Big Data and Human Behavior

Every now and then you see something startling–something that bends your mind.  It’s rare, not often–maybe once a year, if you are lucky. And when you see it, it captivates you. It jars you. You are drawn in and as you listen, time flies at the speed of light. That’s what happened to me last night when I watched PBS’ The Human Face of Big Data.

If you are like most people, when you hear the words “big data”, you cringe. How can it be any good, right? People are tracking our lives and what we do more than ever before in history.

What is big data? Listen here.

Every two days now we are storing more information than all of history up until 2003. That’s staggering!   We’ve lost our privacy, we are being targeted by ads more precisely and invasively than ever, and big data knows just about every single thing we do each day! How could that be a good thing?   If you fear big data, of course there is reason to, I can’t say there isn’t. This show talks about that, too.

But there is an incredibly positive side to big data that is astounding, and no I haven’t just bought a bridge!

This PBS show demonstrated that we are in a “data revolution” and it will change your life and my life forever–rapidly–with progress we haven’t seen in our lifetimes.   The growth we are going to experience in understanding human behavior and our health in the next ten years is going to be mind-bending.  I am that excited about this!

You see, big data reveals invisible, never-before seen patterns about us as humans.  It reveals how we behave, about our health, and what we do on a level none of us have ever seen before, and what it reveals is startling, fascinating and exciting!

It makes science-fiction look dull.

In this one-hour show, what data has uncovered will literally stop you in your tracks.

By watching Google searches (as seen in the video above), researchers found that they could predict the flu a full two weeks before the CDC.

In the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU), when babies get an infection, it is very serious and often life-threatening.  One person decided to track every bit of data they could from these babies, and they found there are signs that babies give in their data that signify an infection is starting–long before we ever see a thing!  Isn’t that amazing??

By tracking mobile users in malaria-infected areas, we are now able to much more effectively treat malaria and have brought infections down by 25%!

Boston now takes data from a mobile app called “Street Bump” that tracks locations and bumps in the road as you travel, and feeds that data back to the city to make repairs for potholes!  Another app watches people’s behavior and can predict depression two days before actual symptoms appear.  How is that? People who are depressed stop going out, and slow down their interactions with others via social media and email.

Think about how powerful data can be! It will revolutionize how we understand our world, each other and ourselves without question!

I can’t even do this show justice talking about it. You have to see it. This is our future. This data revolution is going to change all of our lives and what we learn will be incredible, amazing, scary and shocking.

You just have to check out this show! It’s one-in-a-million!