It powers your life - but not for free

It was Saturday night, and Coy Bailey, a Sunday School teacher from Huntsville, Ala., had a dilemma. A friend was offering a free ticket to a concert by country singer Jason Isbell, but the lesson on Noah’s Ark that Bailey and another friend were teaching the next morning wasn’t finished.

Bring the work along, the friend with the ticket suggested. And so Bailey, a 28-year-old gas company employee, grabbed his iPhone.

To and from the concert and in spurts during it, Bailey remotely shared an evolving lesson plan with his co-instructor. He accessed Bible-related sites – including the interactive GloBible – to mine for facts and verses. The other teacher did the same.

“Through the music and crowd I continued to watch text magically appear on my phone or disappear,” Bailey says. Though “slightly distracted” during the show, they “shared some more bullet points and questions, added more scriptures” until they were satisfied.

Welcome to your everyday world of “Big Data,” the infinite sea of facts, products, books, maps, conversations, references, opinions, trends, videos, advertisements, surveys – all of the sense and nonsense that is literally at your fingertips, 24-7, every day from now on. Eric Schmidt, Google’s executive chairman, estimates that humans now create in two days the same amount of data that it took from the dawn of civilization until 2003 to create.

Micro-bursts of technological innovation over the past decade have created a supernova of new data and a virtually limitless capacity to create and store it, shaping everyday lives across the planet. What may be most fascinating, experts agree, is that this change has come so quietly and seamlessly.

“An extraordinary knowledge revolution (is) sweeping, almost invisibly, through business, academia, government, health care and everyday life,” says Rick Smolan, co-creator of a new book, The Human Face of Big Data.

Think cloud computing. Or niche health care. Or even sites like Facebook and Twitter that further shrink the nearly 7-billion-people planet. All arrived because of increasingly sophisticated, and inexpensive, computer-and-sensing technologies, along with scientific breakthroughs like the Human Genome Project.

Lotto-Belisol stars Jürgen Roelandts and Jurgen Van Den Broeck are both looking forward to getting the 2013 season started, as they attend the team’s first real training camp of the winter in Mojacar, southern Spain. The two riders will be aiming at very different targets in the season, with the former targeting the Classics and the latter the Tour de France, but both have unfinished business from 2012; again, for different reasons.

“A training camp is important for different reasons, explained Roelandts. “First of all there is the climate, which differs day and night with the weather in Belgium. Apart from that we train here in group, which is always very motivating.

“The trainings are balanced perfectly, in function of the start of the season. And you are living on a perfect cycling rhythm. Every year I look forward to the training camp in December. I find this one the most fun, because everyone is here,  you get to see everyone again after a pretty long time. I will ride the Tour Down Under, so I won’t go to the training camp in January.”

Roelandts appearance in the Santos Tour Down Under this January ended his 2012 spring campaign, as he crashed in the opening stage. A fractured cervical vertebra meant that he was unable to race until the Tour of Belgium in May; a strong late-season saw him win the Circuit Franco-Belge in late September, but he crashed again in Binche-Tournai-Binche a few days later and ended the season with a broken collarbone.

“Of course the Flemish classics will be my first goal,” he explained. “I call it my playground, and I had to miss it past season, which really hurt. Lars Bak was the second of our leaders who was injured, so I guess we will be stronger at the start in 2013.”

Lotto-Belisol has seen very little activity in the transfer market this winter, with only Iranian Mahdi Sohrabi and a late-departing Gianni Meersman leaving the team, and Dirk Bellemakers a last minute revival. This continuity in the Belgian squad should serve the Belgian team well, thinks Van Den Broeck.

“We are here for the second year in a row; this location is perfect, there isn’t a lot of traffic on our training route, which is important when you are here with such a big group,” he said. “The atmosphere is relaxed, which differs from during the season and this is the ideal opportunity to enlarge the team spirit. There hasn’t changed much to the team, but everyone is again very motivated and stronger than a year ago. And the most important: we already know each other very well.”

Van Den Broeck’s 2012 season was his best to date, as he matched the fourth place in the Tour de France that he had taken in 2010 [after the disqualification of Alberto Contador - ed]. While he will be aiming for success everywhere - largely to prevent Lotto-Belisol facing WorldTour uncertainty at the end of next season as it has this - Belgium expects, and he will once again be setting his sights on the Tour podium.

“The focus will indeed be on the Tour, but every race is important. Each time I’ll start, I will be motivated to set a result as good as possible. You can win points everywhere.