New Year tidbits

Wishing all of us a happy, prosperous, data-filled 2010.

• Unfortunately behind paywall: Nature says (rightly) that it's not quite as simple as "throw the data out there." Combining datasets carelessly may magnify faults in the original, eliminate crucial explanatory variables, or otherwise make a big hash of things.
• In which economics and computer science walk hand-in-hand. This isn't precisely data-driven science, but it's in the same neighborhood.
• "The biomedical sciences have moved on in the past quarter-century." Methods change; so do raw materials and communicative techniques. Money quote: "So I told m'colleague to explain to her author that unless she deposits her genome sequences, the last three years of her professional life will ultimately have been wasted." Hear, hear!
• Why we can't use the same open licensing approach for databases as we do for content and software. Jordan Hatcher tells it like it pretty much is.
• Sneak preview for future library-science posts: Anatomy of a Catalog Record.
• The key to astronomy has often been serendipity. That, or data availability? Read the article and see if you aren't struck by how often "serendipity" involves finding something novel in someone else's data.

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