Big brother already knows more than we think

Thoughts about how NZ might use this were also interesting - includes some work being done at Massey on soil measurement at field level that is predicting how much water and fertiliser might be required. On the early data there could be something like a 15% decrease in the amount of fertiliser that gets applied.

Apparently there are so few data scientists in training in NZ that a Telecom subsidiary is now sponsoring the PhD students at the only data science programme - all 6 of them! Predicting we need 2000 data scientists in the next 2 years but will have 12.

Because there is a shortage of data scientists and these people have a unique skill set there is a place you can go on line and set up your own questions/ challenges using big data

http://www.kaggle.com/competitions

Tapping mobile phones is the least useful use if big data it seems