Big Data Bytes: What the Cheerleaders Say

Noam Chomsky at the Engaging Data 2013 Conference

“We can find lots of data; the problem is understanding it. And a lot of data around us go through a filter so it doesn’t reach us”–Noam Chomsky

“The reason we’re all talking about big data is because some analysts made all the money they could off of cloud, and they had to move on to the next buzzword. It was data warehousing, and then software as a service, and then cloud computing, and everyone put their money into cloud startups until it was time to change the topic”–Jim Goodnight, CEO, SAS

“Big Data is bullshit… The ‘big’ there is purely marketing. This is all fear… This is about you buying big expensive servers and whatnot”—Harper Reed, chief technology officer in President Obama’s 2012 campaign

“One great and underused technique at this scale is sampling.  For most things that you want to do with data, 100,000 randomly selected rows is as good as 10,000,000 rows and working at R or SPSS scale allows for a much faster analysis cycle–Lukas Biewald, CEO of the startup Crowdflower

#BigData may not contain the answer. Upon torture,BD will tell you anything. For BD,the big money is in the false alarms. Especially NSA BD

— Edward Tufte (@EdwardTufte) December 2, 2013