{"id":4003,"date":"2013-11-19T10:38:17","date_gmt":"2013-11-19T17:38:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=4003"},"modified":"2013-11-19T11:18:26","modified_gmt":"2013-11-19T18:18:26","slug":"big-data-essential-even-when-useless","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=4003","title":{"rendered":"Big Data: essential even when useless"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.roughtype.com\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/11\/emma-is.jpg?ssl=1\"><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-4027\" alt=\"emma is\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.roughtype.com\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/11\/emma-is.jpg?resize=500%2C141&#038;ssl=1\" width=\"500\" height=\"141\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.roughtype.com\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/11\/emma-is.jpg?w=500&amp;ssl=1 500w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.roughtype.com\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/11\/emma-is.jpg?resize=300%2C84&amp;ssl=1 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Rebecca Greenfield <a href=\"http:\/\/www.fastcompany.com\/3021601\/innovation-agents\/tracked-since-birth-the-pros-and-cons-of-extreme-baby-monitoring?\">reports<\/a> on the arrival of &#8220;extreme baby monitoring.&#8221; For a few hundred bucks, new parents will soon be able to outfit their putative bundles of joy with a variety of sensors\u2014ankle monitors, &#8220;smart diapers,&#8221; even a networked onesie that sends respiration, temperature, and other data feeds to smartphones\u2014that enable &#8220;a big-data approach to parenting.&#8221; Comments Greenfield, &#8220;By gathering information on your kid&#8217;s poop, sleep, and eating schedules, the idea goes, you can engineer a happier, healthier baby.&#8221; This does seem like an advance on the technology strategy I deployed in baby-rearing, which involved a pacifier and a martini.*<\/p>\n<p>As a case in point, Greenfield tells the story of Yasmin Lucero, who meticulously tracked a variety of data on her baby Elle. Elle wasn&#8217;t a great sleeper\u2014she cried a lot in her crib\u2014and Yasmin hoped that Big Baby Data would unlock the reasons underlying the problem and point to a solution: &#8220;She wanted answers: Did she put Elle to bed too early? Too late? Give her too many naps? Parsing data, she thought, would help her figure it out.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>So, after months of grueling data collection and graphing, what did Big Data reveal? Absolutely nothing. &#8220;Per the data, Elle was just fussy.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>A waste of time? Not at all: &#8220;The results suggested Yasmin couldn\u2019t engineer better naps, as she\u2019d hoped. Just knowing that, however, made her feel better. &#8216;If you come to the conclusion that you have no control, then it\u2019s okay to relax and just do whatever is convenient for you at the moment,&#8217; she explained.&#8221;\u00a0Let this be an inspiration to Big Data marketers. Large-scale data analysis may be a waste of time and money, but that doesn&#8217;t make it any less necessary. After all, how will you know that Big Data has nothing to tell you if you don&#8217;t invest in it?<\/p>\n<p>Come to think of it, as a marketing strategy this would also work quite well for Ouija Boards and the I Ching.<\/p>\n<p><em>*Important legal notice: The baby gets the pacifier, the parent gets the martini.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Rebecca Greenfield reports on the arrival of &#8220;extreme baby monitoring.&#8221; For a few hundred bucks, new parents will soon be able to outfit their putative bundles of joy with a variety of sensors\u2014ankle monitors, &#8220;smart diapers,&#8221; even a networked onesie that sends respiration, temperature, and other data feeds to smartphones\u2014that enable &#8220;a big-data approach to [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4003","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4003","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4003"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4003\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4032,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4003\/revisions\/4032"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4003"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4003"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4003"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}