Just by living our plugged-in lives, each of us is producing a constant stream of data. Little snippets are left behind of what we search, what we buy, where we go, what we tweet ... This endless flow of numbers is referred to as “big data,” data sets so large that they require sophisticated parsing to give them meaning. But big data has the potential to tell us a lot about ourselves -- unearthing patterns in information flow, energy consumption, weather patterns, disease spread, education trends, and more.
