Free e-book "The Fourth Paradigm"

Some of you might be interested in "The Fourth Paradigm", which you can either download for free or purchase (the free version is here). From the Foreword:

This book is about a new, fourth paradigm for science based on data intensive computing. In such scientific research, we are at a stage of development that is analogous to when the printing press was invented. Printing took a thousand years to develop and evolve into the many forms it takes today. Using computers to gain understanding from data created and stored in our electronic data stores will likely take decades—or less. The contributing authors in this volume have done an extraordinary job of helping to refine an understanding of this new paradigm from a variety of disciplinary perspectives.

In many instances, science is lagging behind the commercial world in the ability to infer meaning from data and take action based on that meaning. However, commerce is comparatively simple: things that can be described by a few numbers or a name are manufactured and then bought and sold. Scientific disciplines cannot easily be encapsulated in a few understandable numbers and names, and most scientific data does not have a high enough economic value to fuel more rapid development of scientific discovery.