Very interesting, Kurt. Back when I was a paid journalist I did a story about a Utahn who is involved with Cern and the new collider -- he was working on a method to funnel the most important data out of the firehose of information that the collider will spew out once it gets going. It's a lot more complex than I made it sound, but I think it's something like the proposed fourth paradigm. -- Thanks, Joe (who never goes to bed when he should) --- On Tue, 12/15/09, Canopus56 <canopus56@yahoo.com> wrote: From: Canopus56 <canopus56@yahoo.com> Subject: [Utah-astronomy] OT: New fourth paradigm of science To: "Utah Astronomy List Serv" <utah-astronomy@mailman.xmission.com> Date: Tuesday, December 15, 2009, 10:35 PM Book review Jim Gray. 2009. The Fourth Paradigm: Data-Intensive Scientific Discovery. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/15/science/15books.html?th&emc=th "In a speech given just a few weeks before he was lost at sea off the California coast in January 2007, Jim Gray, a database software pioneer and a Microsoft researcher, sketched out an argument that computing was fundamentally transforming the practice of science. Dr. Gray called the shift a 'fourth paradigm.' The first three paradigms were experimental, theoretical and, more recently, computational science. He explained this paradigm as an evolving era in which an 'exaflood' of observational data was threatening to overwhelm scientists. The only way to cope with it, he argued, was a new generation of scientific computing tools to manage, visualize and analyze the data flood. In essence, computational power created computational science, which produced the overwhelming flow of data, which now requires a computing change. . . . . The essays also chronicle a new generation of scientific instruments that are increasingly part sensor, part computer, and which are capable of producing and capturing vast floods of data. For example, the Australian Square Kilometre Array of radio telescopes, CERN’s Large Hadron Collider and the Pan-Starrs array of telescopes are each capable of generating several petabytes of digital information each day . . . " Clear Skies - Kurt P.S. - An effect we see in astronomy with the Sloan DSS, the Galaxy Zoo Project and the JPL project to classify Mars Recon Orbitor images and BOINC. http://boinc.berkeley.edu/ _______________________________________________ Utah-Astronomy mailing list Utah-Astronomy@mailman.xmission.com http://mailman.xmission.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/utah-astronomy Visit the Photo Gallery: http://www.slas.us/gallery2/main.php Visit the Wiki: http://www.utahastronomy.com