Bench Talk

Flying home from my internship in Washington D.C., I began to think about airplane crashes and what it would be like to be in a plane crash. I wondered what I would do if I got in a crash not far from D.C. and survived. The logical me would go to the nearest city and take a plane from there. It would be safer. My emotions, however, would make it difficult to get back on a plane. This goes to the core of human irrational thinking. We often are terrible at looking at the data and behaving logically, whether this be risk assessment or behavioral response. This is where big data comes into play. Big data allows us to gather enough data on specific tasks to make accurate evaluations on cause and effect. This enables us to weed out the outliers, to see the long term trends and therefore understand the cause and effect of one event in context of the whole picture.

Consider a conference that is simultaneously transmitted to audiences in three cities. When a presenter asks the audience a survey question, they can respond by simply raising their hands. The total vote is tallied across all three cities and displayed to the presenter and the audience in real time.