Please forgive me for paraphrasing iconic Canadian rock band Rush's lyrics to their 1985 song "Big Money", but if you substitute "money" with "data", you might see a more accurate reflection of the digital world we live in over 30 years later:Big money goes around the world
Big money underground
Big money got a mighty voice
Big money make no sound
Big money pull a million strings
Big money hold the prize
Big money weave a mighty web
Big money draw the flies
Songwriters: NEIL PEART, GEDDY LEE WEINRIB, ALEX LIFESON
"Big Money" lyrics provided for educational purposes and personal use only.
I was Master of Ceremonies for a college I.T. conference a couple of weeks ago and the theme was Big Knowledge. There was also a separate technology conference happening in downtown Toronto the same week focused on big data. Clearly, big data is a buzz word, but it might be more than a buzz word du jour. Big data might be a real Orwellian manifestation of living in the digital age. This term was until recently, usually talked about in the context of large retailers trying to sell you more goods based on shopping patterns and demographic information extracted from huge sets of transactional data. A quick Google search of "big data" today yielded news stories about automobile traffic, human judgement versus data driven decision-making in manufacturing, and U.S. Vice-President Joe Biden's Cancer Moonshot research initiative. As big data grows exponentially, so does it's potential uses and misuses.
I'm beginning my current academic studies at a time when research is also being impacted by big data. Vice-President Biden's aforementioned Cancer Moonshot project is an effort to double the pace of preventing, diagnosing, and treating cancer (The Rocket Fuel for Biden’s “Cancer Moonshot”? Big Data - MIT Technology Review). Part of that project is an effort to bring together enormous amounts of cancer research so it can be better shared by academia, industry and government. This is a challenge I heard a few times from keynote speakers at the conference I was hosting; how do we organize and standardize huge amounts of data from disparate sources, structured in different formats? If this challenge can be met, the potential for research, and by extension, industry, government and society is enormous. But unless there is rigorous security, ethical and legal structures in place outlining how big data can, or cannot be used, the potential for violations of personal privacy and research ethics is equally enormous. Big data is a tsunami of information, all of our own making. The question is, will we be able to harness that energy or will it overwhelm us?
Yes, this is such a fascinating and important topic isn't it. Did you see the article that Heather posted in our Learning Community Class Forum? I thought it did a good job of starting the ethical aspect of the discussion that need to happen in regards to big data. I was listening to a program on public radio where a doctor discussed how the patterns they are beginning to decipher from individuals'use online behavior can predict risk for certain diseases. What do they do with this information? What is the ethical thing to do? Who owns it, has access to it, can prevent it from even being collected and analyzed in the first place. How to make it transparent? Lots of important questions!
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