The UK big data project playing Moneyball to build smarter cities

The Future Cities Catapult aims to improve policymaking - be it for better flood defences, banking or medicine

When London's Soho was hit by a cholera outbreak in the summer of 1854 it took a maverick to pinpoint the cause and come up with a way to contain it.

Doctor John Snow rejected the established belief that cholera was airborne and he set out to disprove the miasma - or "bad air" - theory by plotting cases on a map. The physician's findings proved his theory that the disease was in fact being spread through contaminated water. He traced the outbreak back to a water pump.

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