Over the last year and a half, the phrase “big data” has exploded into public awareness.  Simple Google searches on the phrase show it to be a hockey stick in terms of citations (http://blogs.splunk.com/2012/04/12/some-big-data-this-way-come), and to be more popular than “Barack Obama”.   What does that mean, if anything, for how we educate the students of today?

Not too long ago, I found myself in a situation where I needed some help.  I had a house full of stuff that needed to be boxed up and stored, but I didn’t have the time or energy to attack the tasks of sorting, packaging, labeling, and storing.  Thankfully my mother had the time to step in and help out.  We went…

Being a reformed academic of sorts, I get a little starry-eyed when things go “meta” – ie, whenever I observe a discussion about specific events or topics I tend to look for universal patterns.  Sometimes it’s useful, other times I end up annoying people, including myself.

Lately I have been reading and re-reading “Too Big To Know” (http://www.toobigtoknow.com/), an excellent book by David Weinberger on re-thinking the definition of knowledge in a networked age.  I also read his blog, and the most recent posting http://www.toobigtoknow.com/2012/08/11/2b2k-knowledges-typeface/ made me laugh-out-loud. Evidently, typeface impacts credibility http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/08/hear-all-ye-people-hearken-o-earth/, and his conclusion was that “your brain is not your friend”.  I can appreciate that.

Further down the page, however, something caught my eye…

This past weekend, Splunk sponsored the 2012 National Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition http://www.splunk.com/view/SP-CAAAGXF , a competition aimed at helping undergraduate students master the craft of cyber-security so that they hit the ground running when they graduate.

Over this same weekend, I had the chance to visit a decommissioned Nike missile site in the Marin Headlands.  The site was staffed by retired volunteers who were active army personnel on-site when it stood ready to deploy nuclear warheads mounted on supersonic missiles.  As someone who went to high school during the early 1980’s, seeing cold-war era hardware and procedures in action was spooky and fascinating.  A small group of us rode the missile platform down and got a brief history lesson…

Last week I talked about the “big data” hurricane that is upon us.  Now a little bit on how to get swept off your feet instead of getting knocked down.

Educate yourself. Understand the content and sources of big data.  Contemplate the probable reality that correlating information across dissimilar data sets is far easier than you think.

• Want to find out where gender ratios work in your favor at SXSW musical venues? Try http://bit.ly/splunksxsw2012

• Fascinated by sports and statistics? Take a look at http://www.analytics-magazine.org/special-articles/525-beyond-moneyball-the-future-of-sports-analytics.

The only real limit here is the imagination and determination of those asking the questions.

Educate others. North Carolina State established the Institute for Advanced Analytics in 2007…

Some time ago, in a company not too far away, I woke up with unstructured data on my mind, thinking about ways to correlate real-time clickstream information with my existing customer base. The internal IT folks said that this was not possible, at least in a timeframe that would help my decision-making.  This merely increased my fascination with people interacting with all these layers of technology in unpredictable ways, defying the cry of the old-school database administrator:  “that which exists must fit into my predefined schema!”   The marketer in me just wanted to make sense of it all, but I was at a loss at how to get around that schema requirement and let my data crayon wander outside the…