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Big Data is a lot like teenage sex

Even if you have heard the big data quote doing the rounds it is worth repeating here once more:

Big data is like teenage sex: everyone talks about it, nobody really knows how to do it, everyone thinks everyone else is doing it, so everyone claims they are doing it.

Hard to beat that for pith! It is a sign of increasing disappointment in the promise of big data.

The big data hype started back in 2009 with Google’s Flu Trends paper in Nature. They used 50 million search terms and 450 million models to find the best combination of 45 search terms that helped the Center for Disease Control in the US predict winter flu epidemics, three weeks ahead of doctor-reported stats....