Notes - To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World - page 229

cloud. This conference will be an attempt to explore how cloud computing could
be applied for library applications” ( Daily Pioneer 2013).
8. See http://microwork-dev.ucsd.edu/.
Chapter 5
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_data.
2. Walter Binney left the NSA in 2001 but stayed in contact with NSA employees.
He left once the agency started its warrantless wiretap program. Binney explains,
“They violated the Constitution setting it up. But they didn't care. They were going
to do it anyway, and they were going to crucify anyone who stood in the way. When
they started violating the Constitution, I couldn't stay” (Bamford 2012).
3. See, for example, Tilahun, Feuerverger, and Gervers 2012.
4. Not every expert and commentator agrees with the myth. In a 2013 address
to a conference session titled “Data Scientist: The Sexiest Job of the 21st Century,”
the chief technology oficer for President Obama's 2012 campaign argued that “data
scientist as a profession is largely a fad” (Parry 2013).
5. See www.reinhartandrogoff.com/related-research/growth-in-a-time-of
-debt-featured-in.
6. The sight of a data center tempts me to think about another popular Magritte
painting, this one of a pipe ( The Treachery of Images or Ceci n'est pas une pipe —This
is not a pipe). I would caption the image of the data center's dull banality Ceci n'est
pas un nuage —This is not a cloud.
7. Frankly, I feel blessed to have received a rich education in the humanities
well before the ield required the adjective “digital” for its legitimacy and perhaps
for its survival.
8. I can recall reading his work for the irst time as a university student in the
1960s and feeling the surge of possibility in knowing that by cultivating the mind
we would be participating in a global process of advancing the human race closer to
its cosmic destiny at the Omega Point.
9. It is only slightly ironic that Joni Mitchell is well known for singing about
clouds in the song “Both Sides, Now” and especially for its lyric “But clouds got in
my way.”
10. www.metmuseum.org/saraceno.