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Timandra Harkness@Farm Rd, Mon 24th July @7:30pm

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Big Data: Does Size Matter?

 

Big Data knows where you’ve been and who your friends are. It knows what you like and what makes you angry. It can predict what you’ll buy, where you’ll be the victim of crime and when you’ll have a heart attack. Big Data knows you better than you know yourself, or so it claims.

 

But how well do you know big data?

 

From science to smart cities, business to politics, self-quantification to the Internet of Things, people are talking about big data as a force for change. Privacy, democracy, even our ideas of who we are, could be transformed. You don’t need to be a Silicon Valley tech prodigy to understand what’s going on.

 

Timandra Harkness writes comedy, not computer code. The only programs she makes are on the radio. If she can understand what’s going on, so can you. Some of the ideas underlying Big Data are based on the kind of mathematics anybody can grasp: different measures that are correlated in predictable patterns; the relationship between the average of a population and what that tells you about an individual; how we study networks and connections to learn something new about the big picture. Others, though harder to grasp in theory, are familiar in practice: apps on our phones that locate us on a map, or count our steps; internet search engines that predict what we’d like to buy; websites that translate other languages into English.

 

But big data isn’t just neat mathematics or clever technology. It has implications for all of us.

 

Timandra asks the big questions about where it’s taking us: is it too big for its boots, or does it think too small? Are you a data point or a human being? She aims to leave you armed and ready to decide what you think about one of the decade’s big ideas: big data.

 

http://sheffield.skepticsinthepub.org/Event.aspx/11313/Big-Data-Does-Size-Matter

 

https://www.facebook.com/events/217545568730353/?acontext=%7B%22source%22%3A4%2C%22action_history%22%3A%22null%22%7D&source=4&action_history=null

 

@Farm Road Sports & Social Club

Farm Road

Sheffield

South Yorkshire S2 2TP

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