The mirage of large numbers

The first thing one (should) learn about statistics is "all that data is not information." That's the very first thing I tell my class each semester. This message is doubly resonant in this age of "Big Data". *** I was reading a post on Dell at Felix Salmon's blog, a post written by Ryan McCarthy or Ben Walsh. It cited BusinessWeek's Roben Farzad: "When it comes to putting a price on Dell, [he] points out one wild card: the company’s 3,449 patents (with another 1,660 pending)." This is not the first time I read about the potential value of the...