Quotes from Rick Smolan

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.

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.

If we were to reengineer the DVR, we would cut America's energy bill by 5%.

How do you photograph data?

Photographers have always been each other's biggest fans.

What amazes me is that you can have 10 different photographers in the same room, and you see 10 different rooms. You realize how much of it is the person's perspective rather than the situation itself.

If you travel 11 months a year - from one dangerous or isolated situation to the next - if you live in hotels, and every relationship with another human being is a two-week relationship, the only other people who have any idea what you're going through or how strung out you are are other photographers.

'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.

I love the physicality of books.

Programmers have been wandering out and shooting a shotgun into the night sky and hoping they hit something, and I end up paying $150 for channels full of nothing I want to watch.

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.

'America 24/7' will be a landmark series in documentary photography and the watershed event of the new digital photography age.

My dad was actually against me being a photographer. He thought it was a dead-end job and that you end up doing baby pictures and weddings.

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.

There's a company in Boston called Ginger IO that has a smartphone app that can predict, two days before you get depressed, that you're going to get depressed.

The world that our children living in is going to be completely different because of big data.

I'm not very good at science or math, even though I pretend. And I'm not very good at teaching. I'm not very patient.

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.

Every time there's a new tool, whether it's Internet or cell phones or anything else, all these things can be used for good or evil. Technology is neutral; it depends on how it's used.

You can't talk about big data without talking about things like privacy and ownership.

Some of the pictures in 'The Human Face of Big Data' will bring tears to your eyes; others are so surprising or memorable that you just have to show them to your friends and family.

Netflix and Amazon know when you stop and start a program, whether you wanted the whole thing, all of that.

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.