Once you start playing in the world of data, it’s hard to turn off the part of your brain that examines how various independent streams of data can be mixed, matched, sliced and diced to glean meaning. The world is rife with data to be mined, and our magnificent brains handle it with such speed and efficiency that we barely notice we’re doing it. But, slow yourself for a moment. Take a look around you…witness everything you are learning from what is going on in your vicinity at that very moment. We cue on the subtlest of things…almost totally subconsciously.

The following article takes a look at how a city street is a treasure trove of data and data processing. Watch as the author breaks down just what is happening from an objective point of view. Very interesting read.

We can’t see how the street is immersed in a twitching, pulsing cloud of data. This is over and above the well-established electromagnetic radiation, crackles of static, radio waves conveying radio and television broadcasts in digital and analogue forms, police voice traffic. This is a new kind of data, collective and individual, aggregated and discrete, open and closed, constantly logging impossibly detailed patterns of behaviour. The behaviour of the street.

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