表面看起来,大数据似乎只有大企业能够用得上。当人们首次听说海量的信息被用于反恐、治愈癌症或预测埃博拉疫情时,我们的第一印象是这些大数据很昂贵,且耗时费力。但实际上并非如此。从人口统计到气象预报再到消费者的购物习惯等大量数据,现在都可以在网上免费找到,前提是你需要知道去哪里寻找。此外,随着利用这些数据的基本工具逐渐实现免费,且变得日益简单,任何人都将可以使用它们。在最基本情况下,任何人都可以使用谷歌(微博)的 On the face of it, big data seems to be available only to big business. When people first heard about massive amounts of information being used to fight terrorism, cure cancer or predict Ebola outbreaks, our first impression was that these big data were expensive and time-consuming. But in fact it is not. Large amounts of data, from demographics to weather forecasts to consumer shopping habits, can now be found online for free, provided you need to know where to look. In addition, as the basic tools that make use of these data are becoming free and easy to use, anyone will be able to use them. In the most basic case, anyone can use Google (microblogging)