data, data, everywhere

Saturday 20th November 2010

I gave a presentation at a google-sponsored business breakfast aimed at getting businesses on-line, which apparently boosts chances of success by 4 times. What I gained was a better understanding about analytical literacy. There’s so much of it around that the potential to replace strategic educated guesswork with much more powerful data analysis is overwhelming, and those that can will be the new royalty. There’s a fantastic economist article on this: “when the sloan digital sky survey started work in 2000, its telescope in new mexico collected more data in its first few weeks than had been amassed in the entire history of astronomy. Now, a decade later, its archive contains a whopping 140 terabytes of information. A successor, the large synoptic survey telescope, due to come on stream in chile in 2016, will acquire that quantity of data every five days...”