What’s the point of BIG data? To make decisions!

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MSI
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What’s the point of BIG data? To make decisions!

Post by MSI »

MIT Technology Review: Jan 22, 2014: The Power to Decide:What’s the point of all that data, anyway? It’s to make decisions
which begins:
  • Back in 1956, an engineer and a mathematician, William Fair and Earl Isaac, pooled $800 to start a company. Their idea: a score to handicap whether a borrower would repay a loan.
    It was all done with pen and paper. Income, gender, and occupation produced numbers that amounted to a prediction about a person’s behavior. By the 1980s the three-digit scores were calculated on computers and instead took account of a person’s actual credit history. Today, Fair Isaac Corp., or FICO, generates about 10 billion credit scores annually, calculating 50 times a year for many Americans.
In the MIT article Antonio Regalado puts together summaries and links to a number of articles on how big data affects our power to decide.
for example see the full article: