Reading Response – The Digitization of Just About Everything

The author illustrates digitization through Waze, a mobile GPS application that provides users the fastest way to a destination depending on the time, traffic, and other variables. We are situated in the moment where nearly all of the “offline” data are becoming digitalized – and these raw data are floating around the medium we know of as “the internet”. Some are being efficiently utilized, such cases shown through Waze where it uses the sensor data of its users’ mobile devices on top of general map information and GPS data. However, I would say that most of other raw data are still waiting for their turn to be polished into a proper use – which leads to new terminologies like Big Data.

As the author describes as “data explosion”, I agree with his claim on how statisticians will be one of the sexy jobs. To put it simply, we have tons of increasing number of ingredients but we do not have enough people to refine those ingredients to make something new – and this is where the hype of data science comes in. A lot of the innovations are hidden under these sets of data and once we can analyze these septillions of data, maybe we can answer many questions about behavioral sciences as well as automation of complex human tasks.