CURMUDGUCATION: How Scary Can Big Data Get

CURMUDGUCATION: How Scary Can Big Data Get:

How Scary Can Big Data Get

 There are plenty of people talking repeatedly and forcefully about resisting the infection of public education by the many tentacle-like limbs of Big Data. We know that reformsters have been talking for decades about the prospect of a cradle-to-career pipeline in which all manner of data can be collected and crunched and used to determine how best society can use the human beings that the data represents.


But if you want to see a real-world, already-happening demonstration of what this kind of data looks like, check out this article from the Washington Post that ran last month. "The new way police are surveilling you: Calculating your threat score."

Think Minority Report. Except instead of a predictive criminal system based on three psychics floating in a small pool, it's a giant pool of all the data from everywhere.

The article centers on Fresno's Real Time Crime Center, a high tech hub that allows police to access a gazillion data points available on the on-line world-- including feeds from 800 school and traffic cameras. There's also a library of license plate scans. The city is also networked with microphones that can figure out the location of gunshots. And of course there's a program to monitor social CURMUDGUCATION: How Scary Can Big Data Get: