Mining the Internet's 'Big Data' to Predict the Future

The Internet, social media and billions of cell phones are producing what scientists call "big data," information in such huge quantities that it might be useful for predicting political crises, economic instability and disease pandemics. Yesterday's New York Times reported on science fiction being made real, as scientist try to "mine" the resources of the Internet and social media. Political scientist Norman Nie is the founder and CEO of Revolution Analytics, looks at the possible upsides and downsides.