19th
“Imagine a world in which mashups aren’t just songs and videos, but terabytes of data, where the data input path specified in a Hadoop configuration file isn’t a local directory containing one’s own data, but rather a URI pointing to some stranger’s (or company’s or government’s) publicly-available archives.
There’s a long way to go. Business practices, technologies and tools, and social science training each have years of advances to make before such a reality can become possible.”
…
“One of the ideas that didn’t make its way into the final version is that even though the tools and data are becoming more widely available to laypeople, asking good social science questions — and answering them correctly — is still hard. It’s comparatively easy to ask the wrong question, use the wrong data, draw the wrong inference, and so on, epecially if the wrongness is subtle. As an example, I think the OkCupid blog is interesting, but it’s not social science.”
