Via BBC – Tom Chatfield 5 June 2016 – “You may be familiar with the statistic that 90% of the world’s data was created in the last few years. It’s true. One of the first mentions of this particular formulation I can find dates back to May 2013, but the trend remains remarkably constant. Indeed, every two years for about the last three decades the amount of data in the world has increased by about 10 times – a rate that puts even Moore’s law of doubling processor power to shame…Here’s the problem with much of the big data currently being gathered and analysed. The moment you start looking backwards to seek the longer view, you have far too much of the recent stuff and far too little of the old. Short-sightedness is built into the structure, in the form of an overwhelming tendency to over-estimate short-term trends at the expense of history…”