Wired magazine (July 16, 2008) has two new articles: the Petabyte Age and the End of Theory. Both speak about the huge amount of data one may harvest with today’s technology, and how the “ginormous” amount of data is changing the (known & existing) theories of science…
Data collecting is happening everywhere (via the Internet, particularly) whether you realize or not. Even at traffic junction, camera and flow rate of vehicles are being recorded every second of the day. Not to mention all the cell-phone image recording that went on around us… with or without our consent.
But more than just tracking using all kinds of sensors, it’s the visualization that “interests” me. The article showed that “the biggest challenge of the Petabyte Age won’t be storing all that data, it’ll be figuring out how to make sense of it.” Martin Wattenberg (a mathematician and computer scientist who works at IBM) suggested, “The information [in Wikipedia] probably totals less than a terabyte, but it’s huge in terms of encompassing human knowledge. Today, if you’re analyzing numbers, there are a million ways to make a bar chart. If you’re analyzing text, it’s hard. I think the only way to understand a lot of this data is through visualization.
Some of the images produced even look “video-game like.”
