Andrew Pavlo, Erik Paulson, Alexander Rasin, Daniel Abadi, David DeWitt, Sam Madden, and Michael Stonebraker:

There is currently considerable enthusiasm around the MapReduce (MR) paradigm for large-scale data analysis. Although the basic control flow of this framework has existed in parallel SQL database management systems (DBMS) for over 20 years, some have called MR a dramatically new computing model. In this paper, we describe and compare both paradigms. Furthermore, we evaluate both kinds of systems in terms of performance and development complexity. To this end, we define a benchmark consisting of a collection of tasks that we have run on an open source version of MR as well as on two parallel DBMSs. For each task, we measure each system's performance for various degrees of parallelism on a cluster of 100 nodes. Our results reveal some interesting trade-offs. Although the process to load data into and tune the execution of parallel DBMSs took much longer than the MR system, the observed performance of these DBMSs was strikingly better. We speculate about the causes of the dramatic performance difference and consider implementation concepts that future systems should take from both kinds of architectures.

Previously, from Stonebraker:

Database management systems are 20 years out of date and should be completely rewritten to reflect modern use of computers.

Recently:

This is a guest post by Russell Jurney, a technologist and serial entrepreneur. His new startup, Cloud Stenography, will launch later this year. The article is an extension of a simple question on Twitter asking the importance of Map Reduce.

A Comparison of Approaches to Large-Scale Data Analysis

File under General Memetics Feasibility:

Sure you could promote or demote an individual or issue, but fine tuned manipulation would just be too difficult. Well, I’ve been proved wrong.

From the archive, a white paper:

There will also be times when it is thought to be necessary, in the context of an integrated information campaign, to pass false or erroneous information through the media ... in support of military deception activities. ... In these cases, extra care must be taken to ensure plausible deniability and non-attribution, as well as employing a well-thought-out deception operation that minimizes the risks of exposure.

Pirates!

Precision Hacking

Peggy Chi et al:

Although modern ease of access to technology enables many of us to obsessively document our lives, much of the captured digital content is often disregarded and forgotten on storage devices, with no concerns of cost or decay.

Can we design technology that helps people better appreciate captured memories? What would people do if they only had one more chance to relive past memories?

In this paper, we present a prototype design, PY-ROM, a matchstick-like video recording and storage device that burns itself away after being used. This encourages designers to consider lifecycles and human-computer relationships by integrating physical properties into digitally augmenting everyday objects.

From last year's best-of:

So many things these days are made to look at later. Why not just have the experience and remember it?

Burn Your Memory Away

After the latest 3-D movie fad runs its course, perhaps we'll move on to tactile blockbusters.

When subjects watched a stationary stripe on a computer screen after a machine stroked their fingertips, the motion of the stroking created the illusion that the stripe was moving. The discovery demonstrates for the first time a two-way crosstalk between touch and vision, challenging long-held notions of how the brain organizes the senses.

The discovery means that, contrary to the classical view, touch can shape what we see.

Alan Kay:

If the children are being instructed in the pink plane, can we teach them to think in the blue plane and live in a pink-plane society?

From the archive:

The rich and powerful humiliate themselves by bowing down and stroking the coat of the false leader, i.e. by 'currying Fauvel'.

What You See Is What You Feel

Nicholas Carr:

Three truths:

1. Google is a middleman made of software. It's a very, very large middleman made of software. Think of what Goliath or the Cyclops or Godzilla would look like if they were made of software. That's Google.

2. The middleman acts in the middleman's interest.

3. The broader the span of the middleman's control over the exchanges that take place in a market, the greater the middleman's power and the lesser the power of the suppliers.

For much of the first decade of the Web's existence, we were told that the Web, by efficiently connecting buyer and seller, or provider and user, would destroy middlemen. Middlemen were friction, and the Web was a friction-removing machine.

We were misinformed.

Joshua Porter:

The game is attention. And the attention game is becoming dominated by two players: Twitter and Facebook. That two-pronged sword will eventually be Google’s undoing.

Scott Karp:

The greatest irony of the web content economy is that Google by itself doesn’t have a clue what content is good or bad.

Google In The Middle

Elizabeth Currid and Sarah Williams:

Social scientists have long sought to understand the cultural production system. Such research elucidates the importance of the social milieu to cultural industries. We capture aggregate patterns of the social milieu and the geographical form it takes. We use a unique data set, Getty Images, and geo-coded over 6000 events and 300,000 photographic images taken in Los Angeles and New York City, and conducted GIS and spatial statistics to analyze macro geographical patterns.

