Some weeks before his disappearance at sea almost three years ago, Microsoft researcher Jim Gray delivered a speech in which he argued that computing was transforming scientific practice into a “fourth paradigm” era incarnated as a vast flood of observational data that threatens to inundate researchers. Gray contended that the only way to deal with this deluge is to build a new generation of scientific computing tools for the purpose of managing, visualizing, and analyzing the data surge. In the wake of this revelation, Gray’s colleagues at Microsoft Research have published a collection of essays written by researchers at Microsoft and elsewhere that, among other things, document a new generation of scientific tools that increasingly meld sensor and computer technology and are able to capture vast volumes of data. “The advent of inexpensive high-bandwidth sensors is transforming every field from data-poor to data-rich,” says University of Washington eScience Institute director Edward Lazowska. Meanwhile, Jeannette M. Wing with the U.S. National Science Foundation’s Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate, says the fourth paradigm shift is supporting a growing perspective of computer science known as computational thinking, in which scientists are being pressured to share all scientific data as a result of the data boom and the plunging cost of computing and communications. This concept dovetails with the emergent trend of cloud computing, which is espoused by companies convinced that the Internet-driven shift is toward centralized computing facilities. Science Commons director John Wilbanks writes in his chapter that “data is not sweeping away the old reality. Data is simply placing a set of burdens on the methods and the social habits we use to deal with and communicate our empiricism and our theory.”
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