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Lessig on Digital Barbarism
Lawrence Lessig has posted a review of David Halperin's recent book, Digital Barbarism.
Halperin, who authored the (in)famous New York Times article calling for perpetual copyright, has now compiled his ideas into a book. Lessig offers a much-needed critique, including citing misconceptions about Creative Commons (Halperin conflates it not only with "freeware" with software... more
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Big Data (Review)
Francis Deblauwe · Saratoga, CA (United States) · Oct 27th, 2008 6:09 pm · 10 votes · no comments made
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| Close-up of a display on the 1st floor of SK Telecom headquarters in Seoul, by JasonJT |
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In its September 4, 2008 issue, the scientific journal Nature published a special section entitled Big Data. It is freely available online (in an enhanced version) for the time-being — no guarantees for the future though. It addresses the many facets of the digital data bonanza taking place in the sciences. Let me briefly review some of these interesting articles.
Community cleverness required
Not only is an ever-increasing avalanche of information, much of it under the form of digital data, a fact of life for scientists, it also entails the responsibility to organise, preserve and disseminate it to the community at large (see also my article OA Academia in Repose). In Big Data: The next Google, a number of people share their two cents on what the next ubiquitous, impossible-to-live-without technology will be in 2018, still incipient right now just like Google was a decade ago. Joi Ito (Infoseek Japan and Creative Commons) talks about "...connecting people and ideas together with a Google-like simplicity — making Wikipedia, Facebook and all sorts of other things completely seamless." For this, we need "... software that automatically gives attribution for the various parts of content we access and share. People want to share content with each other, but the infrastructure and legal framework makes it more difficult than it should be. Legal friction is holding back a lot of creativity." David Goldston (ex-US House Committee on Science) reports on the controversies in Congress regarding which, how much and by whom scientific data on the condition of the environment should be gathered and analysed. Of course, who should have the access to this data is also a matter of contention.
Welcome to the petacenter
Digeratus par excellence Cory Doctorow (Boing Boing and more) checks up on "... the relentless march from kilo to mega to giga to tera to peta to exa to zetta to yotta." He discovers that "it is putting endless strain on the people and machines that store the exponentially growing wealth of data ..." The next article discusses how some forward-looking biologists are using wiki-type web pages to deal with all the new data. An example is WikiPathways which uses open-source MediaWiki software. Next, Clifford Lynch (Coalition for Networked Information) comments that "[t]he time is right for scientists to take stock of the institutionalized data services that are available or under development, to understand how these institutions are governed and financed, and to make choices about the best strategies for their disciplines." After all, the precious data needs to be stored for the long haul.
Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn
The Harvard computers looks at the discoveries and legacy of the remarkable women of Harvard's Observatory. They were called "computers," a name given to "human processors" since the early 18th century. They were paid "... to do the painstakingly repetitive work of measuring the brightness, position and colours of ... stars." Do we recognise an early form of "crowd-sourcing" here? I can't help but be reminded of one of my favourite movies, Desk Set (1957) with Katherine Hepburn in the role of the head reference librarian of a news organisation, threatened to be replaced by two brand-new, flickering "electronic brains," i.e. computers, which their inventor Spencer Tracy comes to fine-tune. Hilarity ensues and of course Hepburn shows herself the equal of man and machine.
There's also a podcast to go along with the Big Data feature.
All in all, Nature offers a fascinating and timely closer look at the way "big data" is changing the sciences.
tags: international science-research local-context-global-commons research data
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