The word data has been losing its status as a plural noun steadily. The last place I remember seeing a determined attempt to stop this descent was in the textbooks from Ullman, Widom and Molina at Stanford University. A fragment in Who's afraid of Google?, which appeared in the September 1st-7th issue of The Economist (the dead trees version of which came thanks to VKG's subscription), however, seems to indicate that the battle is still on:
Google's business model [...] assumes that people will entrust it with ever more information about their lives, to be stored in the company's "cloud" of remote computers. These data begin with the logs of a user's searches (in effect, a record of his interests) and his responses to advertisements. Often they extend to the user's e-mail, calendar, contacts, documents, spreadsheets, photos and videos. They could soon include even the user's medical records and precise location (determined from his mobile phone).
No comments:
Post a Comment