Bob Hawke believes he has the recipe to fix the nation: think big, get better candidates, abolish state governments and use "rational, unemotional thinking" to solve issues for the greater good.
The former prime minister – who won four elections and is considered one of the nation's most popular leaders – used what has become his regular address at Queensland's Woodford Folk Festival to once again push for a federation overhaul Bob Hawke: abolish state governments and think big to-fix the Nation
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Big data is big news but most of it is garbage
Big data is big news these days.
GARBAGE IN, GARBAGE OUT
When the gap between data creation and use becomes larger, it makes it more likely that data quality decreases. This means an organisation will have to employ a lot of effort cleaning old data if it wants to use it today.
According to the US Chief Data Scientist DJ Patil:
Data is super messy, and data cleanup will always be literally 80% of the work. In other words, data is the problem.
Earlier this year, a group of global thought leaders from the database research community outlined the grand challenges in getting value from big data.
The key message was the need to develop the capacity to “understand how the quality of that data affects the quality of the insight we derive from it”.
The golden principle of “garbage in, garbage out” is still true in the context of big data.
Without scientifically credible knowledge that provides the ability to efficiently evaluate the underlying quality characteristics of the data, there is a significant risk of organisations and governments accumulating large volumes of low value density data, or investing in low return-on-investment data products.
Moreover, the lack of knowledge on the underlying data (distributions, semantics and other nuances) could result in analytical traps, where the data analysis can lead to erroneous, and possibly dangerous, conclusions.
Data exploration is emerging as a promising approach to empower users with exploratory capabilities to investigate the quality of the data and gain awareness of data’s shortcomings in terms of their intended use, and do so before they invest in expensive data cleaning and curation tasks.
The search for enlightenment from the data deluge will consume the energy and investments of the data-driven society in the foreseeable future.
Whereas there is immense power in the scale of data, when left unattended will propel organisations into the abyss of dark data.
All this underscores the growing need for well-trained data scientists who have the ability to articulate a well-justified business, scientific or social purpose and align it with the technological efforts for data collection, storage, curation and analysis.
Professor
Data and Knowledge Engineering research group.
This article was originally published on The Conversation.