Thanks for this respectful, detailed, and analytical contribution. I agree that "Big Data" is a tendency that is worth talking about as if it is a new thing.

Thanks for this respectful, detailed, and analytical contribution. I agree that "Big Data" is a tendency that is worth talking about as if it is a new thing. There are edge cases that reside on the border between conventional moderate-n statistical analysis, and large-n "vacuum up lots of data and try to extract correlative information" approaches. Examples like the pothole-location collection and GFT are emblematic of something new, that's well beyond this fuzzy boundary. So it's not surprising that there are new issues. Some of the fixes may be old-fashioned, but some may not. We should also face the fact that the people doing this work often don't have any formal statistical training, so it's on the community to highlight the important pitfalls.