Tag: big data

Society Software-Technology

Data Empire: The Power of Information to Organize, Control & Dominate

By Scott J. Pearson | by Scott J. Pearson

This book exhibits such promise on a hyper-relevant topic, but falls short of its ideals. It offers a fascinating history of data and its use by civilization to organize itself. It points out where it has veered to dominate people (e.g., slavery, colonization, Roman control) and how humans have objected to its control. Today, we live in an age where generating data is inescapable with modern life. Data’s scale and reach are unprecedented. It concludes…

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Software-Technology

Data-Oriented Programming: Reduce Software Complexity

By Scott J. Pearson | by Scott J. Pearson

Professionally, I write code for web applications in PHP for biomedical use. Thus, data play a central role in my professional life. At first, I tried to design my programs around object-orientated (OO) principles, but soon found that data played a strong role that OO actually restrained. Years later, I found how React divided itself between immutable data, state information, and code. Though I no longer code in React, I find this division still helpful…

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Software-Technology

Exploring Splunk: Search Processing Language (SPL) Primer & Cookbook

By Scott J. Pearson | by Scott J. Pearson

Splunk is familiar to those in the IT world who need to search the massive amounts of data that a computer, particularly a web server, generates. The software – available in a downloadable, free format from their website – epitomizes the definition of Big Data. The old way of searching logs involved opening up text files manually, searching for certain words, and compiling results in a spreadsheet. To replace it, the Splunk team created Search…

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