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There is now a CONTENT FREEZE for Mercury while we switch to a new platform. It began on Friday, March 10 at 6pm and will end on Wednesday, March 15 at noon. No new content can be created during this time, but all material in the system as of the beginning of the freeze will be migrated to the new platform, including users and groups. Functionally the new site is identical to the old one. webteam@gatech.edu
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In the 1960s, RAND Corporation researcher Harold Sackman advanced some of the earliest arguments for real-time data in the public interest: “It is commonplace to point out that computers make it possible to collect, organize, and process vast amounts of data quickly and reliably in real time experiments that were beyond the ken of the precomputer era.” Sackman’s assessment of computing in the late 1960s was meant to argue that computation would allow—and had already begun facilitating—large-scale, data-based experimentation with social programs. His was a pragmatist’s view. The combination of scientific method and open real-time control systems, or what we would now call Big Data and Cloud Computing, could be productively brought to bear on for benefit of the public good.
