Sublime

many of our adult behaviors and interests, even those that we consider fundamental to who we are, can be explained by the arbitrary facts of when we were born and what was going on in certain key years while we were young.

Four hundred million mobile devices capture usage statistics; by

Page and Brin added a clever twist by weighting the importance of each link by the number of pages that in turn linked to each of the pages that

We might call this—taking a simple method and utilizing Big Data to perform an analysis several hundred times in a short period of time—science at scale. Yes, the social and behavioral sciences are most definitely going to scale.

In fact, we are all so busy judging our own bodies that there is little energy left over to judge other people’s.

The second lesson is that, when trying to make predictions, you needn’t worry too much about why your models work.

“What we find again and again and again is that the more a particular condition is on people’s minds and the more it’s a current topic of discussion, the closer the reporting gets to 100 percent.”

Email?” Spoiler alert: the conclusion was an emphatic Yes.

cheerleaders for big data have made three exciting claims, each one reflected in the success of Google Flu Trends. First, that data analysis produces uncannily accurate results. Second, that every single data point can be captured—the “N = All” claim we met in the previous chapter—making old statistical sampling techniques obsolete (what that means