Posts tagged data
What “Big Data” can Learn from Dubai’s Skyscrapers & Sewage System
Suddenly, we love data. It’s the hero in our TV shows, saves our baseball teams, generates our art, and is the topic of the moment at Davos. Our obsession borders on religion: we believe data is infallible, containing a single, emergent truth (the Guardian’s Datablog’s subtitle is “Facts are Sacred”). If our businesses or institutions are failing we say they need more data.
But when we embrace “Big Data” we neglect the operations and environments we hope the data will improve. Which is unfortunate because data’s value is determined by how well we capitalize on the intelligence it produces. If a film studio identifies a new trend they’re limited by how long a film takes to produce. If a retail outlet discovers that peanut butter buyers can also be sold bananas, they’re limited by how quickly employees can rearrange shelves.
Adding more data to the mix doesn’t help if infrastructures aren’t upgraded. If we ignore the systems we aim to improve, the data we crave is worth only a fraction of its potential value.
For those of us investing in or producing data, the bottleneck is our users, culture, and infrastructure. We’d be wise to learn from examples in other fields and scenarios. Take Dubai, for instance, where skyscrapers sprung up while sewage systems stagnated.
No One Wants their Name on a Sewer
Dubai’s record-setting skyline emerged over the last decades, fueled by rising fuel prices. Wikipedia lists 195 skyscrapers built or under construction in the once quiet city, whose population has more than quintupled in the last 30 years.
But all is not rosy: while the skyline was funded the sewage system was ignored. In 2008, The Wall Street Journal wrote, “By one estimate, some $300 billion in new projects are going up in Dubai in the next 10 years… But Dubai’s single, 30-year-old sewage-treatment plant isn’t keeping up. Sewage output here is rising by 25% a year.” The 160-floor Burj Khalifa alone was designed to house 25,000 people, nearly a 10th of Dubai’s total population when their sewage treatment plant was built.
“ (One interesting side note: The cameras on drone aircraft in Afghanistan take such precise pictures that not all the data can quickly travel over the local Internet connections to analysts in the United States. The usual method is to store everything in a local cargo container full of receiving gear, computers and storage, then airlift it home when it’s full, swapping out another container to absorb more info from the drones.)”
NYTimes.com on the shipping container as a medium, which the military is hot-swapping in and out of Afghanistan.
(via new-aesthetic)
(via new-aesthetic)
Businessweek shows the potential danger in data. “All you need are two graphs and a leading question.”
I’d argue word clouds are just as bad as these parodies. They suggest correlation by pretending word frequency is more important than sentence structure and, you know, actual language.
“ General managers submit weekly reports, measuring factors like traffic and customer satisfaction. Every quarter, teams assess their priorities under an Intel-pioneered system called “objectives and key results.” And Mr. Pincus, a professed data obsessive, devours all the reports, using multiple spreadsheets, to carefully track the progress of Zynga’s games and its roughly 3,000 employees.”
NYTimes.com on Zynga.
Ignore the rest of this article for a moment and just focus on Zynga’s data obsession, an obsession shared by many other start ups and one being adopted by established companies.
Here’s the rub: anything Excel can’t measure, Pincus can’t see.
Eric Fischer is mapping language communities on Twitter using Chrome’s language detector. (Via Eric Fischer)
Drawing on messages posted by more than two million people in 84 countries, researchers discovered that the emotional tone of people’s messages follows a similar pattern not only through the day but also through the week and the changing seasons. The new analysis suggests that our moods are driven in part by a shared underlying biological rhythm that transcends culture and environment.
(Via NYTimes.com)
“ Green means the restaurant is serving a full menu, a signal that damage in an area is limited and the lights are on. Yellow means a limited menu, indicating power from a generator, at best, and low food supplies. Red means the restaurant is closed, a sign of severe damage in the area or unsafe conditions.”
FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate on the agency’s “Waffle House Index.”
It seems silly, but I find this to be really clever. Waffle Houses pride themselves on being able to stay open during natural disasters; they’ve even written an in-house “hurricane playbook.” Couple this sort of consistent response with the fact that Waffle House locations blanket hurricane areas and you’ve just bootstrapped a free, distributed qualitative indicator for conditions on the ground. (Via Gizmodo)
Green party politician Malte Spitz sued to have German telecoms giant Deutsche Telekom hand over six months of his phone data that he then made available to ZEIT ONLINE. We combined this geolocation data with information relating to his life as a politician, such as Twitter feeds, blog entries and websites, all of which is all freely available on the internet. By pushing the play button, you will set off on a trip through Malte Spitz’s life.
A German politician becomes his own Big Brother to demonstrate the importance of data piracy. (Via Flowing Data)
Brutal: Garmin and TomTom stock after Google’s announcement of free navigation.
I hate the stock market herd mentality.
This has been a long time coming. The herd mentality in play here is the joint realization that building your business around single-use, consumer, networked devices is not a good idea. Moore’s Law will obliterate you. The big winners will be the people that create multi-use platforms where unitasker products can be built upon. Apple. Google.
BTW, what was the long term strategy for TomTom and Garmin? Both must have realized that mobile was their end-game, hence their forays into the space: Garmin with an actual device and TomTom with software. The thing is, mobile is a cut-throat space where established businesses with hoards of data and capital have been staking claims within for the last decade.
And we’ve seen this time and time again. Apple developers always feared the kiss of death from Apple: that Cupertino would incorporate their function into their OS. (It’s telling no one really had those fears regarding Redmond.) Google has the data behind it to casually turn on features that kill entire verticals, especially around the maps product.
