The Economist explains: The backlash against big data. Open data: A new goldmine. Kenneth Cukier on Big Data: The data revolution. Data, data everywhere. WHEN the Sloan Digital Sky Survey started work in 2000, its telescope in New Mexico collected more data in its first few weeks than had been amassed in the entire history of astronomy.
Now, a decade later, its archive contains a whopping 140 terabytes of information. A successor, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, due to come on stream in Chile in 2016, will acquire that quantity of data every five days. Surveillance: Secrets, lies and America’s spies.