3. Issues with Big Data in Social Problems
• Data is highly unstructured
• Data must be collected firsthand
• Largely limited to numbers
• The belief that each case is unique, and so
adopting a big data approach is ineffective
We are swimming in a sea of big data, but we aren’t doing anything useful with it
2.5 quintillion (1018) bytes of data
-hey we are collecting the data, but what we are doing with it?
-graphic: illustrates we aren’t doing as much as we should
When it comes to social problems, data are still highly unstructured and largely limited to numbers, rather than other types of data. Take, for instance, human trafficking, a $32 billion global industry that ensnares an estimated 30 million people annually.
Problem: The haiti earthquake rocked the entire world with the disasterous effects of a mother nature, and as a result there were increasingly
-problem: crowdsourcing big data and cancer To tackle this task, CRUK and Zooniverse collaborated to create Cell Slider, a website that lets volunteers around the world categorize and analyze cancer cells. Currently, volunteers have analyzed over 2,300,000 samples, significantly assisting in CRUK's progress towards a cure.
-problem: spread of malaria, gathering information, leveraging big data from mobile, report is tedious
-solution: secondary use of data in mobile
Malaria parasites can stow away silently in a person’s bloodstream Researchers have relied on crude estimates based on road networks and census data. The researchers tracked anonymous data from 15 million mobile phone users in Kenya between June 2008 and June 2009. They overlaid the daily movements of subscribers onto detailed maps of known cases of malaria. This yielded estimates of how far and how often the human travelers spread the parasites. Read more: http://news.mongabay.com/2012/1119-ucsc-shaikh-lesko-malaria.html#ixzz3TKMnpt2l Still, the technique has unveiled worthy data, other scientists say. "What a novel notion to use mobile phone data to track disease—still imprecisely, but provocatively," William Shaffner, who heads the Preventive Medicine Department at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tenn., told mongabay.com. The new method can pinpoint hot spots and direct public health efforts, he noted. "You can now rifle your interventions instead of shot-gunning them. It gives you the potential to direct your limited resources," Shaffner said. Read more: http://news.mongabay.com/2012/1119-ucsc-shaikh-lesko-malaria.html#ixzz3TKMecQPf
3-1-1
1) Focus on things that matter – give the kenya example
2) Reuse the wealth of data out there for social good, cite census reports, government data,
3) Before the event of big data, sequencing DNA, steve jobbs pancreatic cancer, lived with over 4 years, one of the reasons he was able to do that, was due to sequencing DNA, so that they could alter
Lot of things we could do before, that we couldn’t do before
Sequence DNA for $130 because of big data
Call to action relate back to
#BigDataU https://twitter.com/bigdatau
