Friday we reviewed several videos about Big Data and talked about what it is, how it keeps growing, and how it is being dealt with by companies and individual users.
Three things I learned...
1. Target had become so good at predicting future purchases that they were able to effectively know when a woman was pregnant before they may have known themselves, based simply on the purchase of certian minerals or lotions.
2. Similarly, Google was able to identify a flu outbreak before the CDC, based on many searches coming from specific locations that involved flu symptoms.
3. Big Data has become to large to the point that companies that are using this data to their advantage actually have to ignore a very large portion of the data. Internet traffic has been projected to hit 4.8 Zettabytes of traffic in the near future, meaning there will be astronomical amounts of data to sift through in order to find patterns or other interesting data that a company could want.
Update on my projects...
I've continued reading into Chapters 3 & 4 in "Exploring Python" as well as continued forward in "Learn Python The Hard Way." I've reached exercise 32 in LPTHW and it dealt with using for loops, previous lessons involved else-if statements which I'm using in my short term project.
This data has been useful for learning in my Long Term project, but I have also been finding new problems to overcome with the project. In order to make the map that will show the frequency people are listening to certain musicians manageable, at least at first, I will have to break the countries (the US to start) into regions rather than city by city. This will involve taking tweets that provide location data and then based upon where they were tweeted from, group them into greater areas, such as say, southwest Michigan, the greater chicago area, or northern California. On top of that, If I want to actually acquire a diverse amount of musicians and regions, I will have to find other social media sites that are used by countries other than the US, as not every country frequently uses Twitter as their main outlet for networking.