Is Big Data at a tipping point? : Data Evolution Stuart Kauffman, in one of his books about complexity, discusses tipping points in networks — what he calls a phase transitions — by way of buttons. Suppose you’re sitting on a floor strewn with 400 buttons, and you begin tying them together with pieces of string at random. At first, you have just pairs of buttons. Then, you have clusters of threes, which in turn get tied into ever larger clumps. The question is: How long until picking any button off the floor pulls them all off together, in one connected mass?

Is Big Data at a tipping point? : Data Evolution

Stuart Kauffman, in one of his books about complexity, discusses tipping points in networks — what he calls a phase transitions — by way of buttons. Suppose you’re sitting on a floor strewn with 400 buttons, and you begin tying them together with pieces of string at random. At first, you have just pairs of buttons. Then, you have clusters of threes, which in turn get tied into ever larger clumps. The question is: How long until picking any button off the floor pulls them all off together, in one connected mass?