"The term Big Data is becoming the buzz word du jour in IT these days popping up everywhere, but with good reason – more and more data is being collected, curated and analysed today, than ever before ... it is all about the information you can extract from that data – and there are some fascinating use cases starting to emerge. A study ... found that Twitter was as accurate as official sources in tracking the cholera epidemic in Haiti ... The big difference between Twitter as a predictor of this epidemic and the official sources is that Twitter was 2 weeks faster at predicting it." (Quoted from article)