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'Big Data' disguises digital doubts

By Dan Vergano, USA TODAY
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Updated 2d 14h ago

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Buzzwords don't come any bigger than "Big Data," which promises to reveal the secrets hidden within big blocks of data held by companies, governments and musty old archives.
But maybe Big Data has an Achilles' heel, some experts

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warn, despite its Big promises. "The initiative we are launching today promises to transform our ability to use Big Data for scientific discovery, environmental and biomedical research, education and national security," said presidential science adviser John Holdren, announcing a $200 million effort in March by six federal agencies to uncork the power of Big Data. Holdren compared Big Data's advent to the invention of supercomputers and the Internet. But what is Big Data really? Starting from scientists struggling to analyze
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massive amounts of genetic data, as they did in the Human Genome Project a decade ago, or astronomical data, such as the survey of more than 930,000 galaxies undertaken by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, Big Data has blossomed into a constellation of computer science approaches to handling, visualizing and blending together "big" sets of data. For example, police forces from Honolulu to New York have looked at combinations of crime tips submitted via Facebook, Twitter and text messages to identify "hotspots" for muggings and other felonies. Amazon famously tracks masses of book purchases to suggest new buys to like-minded readers. The Defense Department hopes to weave together information from a new generation of battlefield sensors at speeds 100 times faster than today using Big Data techniques.

'Big Data' promises to reveal the secrets hidden within big blocks of data held by companies, governments and musty, old archives.

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Such efforts have blossomed in the Facebook era, where poking through troves of customer data is seen as the key to unlocking sales. In medicine, a two-day "Health Datapalooza" held this month in the nation's capital drew together federal officials, former Senate majority leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., and Wired Magazine executive editor Thomas Goetz, to talk health data. If your gene map can be compared instantly to the genomes of millions of other folks in coming decades, for example, the hope is that medicine finely tuned to your medical needs will result. A Sciencejournal study last year introduced the notion of "culturomics," using Big Data Google's millions of searchable digitized books in its case to reveal, "linguistic and cultural phenomena that were reflected in the English language between 1800 and 2000." Data. Data. Data. So much of it is out there, tracked from the moment you look up a dentist on a website, take a trip through a highway tollbooth to sit in the chair, pay your bill at the reception desk and post your toothache experience afterward on Facebook. Can an ad for a toothbrush be far from your in-box? "The only problem is that a lot of the Big Data isn't really data," says anthropologist Robert

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'Big Data' disguises digital doubts USATODAY.com

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Albro of American University in Washington D.C., who studies how culture affects public policy. "It's a mash-up of all kinds of numbers that started out as data, but they don't necessarily mean anything once they have been removed from where they started out." In the social sciences, he says, researchers have learned over the last century that half the battle in any study is carefully explaining your data's origins. "Once you leave that behind, there is a risk you'll be wrong, and a risk that the decisions you make based on being wrong will affect people in negative ways." In anthropology, one historical example of a problem comes from turn-of-the-century attempts to pigeonhole people in far-off nations into tribes or countries, using data in categories now understood as far too simplistic. That effort contributed to European countries inventing imaginary borders or people in nations such as Rwanda. Public health researchers in the 20th century pigeonholed poor people into "defective" categories, based on bogus data, during the "eugenics" movement aimed at breeding better human beings that led to the involuntary sterilization of perhaps 60,000 people nationwide by the 1960s. More recently, University of Wisconsin-Madison, communications scholars have warned that Google's search recommendations (the list of suggested searches that pop up when you start typing a word using the popular search engine) actually bend people's perception. Looking at nanotechnology, for example, the study showed that top search suggestions over a few years turned away from business to health concerns. The search recommendations were actually steering more people to look into less-reliable nanotechnology health-issue websites, they found. "Google is shaping the reality we experience in the suggestions it makes, pointing us away from the most accurate information and towards the most popular," study lead author Dietram Scheufele told USA TODAY in 2010. Still, what's so wrong about using Big Data to find crime hotspots or books you might like? "Nothing. There is obviously immense promise there, as long as the data is kept to uses for which its limits are understood," Albro suggests. However, he worries that since so much of the data out there start out as "market research" likes or dislikes when it comes to buying things that removing data from advertising-focused troves and translating it into health care or planning for new roads or "culture" will essentially turn everyone into consumers, rather than citizens, in the minds of planners. "We can't even agree on what 'culture' is, and now we're going to have 'culturomics.' Isn't that a little ambitious?" Albro asks. "Now we have claims that tweets predicted the 'Arab Spring,' which turns out to be questionable, or can detect 'sentiment' or 'mood,' which are even fuzzier or lazier words. We need to be a little cautious here." (In their defense, the "culturomics" study authors do urge caution on folks using their approach.) But Albro worries that the hype over Big Data is warming up for Big Disappointment down the road. Much of the criticism of Big Data heard now focuses on privacy issues: who is using your data, or whether it will really help sell stuff. "Those are useful discussions, but we really need to talk a little more deeply about data," Albro says. "It's more than 'Garbage In, Garbage Out,' it's about how we shape the digital world."
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6 comments Git Mai Freekahn Reply Top Commenter Freak school