1) Social milieus have nonrandom spatial clustering.
2) These clustering tendencies may reinforce themselves.
3) Event enclaves demonstrate homogeneous spatial patterns across all cultural industries.
4) The recursive nature of place-branding may partially explain resulting cultural hubs.
5) The media also clusters.

These results have unintended consequences for our understanding of clustering more generally and place-branding. The use of Getty data provides a new spatial dimension through which to understand cultural industries and city geographic patterns.

Richard Florida:

Globalization is not flattening the world; in fact, place is increasingly relevant to the global economy and our individual lives. Where we live determines the jobs and careers we have access to, the people we meet, and the "mating markets" in which we participate. And everything we think we know about cities and their economic roles is up for grabs.

From Karen Abbott's "Sin in the Second City":

A young man walking up the stairs to a bordello encounters his father coming down the stairs. "Dad!" he says. "What're you doing here?"

"For two dollars," his father replies, "why bother your mother?"

The Geography of Buzz

James Surowiecki:

It’s true that the uncertainty of recessions creates an opportunity for serious profits, and the historical record is full of companies that made successful gambles in hard times.

Then again, the record is also full of forgotten companies that gambled and failed.

Malcolm Gladwell:

Mysteries require judgments and the assessment of uncertainty, and the hard part is not that we have too little information but that we have too much.

Marc C. Taylor:

The alternative to blind belief is not simply unbelief but a different kind of belief -- one that embraces uncertainty and enables us to respect others whom we do not understand. In a complex world, wisdom is knowing what we don't know so that we can keep the future open.

Robert McNamara:

Rationality will not save us.

Hanging Tough

Kristin Longley:

Property abandonment is getting so bad in Flint that some in government are talking about an extreme measure that was once unthinkable -- shutting down portions of the city, officially abandoning them and cutting off police and fire service.

Temporary Mayor Michael Brown made the off-the-cuff suggestion Friday in response to a question at a Rotary Club of Flint luncheon about the thousands of empty houses in Flint.

Brown said that as more people abandon homes, eating away at the city's tax base and creating more blight, the city might need to examine "shutting down quadrants of the city where we (wouldn't) provide services."

He did not define what that could mean -- bulldozing abandoned areas, simply leaving the vacant homes to rot or some other idea entirely.

From the archive:

The “Gospel Temperance Railroad Map” is an example of an allegorical map. The upper line from Decisionville, the Great Celestial Route, is not without its trials, represented by such station stops as Bearingcross, Abandonment, and Long Suffering; but the final destination, The Celestial City, is clearly more desirable than its counterpart.

Peter Schiff:

Tens of millions of people unemployed, inflation spiraling out of control, the government instituting price controls that result in shortages and blackouts and long lines for things.

I think things are going to get very bad.

Brandi Hitt, reporting from Sacramento:

There are no rules and no regulations. Here, at Tent City, you are on your own.

In The Land Of Abandoned Neighborhoods

Dave Arneson, one of the co-creators of the Dungeons & Dragons fantasy game and a pioneer of role-playing entertainment, died after a two-year battle with cancer, his family said Thursday. He was 61.

From a year ago:

Gary Gygax, a pioneer of the imagination who transported a fantasy realm of wizards, goblins and elves onto millions of kitchen tables around the world through the game he helped create, Dungeons & Dragons, died Tuesday at his home in Lake Geneva, Wis. He was 69.

From the archive:

Thirty-one years after the invention of Dungeons & Dragons, the original role-playing game remains the most popular and financially successful brand in the adventure gaming industry.

Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition is going to change just about everything for the dice-rolling set.

I'm just, like, in his arms, all snug. I'm his first ever girlfriend and we've been together 18 months. My ideal night with him is playing Dungeons & Dragons on Xbox or painting Warhammer figurines.

Dave Arneson, Co-Creator of Dungeons and Dragons, Dies at 61

Tim Harford:

I do not regard my own confusion as an indictment of modern macroeconomics, but I am struck by the soul-searching that has gripped the profession in the face of the economic crisis. The worry is not so much that macroeconomists did not forecast the problem – bad forecasts are more a sign of a complex world than intellectual bankruptcy – but that macroeconomics seems unable to provide answers. Sometimes it cannot even ask the right questions.

Your daily dose of Simpsons:

Smithers: That's quite a nice model, sir.

Burns: Model?

Malcolm Gladwell:

Mysteries require judgments and the assessment of uncertainty, and the hard part is not that we have too little information but that we have too much.

Do Sweat The Big Stuff