What's going on in the game today... it's data vs. art - that's what it comes down to for me. Art being the human heartbeat, data being numbers, the math, etc. I believe there's a balance to be struck right there.
I'm going to say something rather controversial. Big data, as people understand it today, is just a bigger version of small data. Fundamentally, what we're doing with data has not changed; there's just more of it.
Data and data sets are not objective; they are creations of human design. We give numbers their voice, draw inferences from them, and define their meaning through our interpretations.
Listening to the data is important... but so is experience and intuition. After all, what is intuition at its best but large amounts of data of all kinds filtered through a human brain rather than a math model?
Any time scientists disagree, it's because we have insufficient data. Then we can agree on what kind of data to get; we get the data; and the data solves the problem. Either I'm right, or you're right, or we're both wrong. And we move on. That kind of conflict resolution does not exist in politics or religion.
TIA was being used by real users, working on real data - foreign data. Data where privacy is not an issue.
People think 'big data' avoids the problem of discrimination because you are dealing with big data sets, but, in fact, big data is being used for more and more precise forms of discrimination - a form of data redlining.
I spend way too much time watching television, going to sports games, going to movies. It struck me that there's an awful lot of data in the public domain for these sectors. The movie industry publishes weekly sales numbers - not many industries do.
When I was a child I could do math and art, so I had left- and right-brain capabilities. But I've seen my children, who are more right-brained, struggling. My son was told he wouldn't make it to college, but he dogged it through and ended up being accepted by 10 major art schools after the high school advisor said, "Please don't apply. You're going to be disappointed." That kid's an artist now.
People are craving this great progress in electronics, going after computers, the Internet, etc. It's a giant progress technologically. But they must have a balance of soul, a balance for human beauty. That means art has an important role.
In this media-drenched, data-rich, channel-surfing, computer-gaming age, we have lost the art of doing nothing, of shutting out the background noise and distractions, of slowing down and simply being alone with our thoughts.
I kept a notebook, a surreptitious journal in which I jotted down phrases, technical data, miscellaneous information, names, dates, places, telephone numbers, thoughts, and a collection of other data I thought was necessary or might prove helpful.
Data is just like crude. It’s valuable, but if unrefined it cannot really be used. It has to be changed into gas, plastic, chemicals, etc to create a valuable entity that drives profitable activity; so must data be broken down, analyzed for it to have value.
I stay away from the arts... writing songs, being creative - those are downloads from God. You can't do data analytics on art.
We should have companies required to get the consent of individuals before collecting their data, and we should have as individuals the right to know what's happening to our data and whether it's being transferred.
People believe the best way to learn from the data is to have a hypothesis and then go check it, but the data is so complex that someone who is working with a data set will not know the most significant things to ask. That's a huge problem.
I personally think there's going to be a greater demand in 10 years for liberal arts majors than there were for programming majors and maybe even engineering, because when the data is all being spit out for you, options are being spit out for you, you need a different perspective in order to have a different view of the data.