Big Data with a Grain of Salt

摘要

Big Data is everywhere, tracking click-throughs, web cookies and time stamps of our daily lives like the digital paparazzi. It can be used for good, revealing patterns in the most miniscule of details and leading to discoveries beyond our wildest imaginations. But in the wrong hands, it's dangerous; unraveling identities, draining bank accounts or worse. From a scientific standpoint, Big Bad Data is greedy and hungry, swallowing everything in its path to chew it up and spit it out, making something from nothing. This can lead to false correlations and, as our industry has seen, junk science. And now that we're tallying up results from intricate tests of genetic up- and down-regulation, alterations in our body's microbiome and neuron response patterns for product likes/dislikes, we have to be careful.