Big Data Quotes of the Week

“…once the database is big enough, it will also let parents compare their baby with fellow users’ babies of the same age and gender. [LinkedIn data scientist Monica] Rogati imagines that this crowdsourcing will provide an early-warning system to help parents determine what is and isn’t out of the ordinary… It will be a way, she says matter-of-factly, ‘to debug your baby for problems.’”–Mya Frazier, The Data-Driven Parent

“Investors know a heck of a lot more about big data now than they did two weeks ago, and they’ll know a heck of a lot more in a month than they do now.”–John Connors, a former Microsoft investor who now works as a venture capitalist at Ignition Partners, where he headed up the firm’s Splunk investment.

“What I have to give back is 30 years’ worth of scar tissue.”–58-year-old Godfrey Sullivan, Splunk CEO

“This whole issue of big data science, big data analysis, is huge. It doesn’t matter what field you’re in, but if you’re in the biological sciences, geneticists are producing massive quantities of data that need to be analyzed.”–NC State Provost Warwick Arden

“You’d be amazed at how many times I’ve seen someone build a model and report the results without realizing that they hadn’t thought critically about where the data was coming from or if their experiment was designed correctly. You must must MUST be able to question every step of your process and every number that you come up with.”–Jake Porway, The New York Times and Data Without Borders

“The first thing I did was pull the BI team out of IT, and they suddenly got productive and started actually thinking like scientists,”–Andy Maddocks, president and chief product officer of R2integrated LLC, a digital marketing startup in Cambridge, Mass.

“One of the issues of social networking silos is that they have the data and I don’t … There are no programmes that I can run on my computer which allow me to use all the data in each of the social networking systems that I use plus all the data in my calendar plus in my running map site, plus the data in my little fitness gadget and so on to really provide an excellent support to me.”–Tim Berners-Lee

“Big Data is like Sex in High School–Lots of people are talking about it, but few are having it.”–Eric Hansen, SiteSpect founder and CEO