download PDF - Imaging Notes

…THE LONG TAIL OF SCIENCE DATA
RICHARD HEIMANN
Analytics Coordinator
Data Tactics Corportation
McLean, Va.
www.data-tactics-corp.com
THE 20TH CENTURY was seminal for the natural sciences, with discoveries such
as penicillin (Fleming, 1945), the polio vaccine (Salk, 1952), the double helix structure
of DNA (Watson & Crick, 1953), and the first complete DNA sequence of an
organism (Sanger et al., 1977), all of which advanced human understanding and
human welfare. The advent of the OpenWeb and a seemingly endless amount of
new science data have the potential to do for the computational social sciences in
the 21st century what other measurement tools did for the natural sciences of the
20th century – advancing further human understanding and human welfare. Big
Data will be central to that pursuit.
“Data is the new oil” is a phrase coined by Clive Humby and embraced by the
World Economic Forum in 2011 as it considered data as an economic asset like oil.
Every day, we create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data – so much that 90% of the data
in the world today has been created in the last two years alone. (IBM) These data
come from everywhere: hard sensors used to gather information, the social web,
transaction records, and cell phone GPS signals, to name a few. The amount of such
data is big and by every account growing exponentially. These facts, however, give
no hint to where the largest growth is, or comparatively speaking, where the greatest
rewards lie for researchers. It is difficult to believe that data are increasing uniformly.
34
IMAGING NOTES // WINTER 2013 // WWW.IMAGINGNOTES.COM