Stepping back from "Big data" and into "Mesoscale data science"

Hot topics like "big data", "machine learning", "data science" are now dominating in the scientific community. In the past 10 years alone, data availability has increased exponentially (and not even in a squared, or cubed sort of way… we are talking on the order of 1010 if not more). Exabytes (1018 or one QUINTILLION bytes!!?) of information are being passed, stored, saved and analyzed on a monthly (perhaps weekly?) basis. This includes credit card transactions (in November 2015, there were approximately 242 million credit card transactions in the United Kingdom alone;(source: BBA)), web searches (Just think about how many times you use Google in the run of a day, and interpolate that out to the 40% of the world who have access to the internet), and any time a user (you) clicks on a link you found on Facebook. When you combine this with the countless other data coming in, it is nearly overwhelming to think about.