Big Data: Does Size Matter?

by Timandra Harkness

Overview

Big Data or "Big Brother?" Mega data is pulling the strings behind how government, business, finance, health, and scientific research are run.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781472920072
Publisher:	Bloomsbury USA
Publication date:	08/29/2017
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.70(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Timandra Harkness is a writer and comedian who co-wrote and performed Your Days Are Numbered: The Maths of Death with stand-up mathematician Matt Parker at the Edinburgh Fringe. She is a regular on BBC Radio and her articles have been published in Men's Health and the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. She lives in London.

Table of Contents

Part 1 What is It? Where did it come from?

Chapter 1 What is data? And what makes it big? 11

Chapter 2 Death and taxes. And babies 39

Chapter 3 Thinking machines 73

Part 2 What has big data ever done for us?

Chapter 4 Big business 105

Chapter 5 Big science 133

Chapter 6 Big society 161

Chapter 7 Data-driven democracy 183

Part 3 Big ideas?

Chapter 8 Big Brother 209

Chapter 9 Who do we think you are? 243

Chapter 10 Are you a data point or a human being? 265

Chapter 11 Even bigger data 289

Appendix: Keeping your data private 305

Acknowledgements 311

Index 313

Editorial Reviews

"A comprehensive and accessible overview of the ubiquity of data collection in modern society. Harkness wisely notes the limitations and inherent dangers of using Big Data, exploring fears of a “Big Brother” society and individuals’ loss of privacy in a balanced and thoughtful way. Throughout, Harkness puts her comedian persona to good use, and her clever asides make this tour of Big Data both smart and fun." - Publishers Weekly

"A pleasing excursion into the daunting terrain of computer-driven information . . . A readable guide for the non-IT set." - Kirkus Reviews

"This thought-provoking book explores one of the biggest opportunities in business, politics, and science in the twenty-first century with just the right amount of humor to keep it lively. A great addition to business, computer science, and public policy collections." - Dan Kaplan, Booklist

"A thoughtful, reader-friendly assessment of an ongoing, revolutionary change, Big Data: Does Size Matter? is highly recommended especially for public and college library collections." - Midwest Book Review

From the Publisher

2016-05-14
A pleasing excursion into the daunting terrain of computer-driven information. British comedian and writer Harkness debuts with an anecdote-laden account of our propensity for making a data set out of anything that can be turned into numbers. "Routinely collected, stored, shared, linked together and analysed," big data, writes the author, are now used to monitor diseases, predict crime, shape our elections, surveil our private moments, and track our purchases at supermarket checkouts—an extraordinary reach for a term coined in 2006. With a focus on how this enormous information-gathering has affected each major area of our lives, Harkness visited experts in places from Brooklyn to Silicon Valley and engaged in lucid conversations about numbers-crunching, from early recording-keeping (death and census data) to Alan Turing's use of mechanized reasoning to break secret World War II codes to our present widespread use of big data in business, science, politics, and other realms. "Basically any interaction between man and machine, or machine and machine, these days is being logged," one researcher told her. The author confesses her appreciation of big data's benefits—its ability, for example, to trace links between behavior, environment, and health outcomes—but also her wariness of its growing intrusiveness. "Our most personal information, our private exchanges, our network of friends, are used by others without our consent," she writes. Since the invention of the filing cabinet, governments have tried to run society by watching data, warned a privacy advocate: "If only we had more data we could control things better!" Harkness' style is light and conversational, but she makes clear her serious concerns about a society in which it is now possible to predict the likelihood of a person's future involvement in homicide or other serious crime based on the police records of friends and acquaintances. "I'm not a data point, I am a human being," she writes. "And so are you." A readable guide for the non-IT set.

Kirkus Reviews