Big volcano science: needs and perspectives

Big Data Science Needs Big Data Middleware

There has been a “Cambrian explosion” of big data systems proposed and evaluated in the last eight years, but relatively little understanding of how these systems or the ideas they represent compare and complement one another. In enterprise and science situations, “one size is unlikely to fit all”: we see analytics teams running multiple systems simultaneously. However, the highest level of abs...

Perspectives of Science in Iran

Perspectives of Science in Iran

Science and Culture: Terraforming a volcano, artfully.

From October 26 to November 12, 2010, Indonesia’s Mount Merapi blew its top in the volcano’s largest series of eruptions in decades. It spewed ash and lava rock thousands of meters into the air. Hundreds of thousands of villagers fled, abandoning their homes along with more than 1,000 ha of farm fields to the scalding ash, rock, and mud spilling down the slope (1, 2). The following July, space ...

Big science, little science.

In the USA, where I live and work, it is well known that I have little love for structural genomics—the attempt to determine the structures of most or all of the proteins in an organism by some combination of high-throughput X-ray crystallo graphy, nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy and homology modelling. My reasons are a matter of public record: structural genomics is based on an assumpt...