Big Data vs. Small Data: who is right?

Big Data? Small Data? If there is something that the students of Inference and Econometrics learn quickly, it is that very few statistics are applicable to complete populations.Logically, they are based on samples and discards.In the rearview mirror we have the Spanish elections of 2016 and the different polls, pulling overboard assumptions taken as firm facts.Why? People can lie, feel coerced or just not be comfortable telling sorry matters.

To understand the difference between big and small data , we can look at micro and macroeconomics.They both operate under the same precepts.Micro is fixed on the consumer , distributor or producer; the Macro, in whole populations, in countries.But let's think about the austerity paradox: at the microeconomic level, it is best to calculate the expenditure: the greater the savings the greater the possibility of future investment.But at the macroeconomic level this is disastrous: consumption decreases , companies sell less, prices rise, future demand soars, GDP falls, unemployment increases...

Why do we tell this? Well, because one is not better than another.Because, on the one hand, we have machines throwing graphs based on logarithms, cultivating raw data to spit coherent conclusions: the "big data".And, on the other, people on foot from the street doing interviews, creating "small data".We will first define these two alleged contenders, who seem not to get along.

-Big Data: refers to the storage of large amounts of data to find patterns.It could be said that ' Big Data: the revolution of mass data ' is your Bible; and Viktor Mayer-Schonberger, his prophet.

-Small Data: if big data refers to large data harvested by machines, small data refers to small data extracted from people, from observation active witnesses, a leisurely analysis .Martin Lindstrom could be considered his particular prophet, with the bestseller ' Small Data: small clues that reveal the most important trends ' as the central axis of his thought.

Big Data vs. Small Data: who is right?

What does big data hide?

Take the example of cinema: There are two films that, thanks to their fragmented montage, try to evoke a series of emotions in the viewer. Elephant (Gus Van Sant, 2003) and 71 fragments of a random chronology (Michael Haneke, 1994) are two good examples of how the director, through the cold exposure of information, intends to suggest without judging, that the puzzle be mounted on the viewer's head and same draw your own conclusions.

The Big Data are all those fragments.Once analyzed, an immediate conclusion would be reached: this or that character is the murderer, for such or such reasons.The Small Data would not analyze the footage, but the viewer.Its emotional conclusions would be your registration.

However, Big Data is essential for any company.It does not only cover the collection and processing of information.It does not refer to a specific amount.It feeds on the quantity: the more information, the better.It is a matter of volume and variety.This one "understands" how we use social networks, how we drive on the road, our favorite type of cinema, collects every likes of Facebook or every fav of Twitter.All those recommendations of friendship, similar websites, holidays in the mountains or restaurant ads are determined by an analysis of habits and tastes.

Big Data is not limited to digitally piling up information, but rather it measures and communicates movements .This is especially relevant when we need a quick response, for example, among High Frequency Traders.HFT are systems for buying and selling listed financial assets, from stock indexes, raw materials to cars at auction.The fact is that these robots have the Stock Market staggering thanks to their ability to operate at the speed of light.

This speed is essential for the user.Surely you have heard about cloud and fog computing .To avoid going deeper into these concepts, we will say that Its function is as follows: instead of sending all the information collected to a provider and having it analyzed by its servers, this method of computing harnesses the power of our smartphone to generate an answer.The goal is simple : Shorten wait times.

Big Data vs. Small Data: who is right?

How do you get all this data?

There is a common fallacy that says that human beings increasingly produce more data.Beyond the number of inhabitants of the planet, what increases is the obtaining of them.And the ability to house astronomical quantities of numbers if it increases every day.

In the foreground we would have population censuses, medical records, taxes, fines, etc.To this we would have to add each transaction, every conversation-on Twitter 12 Terabytes of daily tweets are generated, Facebook stores about 100 Petabytes in photos and videos and YouTube...better take a look at this infographic-and, finally, add all the learning that the machines themselves do when interpreting that data, the so-called cognitive computing and the m2m (machine to machine).If we add all the activity of all the mobile phones in the world we would spend 3 quintillion bytes of daily data.

This rate has an exponential growth.Today almost everything is connected, it is the so-called Internet of things: the smartphone tops the list, but we would have to add our TV, the printer, any wearable (bracelets, watches), the new wireless audio systems, the smart homes -washing machine, oven, plate, fridge-and even some musical instruments.Each new connected gadget is a new real-time information issuer.

Finding connections with the user

But all that is just the tip of the iceberg.It is a machine language that we cannot understand.And not everything can be reduced to variables of ones and zeros.Ingvar Kamprad, founder of IKEA, said that the cheapest research and Effective that exists is to ask each customer why they buy this or that product: this is Small Data .

