Jessica Leber seems like a strong metric advocate. A good contact for
USMA officers to pursue.
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http://www.technologyreview.com/view/508526/will-big-data-get-too-big-for-the-metric-system-to-handle/
Jessica Leber
MIT Technology Review
December 10, 2012
Will Big Data Get too Big for the Metric System to Handle?
It.s dizzying to contemplate, but it might not be long before the volume
of digital data surpasses the current limit of measures.
In 1991, the General Conference on Weights and Measures met to add a few
prefixes to the metric system to deal with the very large and very small
scales of measurement that scientific advances required. The largest they
came up with is the .yotta,. a number that contains 24 zeroes. As in: the
diameter of the observable universe is estimated to be 880 .yottameters..
.Big data. sometimes feels like a buzzword, but it gets more concrete when
you imagine that soon the volume of digital data processed could surpass
this current upper bound, which only two decades ago was the limits of
scientists. imaginations.
That.s at least the prediction of Andrew McAfee, who is principal research
scientist at MIT.s Center for Digital Business and a prominent thinker
about business information technology trends (see .When Machines Do Your
Job.). At a conference I attended, and on his blog, McAfee chronicles the
.arms race. of organizations declaring first the era of the .terrabyte,.
then the .petabyte,. and most recently, Cisco.s call for the .zettabyte.
era, as measured by its forecast of annual global IP traffic in 2016.
.Yotta. comes next, and McAfee predicts the global measurement body will
be contemplating its successor by the time the decade is up. His favorite
contender for a new prefix? The .hella.. As a San Francisco resident, I
support the idea.
Jessica Leber Editor
Business Editor
91 stories
I.m MIT Technology Review.s business editor, working from our San
Francisco office. I.m interested in how new technologies enter and
rise in the marketplace, and in how they create new businesses and
affect established ones.
Before joining MIT Technology Review, I covered energy policy,
technology, and business for ClimateWire from our fine nation.s
capital. I also did the crazy startup thing, serving as an editor
at Change.org as it grew rapidly in a short 18 months.
Before going into journalism, I was an environmental geologist
working on contaminated waste sites in New York City. That.s when I
realized that I.d rather report and write about the fumes than
breathe them in.
