Data as an Illusion – the art of human big data

2D9057E6-485C-4FA7-B81B-FEC5A16658AEJust before my birthday I had the great privilege of joining a line up of 12 fantastic speakers for TEDx Hull 2015. It was quite an experience standing on that red carpet, and great fun listening to the other speakers too. My talk is up on the TEDx site, and you can also watch it via YouTube – there is even a bit about the UK national debt in there…

“Every day we are bombarded with a sea of data, of facts, of numbers, of graphics and infographics about us, and about the world in which we live. How are our brains wired to process it all? Is it rewiring us? Or is data really just one great big illusion?”

Benjamin Ellis 2It is a condensed version of a longer talk about the psychology of human big data, and the challenges of collecting, processing and making intelligent decisions using it, and understanding data in the bigger context of how we communicate as humans (if you’d like to hear more about that, ask me about speaking at your event).

As big data becomes a more and more dominate force in our daily lives, we need to get smarter about our, often complicated, relationship with it. It isn’t always as it seems…

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