Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think

Viktor Mayer-Schönberger · Kenneth Cukier

Mar 2013 · Sold by HarperCollins

About this ebook

A revelatory exploration of the hottest trend in technology and the dramatic impact it will have on the economy, science, and society at large.

Which paint color is most likely to tell you that a used car is in good shape? How can officials identify the most dangerous New York City manholes before they explode? And how did Google searches predict the spread of the H1N1 flu outbreak?

The key to answering these questions, and many more, is big data. “Big data” refers to our burgeoning ability to crunch vast collections of information, analyze it instantly, and draw sometimes profoundly surprising conclusions from it. This emerging science can translate myriad phenomena—from the price of airline tickets to the text of millions of books—into searchable form, and uses our increasing computing power to unearth epiphanies that we never could have seen before. A revolution on par with the Internet or perhaps even the printing press, big data will change the way we think about business, health, politics, education, and innovation in the years to come. It also poses fresh threats, from the inevitable end of privacy as we know it to the prospect of being penalized for things we haven’t even done yet, based on big data’s ability to predict our future behavior.

In this brilliantly clear, often surprising work, two leading experts explain what big data is, how it will change our lives, and what we can do to protect ourselves from its hazards. Big Data is the first big book about the next big thing.

www.big-data-book.com

Ratings and reviews

Het boek leest vlot, sprekende voorbeelden en goede kritische noten. Aanrader voor een ieder die wat dieper wil gaan dan de gebruikelijke hiep hiep hoera over big data...

Very pleasant book about how Big Data works. It tells few very interesting stories how this technology changed the way we people look at data. My two favourites are about New York's manholes and the solution to limit problems with them and about a see maps from centuries ago. That was quite brilliant. This book is by no mean a technical one, so it's for everyone. It tells these stories with a very common language without technical jargon so everyone can understand what is going on here. And i can suggest it to anyone> This book is not only for IT guys. :)

About the author

VIKTOR MAYER-SCHÖNBERGER is Professor of Internet Governance and Regulation at the Oxford Internet Institute, Oxford University. The co-author of Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We, Live, Work, and Think, he has published over a hundred articles and eight other books, including Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age. He is on the advisory boards of corporations and organizations around the world, including Microsoft and the World Economic Forum.

KENNETH CUKIER is the Data Editor of the Economist and co-author of Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think. His writings on business and economics have appeared in Foreign Affairs, the New York Times, the Financial Times, and elsewhere.