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Data-ism

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Data-ism

The Revolution Transforming Decision Making, Consumer Behavior and Almost Everything Else

HarperBusiness,

15 min read
10 take-aways
Audio & text

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What does big data promise and what can it deliver for you?

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Editorial Rating

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Recommendation

Is big data a big opportunity – or a big problem? Business writer Steve Lohr helps answer that question with a compelling collection of wide-ranging stories that demonstrate big data’s possibilities and complexities. Lohr follows people and organizations through the big data jungle. Some are big data pioneers. Some, like IBM, were once giants, almost died and now are coming back. Others are normal organizations adapting to change. Lohr’s varied stories humanize big data. He helps you see why people might become big proponents of it and why they might resist it. getAbstract recommends Lohr’s narrative to CEOs, CIOs, managers, coders, start-ups, entrepreneurs, students of business, futurists, and anyone interested in big data or social change.

Summary

Big Data and Data-ism

English statistician and biologist Ronald Fisher first applied what now might be called data science to agriculture in the 1920s. At IBM in the 1950s, Hans Peter Luhn suggested that firms would someday use “business intelligence” to strengthen their decision making. John Tukey of Princeton and Bell Labs can rightly be called “the first data scientist,” but “the age of big data” began with companies that exist for and in data, like Google and Facebook.

“Data-ism” holds that people and organizations should base their decisions on data, not on intuition, tradition or experience. Still, every choice about what to include as usable data reflects someone’s values. As big data moves into the larger world, its new measurement tools promise to make businesses more efficient. The ability to analyze patterns in data promises new innovations.

As the discipline of data science matures rapidly, it’s moving into “established academic departments.” Governments and private industry already pour money into developing data science. Emerging data technologies function like other scientific advances, such as the microscope or telescope. Gaze through these lenses...

About the Author

Steve Lohr covers business and technology and contributes to the Bits Blog for The New York Times. In 2013, he was part of a team that won the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting.

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