"…The people who are likely to produce breakthroughs--the really smart smarty-pants in the math departments of the world’s universities--don’t have access to large bodies of real-world data. And without real-world data, they can come up with as many hypotheses and new types of math as they like, but they’ll never really know if it actually works in the real world. It’s like trying to learn how to serve without tennis balls. You can swing as much as you like, but until you actually hit a real-live ball, you can never be sure if your swing would actually place a ball in the serve box.

For their part, the people who have real-world data--the Amazons and eBays of the world--can’t share it with the researchers for reasons of customer privacy. “Even if we anonymize it, we’re handcuffed because we can’t give out data that can be reasonably be used to reconstruct who someone really is,” the Chief Scientist, Darren Vengroff, tells Fast Company.

Vengroff, however, has come up with a novel solution: He’s created a “black box” of sorts with real-world data that researchers can use to run experiments on. Researchers won’t be able to look at the data, but they will be able to dump their algorithms in and have the box spit out results, which the researchers can then use to refine their hypotheses.…"

"DocumentCloud is an index of primary source documents and a tool for annotating, organizing and publishing them on the web.

Documents are contributed by journalists, researchers and archivists. If your organization does document-driven investigations, we’d love to have you join us. Using the DocumentCloud workspace, you can upload documents, share them with your team, and conduct structured searches and analyses based on extracted entities — the people, places, and organizations mentioned in the text. As a contributor, you will soon be able to download a lightweight document viewer to embed documents right on your own website."

Amazon Web Services Blog: Introducing Amazon RDS - The Amazon Relational Database Service tip @techmeme http://tr.im/DbKj

Blog Post > Confessions of a Google Wave Fanboy > http://bit.ly/3vw868

libcloud is a standard client library for many popular cloud providers, written in python

census data available as an EBS store

What makes a cloud a cloud is the fact that the physical resources involved are operated to deliver abstracted IT resources on-demand, at scale, and (almost always) in a multi-tenant environment. It is how you use the technologies involved.

"...We welcome others to run wave servers and become wave providers, for themselves or as services for their users, and to "federate" waves, that is, to share waves with each other and with Google Wave. In this way users from different wave providers can communicate and collaborate using shared waves. We are introducing the Google Wave Federation Protocol for federating waves between wave providers on the Internet."

One of these memes that I have been noticing more and more in the last week is that of the two-faceted cloud; the concept that cloud computing is beginning to address two different market needs, that of large scale web applications (the so-called "Web 2.0" market), and that of traditional data center computing (the so-called "Enterprise" market). As I'll try to explain, this is a "reasonably big idea" (or perhaps "reasonably big observation" is a more accurate portrayal).