Martin Lindstrom, backbone of Small Data , tells an interesting anecdote: remember how Lego , on the verge of bankruptcy in 2003, stopped paying attention to Big Data, which said that its parts sets were finished because the current generation had become accustomed to instant gratification.The company talked to children and I ended up making their pieces smaller, more versatile, a decision that affected to the packaging and automatically increased the difficulty.This decision contrary shot sales.

Lindstrom is known as the father of neuromarketing.It consists in the application of neuroscientific techniques in the field of marketing, as a study of the levels of emotion, attention and memory that the user shows against different stimuli.It is something that advertising comes practicing for 150 years.The Small Data appeals to creativity, to accidents, to that which escapes from raw statistics.Snapchat success, converting the post-its as a work tool, the viralization of just-the-opposite-what-you expected.

The Big Data wants to find consistent correlations in large volumes of data. Small Data prefers to sit with the user, meet him, study him, or even anything like that: act how people act, without great reasoning, with a hint of madness and risk, hence the Small Data is the new topic of conversation and obsesses large companies: why do startups exist? that perform better than millimetrically ordered corporations? Why Amazon has not made the small publishers disappear but quite the opposite, being Spain at the head of Europe despite its economy?

Big Data vs. Small Data: who is right?

However, Lindstrom's book hides a great fallacy: "Big Data is data, and data favors the analysis of emotion." This is a romantic perspective that leads to error: Big Data is data as much as Small Data .And it used to determine emotions-that ask the algorithm of favorite groups in Spotify-as well as wishes of the type of "purchase intention".

Finally, we should take into account that maximum random call: the essayist and financial researcher Nassim Nicholas Taleb calls an unlikely event "black swan", so much so that its consequences can only be explained a posteriori, which leave us out of place and we can only understand them when we have conducted a cold analysis, such as cases of labor pressure or the terrible consequences of the killing of the Columbine Institute, portrayed precisely on the Elephant tape.

Comments

Internet of plants: a tomato knows as much about networks as you

The possibility of plant species communicating through complex networks, what some scientists have called the internet of plants , is an issue that has been discussed for a long time, at least 20 years.It was in 1997 when the scientist Suzanne Simard , from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver (Canada), published a study in the journal Nature on how Forest plants use complex systems where species exchange nutrients, send warning signals and relate to the environment. Although there is no scientific consensus, several investigations seem to support this hypothesis.If confirmed, as we read in a fascinating report by the Sinc Agency, the forests would act as huge structures that are articulated under the soil through a network in which factors invisible to the human eye interact and can determine the future of the climate.Understanding how it works is the challenge that even science faces. internet of plants and the wisdom of forests The premise of Suzanne Simard ...

New setbacks for conspiranoicos: radiofrequencies do not affect health

New evidence published by the Scientific Advisory Committee on Radio Frequency and Health (CCARS) in its 2016 Radio Frequency and Health Report indicates that there are no adverse health effects derived of exposure to radio frequencies emitted by mobile phone antennas or radio and television broadcasting.No evidence has been found on the danger in wireless systems (Wi-Fi) or airport scanners. The new 2016 Radio Frequency and Health Report collects, updates and analyzes the scientific evidence on the subject for the period between January 2013 and June 2016. radio frequencies are not dangerous According to the conclusions of the report " the critical analysis of the evidence supports that there are no technical or sanitary reasons that justify the arbitrary and discretionary imposition of more demanding exposure limits than those recommended by WHO-ICNIRP and the Union European ", while the application of more restrictive limits" would imply increasing the n...

GIF history: where they come from and where they are going

Funny, witty, curious... GIFs have already become a regular resource in social networks and messaging applications and have become part of our daily lives and jokes.It is an image format that has evolved significantly throughout its history and is experiencing a new awakening. In fact, to find its origins, we must go back more than twenty years ago .A moment in which they had little to do with what we know today and an evolution that we could not stop review.So let's find out where they come from and try to catch a glimpse of where they are going. What is a GIF The word GIF responds to the acronym of Graphics Interchange Format , or what is the same, graphic exchange format.A term for the graphic format used in the network for both static images and animations.In more concrete terms, it supports 8 bits per pixel and allows you to display images with up to 256 colors simultaneously-limited by a palette of 16 million-. This particularity makes it a perfect ally of infogr...

Amazon Prime Video arrives in Spain: this is all you need to know

That during the last years there has been a change in the way we enjoy audiovisual content is an obvious reality, as reflected by the huge popularity of streaming services like Netflix and the like.A context in which new competitors are constantly added and that, after the landing of this company in our country just over a year ago, is in full transformation. In fact, today we have learned of the incursion of a new protagonist in this area.Yes, because Amazon Prime Video has just arrived in Spain .A landing that takes place only two weeks away that of HBO, which culminates in a 2016 sown of changes.But, what exactly does it consist of? What advantages and disadvantages does it have compared to the "of its kind"? WHAT AMAZON PRIME VIDEO OFFERS The type, quality and quantity of movies and series offered by the service will be key when determining your success.A catalog a priori smaller than that of HBO and Netflix, but in which we find titles like Seinfield , Into...

