How to Lie with Data
Back in the early Nineties, I was working on a Ph.D applying a tool called a Geographic Information System (GIS) to the challenge of modelling archaeological deposits under cities. For those of us worrying about these things, Mark Monmonier‘s then-newly published first edition of How to Lie with Maps was required reading. It wasn’t so much a handbook...
KPMG Capital CEO Mark Toon discusses corporate perspectives on big data
That global accountancy giant KPMG should be interested in data is not, perhaps, surprising. That KPMG would use its own money to “invest in, partner with and acquire organisations that specialise in data and analytics tools and assets” was less immediately obvious to me. But that, according to KPMG global lead for data and analytics Mark...
Getting it right with data attribution
There have always, it seems, been people for whom attribution and citation really matter. Some of them passionately engage in arguments that last months or years, debating the merits of comma placement in written citations for the work of others. Bizarre, right? But, as we all become increasingly dependent upon data sourced from third parties,...
Seeking Simplicity’s Sweet Spot
Albert Einstein, you may have heard, was a clever man. He scribbled equations on blackboards, thought big thoughts, and all of that. But, allegedly, he also said Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler. These words have resonated with me recently, as I’ve heard pitches from one company after another, all...
Visualisation – the key that unlocks data’s value?
As the Big Data hype machine continues its relentless attempt to gobble everything in its path, new business units and entire new domains buying into the promise find themselves faced with unanticipated data volume and complexity. They see the potential for data-based decision making, but still face (short-term?) challenges in actually managing, analysing or interpreting...
Doing the DataBeat
For the past two years, Ben Kepes and I have helped the team at VentureBeat assemble the programme for their annual Cloud Computing event, CloudBeat. It looks as though we may end up doing something similar with them this year, as CloudBeat moves from Redwood City to downtown San Francisco, and from November to September....
Hubris and the Data Scientist
ReadWriteWeb‘s Joe Brockmeier captures a recurring issue from last week’s O’Reilly Strata conference, asking “Can Big Data replace domain expertise?” According to Brockmeier, the audience (of data scientists) apparently narrowly agreed that their arsenal of tools and algorithms trumped the knowledge and experience of the meteorologists, financiers, and retailers to whose domains data scientists are increasingly...
Top Level Domain for data answers the wrong question
British-born computer scientist Stephen Wolfram sees ongoing efforts to extend the Internet’s top-level domains (TLDs) beyond the familiar .com, .org, .uk etc as an opportunity to raise the profile of machine-readable data. In a blog post published yesterday, he argues that a new .data domain would increase “exposure of data on the internet—and [provide] added impetus for...
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