The dark side of an operations researcher. Or how operations research can be a funny subject. Wanna join me?.
Trough La Pastilla Roja I know about another cloud-based file-storage system: Clever-Safe.
This one though has a slightly different business model, since the later has been articullated as a FLOSS project backed up by a commercial arm, wether the former keeps the software propietary and has arranged it as a social tool.
Both, however, seem to rely on the same mathematical foundation.
That’s me! As an economist I had the technical and mathematical knowledge to model, as an amateur programmer I could run these models. However, I always wanted to enroll in Computer Science to professionalise my expertise; now is the time!.
I’m starting this week!!!
Voilà!, new company developes new technology that improves cloud storage; that’s Wuala. I knew from The Economist.
These guys have been more than three years constructing their architecture which consists of… your spare bandwith and disk space. By means of brand new technology based on mathematical polinomial analysis, your files are stored all over the social storing network minimising the redundancy (yes, there’s no whole file stored in a single computer neither a single computer storing a whole file, always taking into account the probability of a computer being offline). So that, hail to private cloud computing.
And I find funny (but clever) their business model: "Need more storage? No problem. Get the storage plan that fits your needs. Our technology allows us to offer extra storage at extremely competitive rates." (extracted from Wuala’s web, the underlined is ours). Sure it is!, but don’t miss their R&D costs during all this three years plus the extraordinary profit they deserve due to the clever breakthrough.
Cheers!!!
That’s how I felt when I went to order our little, modest, cheap wall plate:
Misunderstood because the guy wouldn’t understand why just the name and the professional bodies involved in the business (economists & industrial psychologists).
Misunderstood because the guy wouldn’t understand why I just used other application rather than the usually pirated one; I used GIMP.
Misunderstood because the guy wouldn’t understand why I just used a non-DIN format; I liked the Golden Ratio.
Do you understand me?.
It should be happening soon. From Social Science Statistics Blog I get this information about a project aiming to give access to social science research data through virtual data archives (which they call "dataverses"). This meta-repository comes from Harvard University, and IMHO it is a great idea; not just will give access to data before it was only available to very few researchers, or getting it was almost impossible to amateur researchers (like me), but will increase the visibility of the "owners" of the data since the system establishes a quote-like system.
This is the next step to the simple data repositories some academic journals were putting in place from years ago in order to allow for the reproducibility and falsability of the empirical papers they have been publishing, and the broad network of Observatories being created all over the place for generating and distributing data related to the foci of the organisation.
Other concerns that I have not taken a look at yet are about the licensing of the data, Data Protection Act-related mattters, ways of amend errors in the data…
Anyway, another dimension added to the multiverse.
