The New York Times on eScience:
“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 …
“In computing circles, Dr. Gray’s crusade was described as, ‘It’s the data, stupid.’ It was a point of view that caused him to break ranks with the supercomputing nobility, who for decades focused on building machines that calculated at picosecond intervals …
“’The advent of inexpensive high-bandwidth sensors is transforming every field from data-poor to data-rich,’ Edward Lazowska, a computer scientist and director of the University of Washington eScience Institute, said in an e-mail message. The resulting transformation is occurring in the social sciences, too.
“’As recently as five years ago,’ Dr. Lazowska said, ‘if you were a social scientist interested in how social groups form, evolve and dissipate, you would hire 30 college freshmen for $10 an hour and interview them in a focus group.’
“’Today,’ he added, ‘you have real-time access to the social structuring and restructuring of 100 million Facebook users.’”
Read the complete article here.