Abstract
What sparks a flashmob? What starts the emergence of a self-organized social movement, political change, technological breakthrough, and other chain-reactions leading to the rise or collapse of a new milieu? Ideas, movements, and products are sparked by a highly evolved sense-making mechanism that has emerged over the past decade to make sense of big data—copious volumes of online documents, email, tweets, and probes collected via the Internet. This data has to be reduced by analyzing its wave-like and probabilistic behavior. In a highly connected interdependent world, ordinary probability is replaced by conditional or Bayesian probability, which in turn leads to Levy flights and long-tailed events widely ranging from making sense of big Internet data to finding and killing Osama bin Laden. Thus, the 21st century is an era of massive data processing unheard of just a decade ago. This transformation leads to an unanswered question, “Is the human race on the precipice of making an intellectual leap of profound significance because of this massive collection effort?”
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Notes
- 1.
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Bell (2011).
- 3.
- 4.
2.25 GW-hr is enough to power a city with 200,000 homes.
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John Gantz, IDC. www.emc.com
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In 2012, Twitter’s firehose, alone, hosted 340 million tweets per day.
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21 petabytes is 2.1 × 1016 bytes.
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Sense-making is the process of converting the experiences of many people into meaning.
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Clifford (2012).
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http://analytics.topsy.com/ was purchased by Apple Inc.
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Influence, momentum, and peak are relative terms defined by Topsy. Influence relates the power to influence purchasing decisions; momentum is roughly a measure of inertia (rising or falling); peak is the point of maximum influence.
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Epistemology studies the nature and scope of knowledge.
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Wesolowski et al. (2012).
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Menczer (2012).
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Bellhouse (2004).
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Posteriori means “after” and priori means “before”.
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Proposition: A “fact” proposed for acceptance as “truth”.
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Gross (2012).
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Crowdsourcing means outsourcing tasks to a group of anonymous people.
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Lewis, T.G. (2014). Sparks. In: Book of Extremes. Copernicus, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-06926-5_3
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