Edge issue -1 | Page 14

Today it’s possible to use the exponential explosion of available data in many extraordinary ways. Former US Secretary of Agriculture Dan Glickman recently used data in citing the UN’s Food and Agriculture food production rates. The information he produced stated that, “in the next 40 years, we have to produce as much food as we have in the past 8,000” which by all counts is by all counts daunting. However what the data reinforced was the issue of dwindling farmland and a growing global population. It was only last year in March that we now assumed the world’s population topped 7 billion, and the data augmented the trends and patterns in accordance to our impact on the planet. The net result is that by studying these patterns of data, we can affect positive action which, in the case of the UN Food and Agriculture situation, might include doing more with less. Efficiency is the name of the game and as the old adage goes, “knowledge is power”. In the last couple of decades there has been an infinite stream of open-sourced information creating a phenomenon known as Big Data. It’s a great misnomer really, because Big Data is more about how to use the information to do things better. It doesn’t even have to be ‘big’ numerically; it just simply has to assist in creating change. Shwetak Patel recognised this and based on the data he gathered, he was able to affect a consequence of change in both behavior and digital outcome. The 29 year old computer science and engineering assistant professor measured the digital signature of every device in his home including existing infrastructure like the plumbing, electrical wiring, gas lines, water outlets, ventilation and the like. Using his own scientific formula he could measure which appliance was using the most energy. It turned out to be the continuous pool pumps and video recorders, and together they

BYTE SIZE – EACH ONE IS A THOUSAND TIMES LARGER THAN THE ONE BEFORE IT.
A Byte A Kilobyte A Megabyte A Gigabyte A Terabyte A Petabyte An Exabyte A Zettabyte one character, or a grain of sand a sentence, or a couple of pinches of sand a 20-slide Power Point, or a tablespoon of sand ten yards of books on a shelf, or a shoebox full of sand 300 hours of good quality video, or a playground sandbox 350,000 digital pictures, or a mile long stretch of beach half the information generated worldwide in 1999, or a beach 1328 kilometres long Unimaginable, or a beach as long as all the coastlines in the world

*the human face of big data by Rick Smolan and Jennifer Erwitt ©2012 EMC Corporation