Add a comment

"There are lies, there are damned lies, and there are statistics." 1 Like Saturday at 7:36pm Top Commenter Free Lance at Opinionator

Ray O. Sunshine

It's always the stealth rider political or commercial motive that creates so much distrust and actual hatred of modern science. Precritical analysis has no place in science, precritical?, Yes, I mean where you already have a conclusion you wish before you begin to look at any data or empirical observation. Reply Like Saturday at 4:43pm Mark-Ginger Schreiber Top Commenter Graduates

As a data analyst for the past 40 years, I view my job as converting raw data into useful information for managers to make decisions or evaluate decisions already made. Computers make it possible to handle larger amounts of data, faster and with more accuracy. Thank goodness we do not have to calculate square roots by hand anymore. Reply Like Saturday at 12:29pm Alex Shayan . . . Ok. At least for me PhD in polit.science it's really interesting to see opinion of professioanl in a such cluster. Reply Like Saturday at 2:49pm Mark Russell Top Commenter Works at East Baton Rouge Public School System

Calculating square roots by hand is really one of the easiest things one can do with numbers. Reply Like Saturday at 6:32pm Mark-Ginger Schreiber Top Commenter Graduates

Never got the hang of it. Sure was glad when I got a calculator with a square root function. Reply Like Saturday at 6:55pm View 2 more Dean Wang Systems Architect at Inventec Depends on how you view whether data gathering, integration, analyzing, or simulation is more important than the other. Big Data could be viewed differently. Pure collecting and using statistical modeling to analyze is probably this guy's view. Reply Like Saturday at 12:34pm Alex Shayan . . . Dear Wang as a sys. arch. can You descibe briefly how i can use it in a consulting for policy makers? May be some particular approatches, sim. models? Thank You in advance PhD in P.S. Alex Shayan Reply Like Saturday at 2:54pm Dean Wang Systems Architect at Inventec tried to see if Han's presentation can help: http://www.ted.com/talks/ hans_rosling_shows_the_best_stats_you_ve_ever_seen.html Reply Like Saturday at 5:14pm Trajce Nikolov Nick Al-Mamoura 35 years old very cool :))))) Reply Like Yesterday at 7:07am Alex Shayan . . . Very interesting article. And of course the digital world is in many respects empty and virtual. But why Facebook's IPO producing such a huge revenue, if it is obious that each programm developer just creates imperssion of his product usefulness ? For it is a puzzle. May be somebody knows the answer? Reply Like Saturday at 12:06pm Mark-Ginger Schreiber Top Commenter Graduates

Maybe after all the analysis, it just comes down to luck. Reply Like Saturday at 6:57pm
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