By: William K.

William K. — Fri, 10 Feb 2017 17:31:05 +0000

I offer another question, already mentioned in this article, which is about the cost of calibrating, collecting, collating, and calculating anything relative to these billions of terabytes of data. None of the hardware is cheap, nor is much of the handling process. So while memory is a lot less expensive than it was ten years ago it is still not really “cheap.” In addition, data without context is worth only about 3 cents a ton, at best. So it takes a fair amount of effort just to avoid having data that is totally worthless.
One thing that we never see mentioned is the actual cost of collecting this data. The reason is undoubtedly because knowing the actual cost will certainly bring to question the cost/ benefit ratio, and any thinking in that area will greatly reduce the number of folks wanting to even think about it.

By: William K.

William K. — Fri, 10 Feb 2017 17:21:57 +0000

This post is interesting in that, just like all of the other posts touting the wonderfulness of “big data” we are not given much explanation of the mechanization of the benefits. Just exactly what sort of insights are obtained from all of this data? And who creates the software that delivers these insights? This posting does go farther than most in telling us about the specific benefits, but everything described could also be achieved by one individual who completely understood the machine and the process watching for a while. Some data might assist the evaluation, but human understanding, from an a person with good insight, is usually faster, although humans may not have “all the numbers” available as fast. Of course such an individual would not be found among the crowd of those folks with the 3-second attention span and a total inability to focus attention on anything.

Comments on: The creative power of big data

By: William K.

By: William K.