As, as we applaud Nate Silver for his work, and tip our hats to Hal Varian's foresight, we also need to seize this opportunity to promote the coolness of math, and its STEM partners: science, technology and engineering.

In a recent HBR blog post, Thomas C. Redman proclaims it is time to Get Responsibility for Data Out of IT. I respectfully disagree. Here's why...

Crucial insight: "Organizations that capitalize on big data stand apart [because] they pay attention to data flows as opposed to data stocks." -- MIT Sloan Review

"Data-driven decisions tend to be better decisions. Leaders will either embrace this fact or be replaced by others who do.", warn McAfee and Brynjolfsson. They identify 5 management challenges that leaders must overcome to adopt data-driven management.

A study of Twitter activity related to the 11th season of American Idol demonstrates the potential of social data to predict societal events, such as election outcomes.

Like most, summer brings out my weekend sports warrior. Thing is, I'm not that talented. My golf outings would be better described as a watersport. My high school tennis prowess is long gone. And I have no foot-eye coordination. But, there is hope for me, via sensors.

Perhaps the big problem of big data isn't analyzing our massive data stockpiles. Rather, the problem is in our data collection techniques. The RET (real-time experience tracking) technique offers a new way of looking at a long-standing challenge, customer behavior data collection.

Big data ushers in a new era of visibility, for good and evil. But, visibility without timely, intended action, isn't all that big. Observations on the Pew Internet Big Data 2020 report, in the context of continuous change.

Right now, the technology industry is coalescing at the super analytics end of the data-to-value spectrum. However, out in the enterprise application development, information management and enterprise architecture trenches, much of the data-to-value focus is earlier, and the problems are more fundamental, such as how to satisfy information consumers, without degrading core business processing, in an anytime, anywhere, any device environment.

"A large percentage of stored data serves no useful purpose because management has not specified how it will be used: who will make what decisions or provide what services with what data." -- MIT Sloan