The assignment is quite specific about what to do! There are two main ways for machines accessing data on the internet. The first is APIs, which Amazon is a particularly good example of the power of. They are designed to help computers, such as search engines, locate and extract data. Other websites are more human-oriented, and may specifically not want to encourage google and others from stealing their information. Examples include shopping sites, travel sites, etc. For these, aggregators and travel search engines use 'page-scrapers' to extract information from the pure HTML or flash formatting and process it accordingly.

This set also talks about the bizarre units of astronomers. They make a kind of sense in their own way. Do not resist.

Big-data is one of the fastest growing economic sectors. Companies such as Palantir, Google, and others have become extremely good at databasing and extracting monetizable information. You see these people at careers fairs, they are the ones handing out heaps of free stuff ==⇒ good jobs therein!