Big Data and Cloud Culture - To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World - page 182

the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) who have spent years trying to
track the disease. Google's haystack is more like a towering skyscraper,
with three billion searches a day saved in Google's clouds. Drawing from
this vast store of data, Google compared 50 million of the most common
search terms to the CDC's information on the spread of lu from 2003
to 2008 (Ginsberg et al. 2009). The company's researchers looked for
correlations between the frequency of certain search terms and the spread
of the virus over space and time. They found that “because the relative
frequency of certain queries is highly correlated with the percentage of
physician visits in which a patient presents with inluenza-like symptoms,
we can accurately estimate the current level of weekly inluenza activity in
each region of the United States, with a reporting lag of about one day”
(ibid.). Since the best reporting lag up to this point was about two weeks,
Google's results, which led to the online tool Google Flu Trends, promised
to provide lu ighters and the general public with the best information on
how to predict the spread of lu. Moreover, it could do this unobtrusively
and inexpensively. Big data found the needle in the form of key search
terms and Google cautiously believed its method might serve to reine
global and local preparations for the virus.
Big data is now used widely throughout the sciences. Genomics, which
uses it to decipher the human genome, and astronomy, which applies it to
map the heavens, gave rise to the term big data. According to one assess-
ment of the beneits for genetics research, “Improvements in the speed and
functionality of data collection, storage and analysis tools have lowered the
cost of sequencing from almost £2bn to around £2,000 today, and cut
the time it takes from over a decade to a week. While more incremental
gains would have taken place at any rate, such major strides have only
been made achievable by the cloud computing services offered by—among
others—Microsoft, Amazon and Teradata” (Burn-Murdoch 2012). The
Sloan Digital Sky Survey has used big data to analyze more information
for astronomy than all the astronomical research amassed before the
project began in the year 2000 (Mayer-Schönberger and Cukier 2013,
7). Physicists use big data to model quantum behavior and climatologists
use it to produce models of changing weather.
Big data is increasingly used to analyze, model, and forecast human
behavior (Boyd and Crawford 2012). Many of these uses are familiar,
although not often associated with big data. They include Google, Bing,