Words matter. These are the best Rick Smolan Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
A lot of people don’t want to know, but I’d like to know if I have a 10 percent or a 90 percent chance of developing Alzheimer’s some day. If I know I’m likely to develop it, I’m certainly going to start looking around right now to find if there is something that I can do to offset it.
Photographers have always been each other’s biggest fans.
‘Data exhaust’ is probably my least favorite phrase in the big data world ’cause it sounds like something you’re trying to get rid of or something noxious that comes out of the back of your car.
As individuals, we have very little say about how our data is being used. I’m not worried about the privacy implications of it so much. But it seems to me that, as an individual, if I’m the one generating the data, I should have some kind of say in how it’s going to be used.
Some people think that Facebook is fantastic; other people are very worried about it.
The ability to collect, analyze, triangulate and visualize vast amounts of data in real time is something the human race has never had before. This new set of tools, often referred by the lofty term ‘Big Data,’ has begun to emerge as a new approach to addressing some of the biggest challenges facing our planet.
How do you photograph a gadget in a new, and not boring, way? You have to get away from people sitting in front of a computer. You have to get a look at the digital signature.
The hard thing about the book world is that you never know whether 10 people or a million people will find it interesting.
The ‘America at Home’ project was aimed at being the most extensive record of American home life ever attempted, and we were amazed at how many people were willing to participate as photographers or to welcome the photographers into their homes.
I wonder if 50 years from now we’ll look back, and maybe Julian Assange will be the hero and J. Edgar Hoover will be the enemy of the state.
If you ever plan to run for office, if you’re a teenager, remember everything you do, every tweet, every Facebook posting, every picture you put on Instagram will be there forever for journalists and politicians – for your competition to dig up.
How do you photograph data?
My company, Against All Odds Productions, has done print on demand; we were the first to do a book with a CD-ROM in the early 1990s. We do custom covers. It’s always fun to do something new.
I’m not a computer person at all. I only know how to turn them on. I’m not a programmer. I couldn’t program my way out of a paper bag.
The goal of ‘Data Detectives’ is to spark the imagination of students around the globe by making them think about new technologies that will impact humanity in ways similar to language and art.
I was painfully shy when I was a kid. I always thought when most people were born, part of the toolkit was teaching you how to relate to other people – and it was just left out of my toolkit.
I find Facebook absolutely fascinating because I don’t think there’s ever been any one source that had so much information about each of us – who we talk to, who our friends are, what books we read, what we’re buying, what movies we saw, what our travel is.
I’m an optimist.
I was voted least likely to manage a business when I was at Dickinson College.
Sergey Brin has said to me, like, 10 times now, ‘Why do you bother doing books? Why don’t you just put all this stuff on the Internet?’ It’s because 10 years from now, my book will still be sitting on someone’s coffee table or in a waiting room.
I love the physicality of books.
The people who are thinking most about big data right now are corporations and governments.
