identified hundreds of lifestyle figures that are more likely to have high blood pressure, diabetes and depression. The applicant does not have to provide blood and urine samples, this pure data analysis is only 5 dollars, so that insurance companies to save 125 dollars per person;

Site content settings depend on the data rather than the editorial sensitivity of the news, and the data is more revealing than an experienced journalist about what is popular.

The online education company deeply studies all the data it collects, such as which part of a student replays a lecture video, and finds the team that is not clear or appealing to the design course ...

It's like a scavenger hunt, and the potential value of this data is dug up far beyond its most basic use by the hands of data scientists. The data sent out its own voice and brought us surprises. With the help of big data, we realize that essentially the world is made up of information.

Mining processing data is the true meaning of "big data"

A man stormed into Target store and said angrily to the manager, "My daughter is in high school, and you send her a coupon for a baby coat and a crib, are you encouraging her to be pregnant?" "A few days later, when the manager called to apologize, the man was calmer:" My daughter was due in August, I was completely unaware of the incident, and I am sorry to say that. "Originally, Target's analysis team found that 3 months pregnant women will buy fragrance-free emulsion, then will buy magnesium, calcium, zinc and other nutrients, more than 20 kinds of related things can make the retailer more accurate forecast due date, send the corresponding coupons to attract customers."

In the big data age we can predict the future. People who can predict the weather in ancient times are often regarded as gods, and what they need now is the possession and analysis of mass information.

The big data is not just the size of the data, it is the key to the large data mining process. A specific tool for collecting and developing data, and a data scientist with a set of hackers and quantitative analysts.

As the technology matures, the amount of "junk" data that the public sector and private companies have accumulated in the past is likely to be renewed. For example, the use of micro-residents and enterprises to guide the smart grid construction, traffic accidents and crime data to guide the deployment of police, using consumption and tax data to guide the distribution of income, the use of passenger data to guide railway and Civil Aviation deployment, the use of Internet keywords to disseminate data for epidemiological prevention, etc.

Wal-Mart is a big data player. After an analysis of the items in each customer's basket, the time of purchase, or even the day of the purchase, the researchers found that beer was the most often purchased with diapers, and that the Pop-tarts egg tarts were purchased before the advent of the seasonal hurricane. So Wal-Mart bundled beer and diapers and put egg tarts and flashlights together after the hurricane alarm. In the past, headquarters personnel needed to have ideas and collect data to validate them; now they can predict that it is precious enough that B will appear when a appears. They no longer seek the elusive cause-effect relationship and turn their attention to the relationship of things.

Does collecting data involve privacy

One morning the police rushed into Howard Marcos's house, who was about to stab his wife with a pair of scissors because he found his wife wearing a green hat. The police began to control Howard, and Howard shouted wronged: "I did nothing!" "This is the scene in the film Minority Report. Unrestricted large data analysis may also lead to scenarios where guilt is judged on the basis of a prediction of a person's future behavior.

The coming data revolution will bring unprecedented innovation and challenge to the development model of enterprises and countries, and must be understood from the strategic height. Holdren, chairman of the President's Science and Technology Advisory Council, said that, like the U.S. history of spending on supercomputing and the internet, big data programs would have a profound impact on American innovation, research, education and national defense. Every legislation and plan in the United States has a database and information management system corresponding to it. In March 2012, the United States announced that it would invest 200 million dollars to launch a "large Data development Research program" to facilitate the extraction, storage, analysis, sharing and visualization of large data. GE will also invest 1.5 billion dollars to build a global software and Analysis Center in San Francisco, employing 400 scientists. As the industrial Revolution to open material transactions, circulation, the open, circulating data is the need for the trend of the times.

But the misuse of large data can also be dangerous, when sporadic data are aggregated, the crisis has arisen-not only the disclosure of privacy, but also the possibility of being seen-that the algorithms that predict that we may be sick, defaulted on payments and committed crimes will make it impossible for us to buy health insurance, loan money, or even advance arrest before committing a crime. Relying too much on data, we are also conditioned: because the volume of data is too large, the decision will be made by machines rather than humans.

Large data is not a panacea for all the problems, says Zhou, a translator and professor of University of teaching and information at the age of big figures. Feng Jinming, a visiting scholar at Harvard University, points out that large data is a supplement, not a substitute, for traditional economic statistics. Data obtained based on procedures such as sampling, survey and aggregation will continue to play an important role in economic analysis and policy formulation. In the horizontal view, the traditional statistical methods in the economic growth, taxation, trade, income distribution and other areas of the leading advantage of statistics, and large data in prices, inflation, unemployment, consumption and other aspects of the statistical advantages.

In short, the book is a rich example of how the light of large data illuminates the whole world, and the rigorous and down-to-earth narrative framework is an understanding of the technical aspects of large data. The knowledge of big data gives us hope and confidence in the future, no wonder that Tian, chairman of Broadband capital, called it "the best big Data Book I've seen."

(Responsible editor: The good of the Legacy)