Origin of big data

Here are three links that are worth your time.

• Who came up with the name big data? The answer is much older than you think. Even the “three Vs” of big data (volume, velocity, variety) date back to 2001.
• JC Penney’s parking lots are emptying. The decline neatly correlates with their stock price. Satellite imagery is also being used to forecast “… things like poverty (by tracking building height and rooftop material), oil inventory (by looking at images of tanks and drilling rigs), and agricultural yields (by observing crops and analyzing weather data)”
• JP Morgan uses machine learning to automatically “read” thousands of contracts and interpret them. This gets us much closer to the Bill Gates milestone: “… when computers can read and understand information like humans do.”

Soon, we can leave the reading to the machines and go out Saturday night.