Big Data Observations: Can We Escape?

Data“Our time is increasingly occupied by data, and that data is increasingly trivial”–Andre Mouton

“Is it even possible to keep sensitive data out of corporations or government hands? There’s a reason old-fashioned devices like typewriters are now being used by Russia’s defense and emergencies ministries for document drafts, secret notes and special reports prepared for President Vladimir Putin. This outdated technology has become the ultimate security system precisely because it’s ‘off-line’ and has the unique advantage that documents can be linked to a particular machine. Who knew we would have to pay additional to exit the information highway?”–Robert Hall

“Big data is, in many ways, an exact replica of reality. Using big data to make decisions is like using every square inch of soil, landscape, and sky in my 200-mile walk across England to figure out how to get around the corner in the next small village. It feels to me as if we need to return to the time of Linnaeus, the famous Swedish botanist whose pioneering classification of the natural world gave us the concept of the ‘species,’ to classify the intersecting and complexly nuanced world thrown off by our digital engines before we start making decisions using this unknown commodity.  We need to rebuild those high level abstractions from the ground up to make sense of this new reality”–Felicia B. LeClere