Group items tagged

Data doesn't invade people's lives. Lack of control over how it's used does. What's really driving so-called big data isn't the volume of information. It turns out big data doesn't have to be all that big. Rather, it's about a reconsideration of the fundamental economics of analyzing data. For decades, there's been a fundamental tension between three attributes of databases. You can have the data fast; you can have it big; or you can have it varied. The catch is, you can't have all three at once. O'Reilly Radar (http://s.tt/1kHKE)

While the brightest minds of Silicon Valley are "disrupting" whatever industry is too crippled to fend off their advances, something odd is happening to our language. Old, trusted words no longer mean what they used to mean; often, they don't mean anything at all. Our language, much like everything these days, has been hacked. Fuzzy, contentious, and complex ideas have been stripped of their subversive connotations and replaced by cleaner, shinier, and emptier alternatives; long-running debates about politics, rights, and freedoms have been recast in the seemingly natural language of economics, innovation, and efficiency. Complexity, as it turns out, is not particularly viral.