Data, data everywhere.

      This report was published at Economist.com at Feb. 25th 2010. This is a summary and the title is above.
     
    The world contains an unimaginably amount of digital information which is getting ever vaster more rapidly. This makes it possible to do many things that previously could not be done. Managed well, the data can be used to unlock new sources of economic value, provide fresh insights into science and hold governments to account.
    But they are creating a host of new problems. Despite the abundance of tools to capture, process and share all this information, it already exceeds the available storage space. Moreover, ensuring data security and protecting privacy is becoming harder as the information multiplies and is shared ever more widely around the world.
    The effect is being felt everywhere, from business to science, from government to arts. The business of information management, helping organisations to make sense of their proliferating data, is growing by leaps and bounds. This industry is stimated to be worth more than $100 billion and growing at almost 10% a year.
    Chief information officers(CIO) have become somewhat more prominent in the executive suite, and a new kind of professional has emerged, the data scientist, who combines the skills of software programmer, statistician and storyteller to extract the nuggets of gold hidden under mountains of data. Hal Varian, Google`s chief economist explain,¨ data are widely available, what is scarce is the ability to extract wisdom from them.¨
     There are many reasons for the information explosion. The most obvious one is technology, 2 billion people use the internet. Moreover, between 1990 and 2005 more than 1 billion people worldwide entered the middle class. As they get richer they become more literate, which fuels information. The results are showing up in politics, economics and the law as well.¨ All these data are turning the social science upside down¨, explain Sinan Aral, Professor at NYU,¨ researches are now able to understand human behaviour at the population level rather than the individual level.¨
     The amount of information increases tenfold every five years. As the world is becoming increasingly digital, aggregating data is likely to bring huge benefits.
     ¨The data-centred economy is just nascent,¨ admits Mr. Mundie of Microsoft.¨ You can see the outlines of it, but the technical, infrastructural and even business-model implications are not well understood right now.¨