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2. · Data, data everywhere Information has gone from scarce to superabundant. That brings huge new benefits, says Kenneth Cukier (interviewed here)—but also.

Data, data everywhere The Economist. WHEN the Sloan Digital Sky Survey started work in 2. 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 1. A successor, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, due to come on stream in Chile in 2.

Such astronomical amounts of information can be found closer to Earth too. Wal- Mart, a retail giant, handles more than 1m customer transactions every hour, feeding databases estimated at more than 2. America's Library of Congress (see article for an explanation of how data are quantified). Facebook, a social- networking website, is home to 4. And decoding the human genome involves analysing 3 billion base pairs—which took ten years the first time it was done, in 2.

All these examples tell the same story: that the world contains an unimaginably vast amount of digital information which is getting ever vaster ever more rapidly. This makes it possible to do many things that previously could not be done: spot business trends, prevent diseases, combat crime and so on. Managed well, the data can be used to unlock new sources of economic value, provide fresh insights into science and hold governments to account. But they are also creating a host of new problems.

Despite the abundance of tools to capture, process and share all this information—sensors, computers, mobile phones and the like—it already exceeds the available storage space (see chart 1). Moreover, ensuring data security and protecting privacy is becoming harder as the information multiplies and is shared ever more widely around the world. Alex Szalay, an astrophysicist at Johns Hopkins University, notes that the proliferation of data is making them increasingly inaccessible. How to make sense of all these data? People should be worried about how we train the next generation, not just of scientists, but people in government and industry,” he says. We are at a different period because of so much information,” says James Cortada of IBM, who has written a couple of dozen books on the history of information in society. Joe Hellerstein, a computer scientist at the University of California in Berkeley, calls it “the industrial revolution of data”.

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The effect is being felt everywhere, from business to science, from government to the arts. Scientists and computer engineers have coined a new term for the phenomenon: “big data”. Epistemologically speaking, information is made up of a collection of data and knowledge is made up of different strands of information. But this special report uses “data” and “information” interchangeably because, as it will argue, the two are increasingly difficult to tell apart.

Given enough raw data, today's algorithms and powerful computers can reveal new insights that would previously have remained hidden. The business of information management—helping organisations to make sense of their proliferating data—is growing by leaps and bounds.

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In recent years Oracle, IBM, Microsoft and SAP between them have spent more than $1. This industry is estimated to be worth more than $1.

Chief information officers (CIOs) have become somewhat more prominent in the executive suite, and a new kind of professional has emerged, the data scientist, who combines the skills of software programmer, statistician and storyteller/artist to extract the nuggets of gold hidden under mountains of data. Hal Varian, Google's chief economist, predicts that the job of statistician will become the “sexiest” around. Data, he explains, are widely available; what is scarce is the ability to extract wisdom from them. More of everything.

There are many reasons for the information explosion. The most obvious one is technology. As the capabilities of digital devices soar and prices plummet, sensors and gadgets are digitising lots of information that was previously unavailable. And many more people have access to far more powerful tools. For example, there are 4.

Moreover, there are now many more people who interact with information. Between 1. 99. 0 and 2.

As they get richer they become more literate, which fuels information growth, notes Mr Cortada. The results are showing up in politics, economics and the law as well. Revolutions in science have often been preceded by revolutions in measurement,” says Sinan Aral, a business professor at New York University. Just as the microscope transformed biology by exposing germs, and the electron microscope changed physics, all these data are turning the social sciences upside down, he explains.

Researchers are now able to understand human behaviour at the population level rather than the individual level. The amount of digital information increases tenfold every five years. Moore's law, which the computer industry now takes for granted, says that the processing power and storage capacity of computer chips double or their prices halve roughly every 1. The software programs are getting better too.

Edward Felten, a computer scientist at Princeton University, reckons that the improvements in the algorithms driving computer applications have played as important a part as Moore's law for decades. A vast amount of that information is shared.

By 2. 01. 3 the amount of traffic flowing over the internet annually will reach 6. Cisco, a maker of communications gear. And the quantity of data continues to grow faster than the ability of the network to carry it all. People have long groused that they were swamped by information. Back in 1. 91. 7 the manager of a Connecticut manufacturing firm complained about the effects of the telephone: “Time is lost, confusion results and money is spent.” Yet what is happening now goes way beyond incremental growth.

The quantitative change has begun to make a qualitative difference. This shift from information scarcity to surfeit has broad effects.

What we are seeing is the ability to have economies form around the data—and that to me is the big change at a societal and even macroeconomic level,” says Craig Mundie, head of research and strategy at Microsoft. Data are becoming the new raw material of business: an economic input almost on a par with capital and labour. Every day I wake up and ask, ‘how can I flow data better, manage data better, analyse data better?” says Rollin Ford, the CIO of Wal- Mart. Sophisticated quantitative analysis is being applied to many aspects of life, not just missile trajectories or financial hedging strategies, as in the past.

For example, Farecast, a part of Microsoft's search engine Bing, can advise customers whether to buy an airline ticket now or wait for the price to come down by examining 2. Watch Toy Story: Hawaiian Vacation Cartoon Stream. The same idea is being extended to hotel rooms, cars and similar items. Personal- finance websites and banks are aggregating their customer data to show up macroeconomic trends, which may develop into ancillary businesses in their own right.

Number- crunchers have even uncovered match- fixing in Japanese sumo wrestling. Dross into gold“Data exhaust”—the trail of clicks that internet users leave behind from which value can be extracted—is becoming a mainstay of the internet economy. One example is Google's search engine, which is partly guided by the number of clicks on an item to help determine its relevance to a search query.

If the eighth listing for a search term is the one most people go to, the algorithm puts it higher up. As the world is becoming increasingly digital, aggregating and analysing data is likely to bring huge benefits in other fields as well.

For example, Mr Mundie of Microsoft and Eric Schmidt, the boss of Google, sit on a presidential task force to reform American health care. Early on in this process Eric and I both said: ‘Look, if you really want to transform health care, you basically build a sort of health- care economy around the data that relate to people',” Mr Mundie explains.