It contains almost 190,000 accounts. At the rate of one per minute, eight hours a day, it would take over a year to reflect upon these.
the 1991 U. S. Budget
The more data we have, the more likely we are to drown in it.
Information networks straddle the world. Nothing remains concealed. But the sheer volume of information dissolves the information. We are unable to take it all in.
All of the books in the world contain no more information than is broadcast as video in a single large American city in a single year. Not all bits have equal value.
There's a mountain of information about us. I mean there's so much. Anyway, I'm not an intelligence person. But I just look at it and it's a mountain of data.
If 300 million people were to offer up the details of their private lives, you would need to hire another 300 million people just to keep up.
There were 5 Exabytes of information created between the dawn of civilization through 2003, but that much information is now created every 2 days.
A worldwide web of electronic connections now moves data at ever-increasing speed and volume along what we call the information superhighway.
The number of queries in a large dataset is exponential, and it's growing exponentially. No matter how fast you make your system, you're never going to be able to get all that information.
We really are living in an age of information overload. Google estimates that there are 300 exabytes (300 followed by 18 zeros) of human-made information in the world today. Only four years ago there were just 30 exabytes. We've created more information in the past few years than in all of human history before us.
The point is there is more information now then you can pass along comfortably in an oral tradition, say a strictly speaking culture. That is a problem.
I'm going to say something rather controversial. Big data, as people understand it today, is just a bigger version of small data. Fundamentally, what we're doing with data has not changed; there's just more of it.
The velocity and volume on the Web are so great that nothing is forgotten and nothing is remembered.
The trouble with facts is that there are so many of them.
The human genome contains so much data that, it has been calculated, it would fill 43 volumes of Webster's International Dictionary.
Every two days now we create as much information as we did from the dawn of civilization up until 2003.
Ironically, the more intensive and far-reaching a historian's research, the greater the difficulty of citation. As the mountain of material grows, so does the possibility of error.
You could spend every waking moment online and still only experience one-trillionth of what's out there. I find that a little overwhelming.
The amount of information, the amount of incoming that any administration has to deal with today and respond to much more rapidly than ever before, that makes it different.
