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Big data. Everyone has a slightly different definition of this new buzzword.

Rick Smolan, former photographer for National Geographic and TIME Magazine and the author of The Human Face of Big Data, defined the term for us like this:

“When you take several different sources for information and you overlap them and you look for patterns in the data… It’s a little bit like watching the planet develop a nervous system. …All of us walking around with our smartphones, we’ve become human sensors. So we’re all feeding data back into this growing mass of databases, and the ability to collect data, process it, visualize it and react to it in real time is something the human race has never had before.”