This is the short edition of Morales.

First broadcast on the BBC World Service.

Thank you for downloading from the BBC.

The details of our complete range of podcasts and our terms of use

go to BBCWorldService.com slash podcasts.

Hello and welcome to Morales on the BBC World Service.

I'm Tim Halford, all of it.

Add all that information together and it's called big data.

It is immensely valuable to a lot of people for good and possibly for ill.

Now back to health and the real gold rush in this as in so many other areas

is all about big data more and more.

One area where big data is about to make quite a big difference.

A lot of people are buzzing with excitement about the promise of what they're calling big data.

Big data itself is a vague term.

It sometimes refers to the vast data sets produced by scientific instruments

such as radio telescopes or the large Hadron collider.

But another meaning of big data, the one which interests us for the next few minutes,

is the digital information we're constantly producing as a byproduct of searching online,

tweeting, posting to Facebook, paying by credit card or wandering around with a mobile phone,

constantly revealing our location.

It looks like computers processing huge data sets are going to give us all the answers

that social scientists, marketers and spies could possibly want.

...