There is a lot of data, big data, available to make conclusions not possible before. Google makes a lot of big data available publicly. For instance by analyzing hundreds of millions of emails searching for the term ‘flu’ you could identify areas of flu outbreaks based on the heightened frequency of the word. This can be identified using data analytics tools. Excel for example can now process up to 100 million lines of data depending on your processing power.

In Tulsa, the mayor was able to identify the home county of the Trump Rally attendees based on GPS data from their cell phones. This data came from Google Mobility Data. I’m trying to put together the pieces, but I’m checking out Google Trends, Google Analytics, and R Analytics. I think R Analytics and/or Excel are the tools for working with big data.