And when you meet the people and hear the stories, it really does tell this story in a different way than just watching the news accounts.

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While the idea that 2013 will be a year of art sounds fanciful, if Big Data is to become the Next Big Thing, it will only be as useful as the stories it can tell, and what better way to tell a story than through images?

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Pixar was working on its first feature film, Toy Story, which pioneered a whole new way to tell compelling stories.

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Rep. MATHESON: Well, there are various stories about that, and it was a little before my time, but the story that I usually tell is that, you know, we had a term for a long time in politics called the Yellow Dog Democrat, which is that people would say I'll vote for a Democrat even if it's a yellow dog.

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