Scaling Social Science with Hadoop

Abstract “The methods of social science are dear in time and money and getting dearer every day.” — George C. Homans, Social Behavior: Its Elementary Forms, 1974……When Homans — one of my favorite 20th century social scientists — wrote the above, one of the reasons the data needed to do social science was expensive was [...]

Posted in Golder, S. | Tagged , , |

The Pathologies of Big Data

Abstract Scale up your datasets enough and all your apps will come undone. What are the typical problems and where do the bottlenecks generally surface? Comments An account of issues inherent to big data from an engineering perspective. Informed of constraints in computer hardware and search procedures, the author makes some back-of-the-envelope calculations with simple [...]

Posted in Jacobs, A. | Tagged , |