Gallery: Why Everyone (Not Just Geeks) Should Care About Big Data
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*Twelve years ago, DEC founder and Microsoft researcher Gordon Bell decided to make his whole life digital. He has since logged over 200 gigabytes of data.* *Photo: Mark Richards/The Human Face of Big Data.*
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*Sheila Nirenberg of Weill Cornell Medical College has built eye glasses that can restore sight to people with retinal diseases. That's not her in the photo. It's a model wearing the glasses.* *Photo: Joe McNally/The Human Face of Big Data.*
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*Author A.J. Jacobs likes to track himself. A lot.* *Photo: Michael Cogliantry/The Human Face of Big Data.*
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*BabyCenter.com says that one in three U.S. children have an 'online presence' before they're born.* *Photo: Catherine Balet "Strangers in the light" (Steidl)/The Human Face of Big Data.*
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*Researchers John Guttag and Collin Stultz are using computer models to analyze discarded EKG data describing heart attack patients.* *Photo: Jason Grow/The Human Face of Big Data*
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*Australia's Integrated Marine Observing System collects and shares ocean data from sensor floats, underwater autonomous vehicles, scientific monitoring stations, remote satellite sensing, and even animal tags.* *Photo: Rob Harcourt/Macquarie University/The Human Face of Big Data*
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*MacArthur Fellow Shwetak Patel says that every computing device has a unique digital signature you can detect with wireless sensors. And then he put as many of those devices as possible on his lawn.* *Photo: Peter Menzel/The Human Face of Big Data*
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*Researcher Oliver Senn grabbed 830 million GPS records describing 80 million Singapore taxi trips, compared it with satellite data describing the local weather, and found that no one in Singapore could get a cab in the rain because cab drivers had a habit of sitting out big storms. It turns out the city's large cab company would hold back $1,000 from a driver's salary if they were in accident until it could determine who was a fault -- and drivers didn't want to take the risk.* *Photo: R. Ian Lloyd 2012/The Human Face of Big Data*
