I thought some of you might be interested in this talk at Harvard Law School by the authors of the book Big Data: Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, Professor of Internet Governance and Regulation at Oxford University in the UK, and Kenneth Neil Cukier, Data Editor of The Economist.

The authors examine big data’s power, the dangers it poses and how to address them. The talk is around 25 minutes, followed by approximately half an hour of questions from the audience.

In particular Mayer-Schönberger and Cukier underline three qualities of big data – “more“, “messy” and “correlation“. Among the points mentioned are pandemics, machine translation, topics of discussion by the UK’s House of Commons, Mitt Romney’s fake Twitter followers, and trends in US Supreme Court decisions.

* In the words of the authors “‘Big data’ refers to our newfound ability to crunch a vast quantity of information, analyze it instantly, and draw sometimes astonishing conclusions from it.“