NPR Podcast: Why “Big Data” Should be the Word of the Year

Over at National Public Radio, Geoffrey Nunberg from the University of California at Berkeley writes that Big Data should be the Word of the Year.

I don’t know if the phrase Big Data itself will be around 20 years from now, when we’ll probably be measuring information in humongobytes. People will be amused to recall that a couple of exabytes were once considered big data, the way we laugh to think of a time when $15,000 a year sounded like big money. But 19 out of 20 is probably still going to be a good hit rate for those algorithms, and people will still feel the need to sort out the causes from the correlations — still asking the old question, what are patterns for?

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I think is Nunberg is right on the money. That’s why we started insideBigData last year as the world’s first online publication to focus exclusively on this amazing ecosystem of information technology.