Data Health – clean, clear information

The big revolution in the Big Data science is still going to come, e.g. how we are going to interpret all the information that is currently collected and the increasing amount of data waiting in the not so distant future; and furthermore how we are going to determine relevance or insignificance of the data lying in front of us. Big data currently redefines our education level of statistics and data modelling and herein comprised is a big ethical challenge for every participant, not only to deliver their results but to enable the reader to properly understand the data. The bombardment with information is not going to solve any doubt, as every statistician knows. You have first to ask the right questions.

The essayist and medical scientist Ben Goldacre points out nicely how important good data are going to be in the future. Like clean and clear water provides a necessary basis for health so are data necessary being screened and filtered through systematic reviews by a wide range of readers in order to provide healthy information.

Her is Ben Goldacres more subtle and elaborate formulation:
"In the nineteenth century, as the public health doctor Muir Gray has said, we made great advances through the provision of clean, clear water; in the twenty-first century we will make the same advances through clean, clear information. Systematic reviews are one of the great ideas of modern thought. They should be celebrated." (Ben Goldacre, Bad science: quacks, hacks, and big pharma flacks, London, 2008, chap. 6)