This scary picture is taken from Theo Priestley's post in "Business Intelligence". As a follow-up to his previous post about the two recent acquisitions in event processing, he talks about the focus in this world on speed. While speed can provide relative advantage it can also be a double edge sword, if it comes on the expense of accuracy, as the recent Twitter hoax indicates.
When talking about the the four Vs of big data - one of them is velocity, and the other is veracity - which is defined as "data in doubt". Indeed processing uncertain, inexact or inaccurate events or data is a major part of what big data is all about -- while there are some works in this area (for example: see my post from last year), it is still the less investigated part of the four Vs.
Priestley is right -- doing things fast and inaccurate can incur big damage, doing things slow and accurate can also incur big damage. The wisdom is to balance and minimize the risk. Resolving the uncertainty issue is the key.
