In viewing our universe by way of models, we can build a hypothesis as a picture, visual data organizing itself more easily than word-based modeling (either as sound or text), and visualization lends itself to extremely large models.
It means that as carriers try to profit from consumer usage, they may discourage customers using iPhone and Android powered phones from increasing video, picture and Web data downloads in the exponential fashion that Apple and Google investors are accustomed to seeing.
It's more helpful for big-picture developments than for data on individual companies.
That's the picture from newly released data from IMS Health (nyse: RX - news - people ), a pharmaceutical information and consulting company that independently keeps track of how often medicines are prescribed and how much revenue they are generating.
"While the broad picture emerging from the data is that Africa's economies have been expanding robustly and that poverty is coming down, the aggregate hides a great deal of diversity in performance, even among Africa's faster growers, " said Shanta Devarajan, the World Bank's chief economist for Africa.
BBC: World Bank: Africa's economic growth to outpace average
The human mind uses abstractions, which allow us to complete the picture, even if the data is incomplete.
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In the big picture, meanwhile, the data also seems to suggest the longer term bull market trend may be topping as well.
Several deans say the data paint a bleaker picture of their schools than justified.
Stepping back from all the data, the big picture still shows a high rate of unemployment for young people, even after the recession.
Where should I go to get data to complete the picture?
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Newly released prescription data reveals a mixed picture and the drugmaker has now begun a free promotion for a 14-day starter dose to entice the obese.
"Then we use some very elegant maths which was developed in computational imaging to turn that data into a 2D picture, " he told the Science podcast.
Compelling evidence from the Kauffman Foundation indicates the economic health of the U.S. can be gauged by the activity of the startup community, and recent data paints a bleak picture.
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So how does data figure into the picture?
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DeBakey VA Medical Center, Houston, Texas and assistant professor of medicine at Baylor College of Medicine who has wrote several studies on diagnostic error, says that while the Hopkins study confirms previous research, malpractice data provide a limited picture.
The better October flash PMI and September data paint a consistent picture of a likely further pickup in economic activity on the back of more accommodative monetary conditions, increasing infrastructure investment, recovering property market activity in second and third tier level cities and improving external demand, mainly in Asia and emerging markets.
On both occasions, when I dug deeper into this conflicting data, an entirely different picture of the truth emerged.
In spite of some gloomy data recently, the economic picture remains quite mixed.
WhatsApp is a cross-platform smartphone app that lets you send text and picture messages for free, using your data allowance.
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Memory has been built into the rankings by taking a weighted average of 2009 (50%), 2008 (30%)and 2007 (20%) data to provide a rounded picture of the school.
These data continue to paint a picture of world governments trying to control what gets posted on the internet, while companies like Google continue to advocate for a much larger degree of freedom.
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High Resolution Management is the idea that the management processes and the design and execution of many different processes should change based on the far more detailed picture of business activity provided by big data.
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As some members of the Supreme Court recognized last year when they considered the use of only a single stream of data -- GPS location -- creating a life stream of data points paints a mosaic picture of a person's actions and habits.
Few of us have a clear picture of how technology should connect people, data and knowledge, and even fewer have demanded it.
Just one data series suggests that the credit picture is better now than it was at the outset of the last recession.
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The first data on September provide a mixed picture of business activity.
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Meanwhile, the data are complex, and the picture of the future depends on climate models which are not perfectly reliable predictors of the future.
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