What we know and what we suspect in the new Facebook algorithm change

"In my time, we read the newspaper in Facebook ".By 2020, nostalgia has taken over billions of people.In its memory, 2018, when Facebook stopped being Facebook to become Facebook again.Paraiso of engagement for brands and media, land paid for clickbaits and fake news, the social network of Mark Zuckerberg has given a rudder to his algorithm. He wants to return to his origins .And this is what will happen. Related If something goes well, to change it.40.653 million dollars entered in 2017.More than 2.100 million active users per month, a quarter of the world's population.But Zuckerberg is not one of those, of which they are.Want a Facebook with more social connections between people and less presence of brands and media .And what do your users want? Nearly two-thirds of American adults consume news on social networks.More than half do so on their Facebook walls.Pew Research Center data points to a clear trend: Facebook is becoming a media platform.54% of Facebook u...

No kidding: selfitis exists and can be a problem

Sometimes one thinks that social networks were created to share photos of faces putting on little bones and images of dishes overflowing with appetizing foods or, better, of faces putting little bones in front of plates overflowing with appetizing foods in the same shot.is to see faces, faces, faces...all of them smiling, as if looking at the smartphone mirror was the height of happiness.And it does not seem that there are so many beautiful and happy people, or maybe yes, that you go Namely.What envy. Well, what we're going to do: Janarthanan Balakrishnan psychologists from the Thiagarajar School of Management in India; and Mark D.Griffiths, of the Nottingham Trent University, in the United Kingdom, have published an article in the International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction entitled 'A study on' Selfitis', which names this mania of going around the world taking pictures of oneself, as if beyond our curls the world had been destroyed by that meteorite th...

Twitter shows the best of ourselves (it wasn't always going to be the worst)

In the era of social networks, accustomed to interact daily with Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google or WhatsApp, we forget that these tools are phenomenal in the History of Humanity capable of mobilize hundreds of thousands of people in very different geographical locations in a matter of hours or even minutes. Already in the past, Twitter has asserted its more social dimension to mobilize people, companies or organizations and also, from a broader perspective, feelings of solidarity and support or also of rejection and repulses towards causes with an important mediatic impact.Recently, Twitter was once again the engine of solidarity after Dortmund's explosions as the Borussia Dortmund team bus passed on its way to the local stadium on the occasion of the Champions League match between the Borussia and the Monaco. These explosions did not have the devastating effect that they could have caused , so that everything remained in a major social commotion at international lev...

Most apps for children violate your privacy

Do you know if apps with which children enjoy their safety? A team of researchers from the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) of the University of Berkeley has studied compliance with the Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) in these mobile applications for the little ones, through a scalable dynamic analysis that allows the automatic evaluation of privacy behaviors of Android apps. After studying 5,855 applications aimed at children, the research concludes that most of these apps, 57%, violate the privacy of their users mainly due to the use of data by third parties. apps for children and privacy Although many apps offer options in their configuration to respect the federal law that protects minors in the United States, by disabling tracking, their results suggest that a majority of applications either do not use these options or propagate them in wrong way. In addition, researchers believe that 19% of apps for children send user IDs to third parties to show ...

Are social networks damaging democracy?

The revelations according to which Russian agents inserted ads on Facebook that tried to influence the 2016 US elections raise a disturbing question: is Facebook bad for democracy? As an expert in the social and political repercussions of technology, I think that the problem is not exclusively from Facebook, but that it is much broader: Social networks are weakening some of the conditions that have historically enabled the existence of national states democratic. I understand that it is a dramatic statement, and I do not expect anyone to believe it immediately, but considering that almost half of all potential voters received false news promoted by the Russians in Facebook is an argument that must be debated. Associate Professor of Philosophy, Director of Center for Professional and Applied Ethics, University of North Carolina-Charlotte How we create a shared reality Let's start with two concepts: the "imagined community" and the "bubble filter". ...

This is how visual challenges star in some of the most viral content

Constantly, we all receive in our mail, our WhatsApp or our Facebook account, games that try to test our ingenuity, imagination or visual skill.There are a thousand types, more fun or darker.But they have one thing in common: we cannot avoid trying them and see if we are able to solve them .This is how the visual challenges star in some of the most viral content of the network. Visual challenges, why are we crazy? The visual challenges are games.So, they attend to this playful and fun part that people have no choice but to feed from time to time.They are pure and hard entertainment, with no more pretensions, and that desire to Having fun represents one of the main features that are sought when surfing the Internet . Another of the qualities for which they succeed is because they challenge the mind directly.Human beings love that feeling of feeling a little troubled, somewhat lost, but convinced that there is a solution to that enigma to which, sooner or later, it will come.Rathe...

Network One Online

Search This Blog