Today's Big Data links

Here are a few posts of interest from the last few days regarding Big Data.  In the Columbia Journalism Review, "When Big Data is Bad Data" concerns the controversy over public posting of teacher rankings based on questionable metrics.  From the Wall Street Journal's "CIO Report" blog, "Taking Small Steps to Big Data" presents views on Big Data that were aired during the recent MIT Sloan CIO Symposium.

"When Big Data is Bad Data"
http://www.cjr.org/behind_the_news/the_press_and_standardized_tes.php?page=all

"Taking Small Steps to Big Data"
http://blogs.wsj.com/cio/2012/05/24/taking-small-steps-to-big-data/

White House Launches New Digital Initiative

The White House recently announced a new digital strategy, which addresses a broad array of topics such as open government, data quality, and attracting talent, among others.

This strategy is the work of Steven VanRoekel CIO of the Federal government, and Todd Park, the CTO.

VanRoekel assumed the role of Federal CIO after Vivek Kundra, the first person to hold the position newly created under the Obama administration, left last year.  Similarly, Park assumed the CTO role after Aneesh Chopra departed.

Here's the blog entry on O'Reilly's "radar" site (btw as a longtime M*A*S*H fan, I love that the url is radar.oreilly.com):

http://radar.oreilly.com/2012/05/white-house-launches-new-digit.html

Science and private "big data"

When research is conducted using data from private sources, should the underlying data be made public?  See the New York Times article at

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/22/science/big-data-troves-stay-forbidden-to-social-scientists.html?smid=pl-share

Coming soon: the Google Knowledge Graph

Google will release a new "Knowledge Graph" feature this week.  For certain searches, the graph will pop up in the right hand column of your search results and provide data which can be used to, for example, disambiguate the search -- if you searched Taj Mahal, you might see data for the musician as well as the building.

For more information, see the Atlantic article as well as the entry on Google "Inside Search" blog:

Google Gets Back to Its Roots With New Search Update - The Atlantic

Inside Search: Introducing the Knowledge Graph: things, not strings

Fighting more than crime with Compstat

CompStat, a data driven process first used in New York City and credited with a drastic decline in crime there, is being used by the city of Baltimore to do more than just fight crime.  It's now being used as a tool to improve a variety of city services.

 Read the blog entry on the New York Times site:

  http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/02/armed-with-data-fighting-more-than-crime/