Big Data Archives - QESP

New Jobs From Big Data

“The Community Colleges Australia New Work Mindset report is based on the analysis of 4.2 million job advertisements between 2012 and 2015.”
The above quote is from a report which may help to address some of the argument about what Commonwealth Budget 2017 means for community Vocational Education and Training (VET) providers. It identifies “7 new job clusters to help young people navigate the new work order”, with examples of early career occupations in each job cluster.

Why big data may be having a big effect on how our politics plays out

Big data is here – but just how widely is it being used?

The first week of parliament for the new year was a noisy one. Cory Bernardi’s decision to leave the Liberal Party has created a flurry of speculation about whether this is the “splitting” of the political right or an indication of the end of business-as-usual politics.

Language delivers fourfold speedups on big-data problems

Experts are presenting a new programming language, called Milk, that lets application developers manage memory more efficiently in programs that deal with scattered data points in large data sets.

Size doesn’t matter in Big Data, it’s what you ask of it that counts

Big Data is changing the way we do science today. Traditionally, data were collected manually by scientists making measurements, using microscopes or surveys. These data could be analysed by hand or using simple statistical software on a PC.

Big Data has changed all that. These days, tremendous volumes of information are being generated and collected through new technologies, be they large telescope arrays, DNA sequencers or Facebook.

Automating big-data analysis

Researchers aim to take the human element out of big-data analysis, with a new system that not only searches for patterns but designs the feature set, too. To test the first prototype of their system, they enrolled it in three data science competitions, in which it competed against human teams to find predictive patterns in unfamiliar data sets. Of the 906 teams participating in the three competitions, the researchers’ ‘Data Science Machine’ finished ahead of 615.

The Big Bad Data Debate

Some new research on Big Data, from different sources, sheds new light on issues raised in our previous article, The Big Data Debate: “N=All” or “Complete bollocks. Absolute nonsense.” A November 27, 2014 ScienceDaily article, Social media data contain pitfalls for understanding human behavior, notes that  “A growing number of academic researchers are mining social […]

Big Data – Management Project Pitfalls

The Australian Public Service Better Practice Guide to Big Data © Commonwealth of Australia 2014 (BPG) gives some good advice on big data management.  In last month’s QESP newsletter, I asked whether the government is following its own advice.  This month, we look at big data management practices, focussing primarily on the advice given in […]

Fakebook? Social Media and Big Data

“being authentic is very important for social media users. At the same time, users also admitted faking parts of their online image in order to conform to social norms and expectations.” The above quote is from a ScienceDaily, 14 August 2014 article titled People fake to look real on social media. The story is based […]

Big Data – Mixed Messages from Government

The Australian Public Service Better Practice Guide to Big Data © Commonwealth of Australia 2014 gives some good advice on big data management (more of that later),  but is the Government  following its own advice? Last year, the Government Chief Information Officer’s role was to focus on whole of government ICT policy, while the Chief […]

The Big Data Debate

“if we actually began relying on the claims made by big data surveillance in public health, we would come to some peculiar conclusions. Some of these conclusions may even pose serious public health harm.” This quote comes from a July 2, 2014 Science Daily article Finding real value in big data for public health, which […]