Reviews

Critic Reviews

"Mayer-Schönberger and Cukier make interesting observations about data-crunching techniques and they also report that analysts have found substantial amounts of "lexical dark matter" (words in books but not in dictionaries)." - Ian Pindar,The Guardian

"Writing mostly for a business audience, the authors don't fully grapple with the implications of such an approach when it comes to, say, public administration and governance. Will ambitious structural reforms in public policy even be possible if we don't arrive at some basic causal explanation of why some parts of the system are broken in the first place?" - EvgenyMorozov, Wall Street Journal

"To their credit, Mr. Cukier and Mr. Mayer-Schönberger recognize the limitations of numbers. Though their book leaves the reader with a keen appreciation of the tools that big data can provide in helping us 'quantify and understand the world,' it also warns us about falling prey to the “dictatorship of data.'" - MichikoKakutani, New York Times

User Reviews

"'Big Data' was more up-to-date than prior works on the subject, but provided very little in explanation of the specifics of new uses. I was especially disappointed that it had failed to report on new applications in health care that would improve the quality and cost-effectiveness of care." - W. Brown

"If you have an interest in the mile-high view of what big data is and how it is being applied, this is an excellent book to satisfy that curiosity. " C. Ashbacher