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Researchers Sharing Data Was Supposed to Change Science Forever. Did It? — Lily Hay Newman | Slate

“If goodwill and curiosity aren’t motivating researchers to work with open-source data on their own, there is still something that probably will: human limitation. ‘We have tiny little brains. We can’t understand the big stuff anymore,’ said Paul Cohen, a DARPA program manager in the Information and Innovation Office. ‘Machines will read the literature, machines will build complicated models, because frankly we can’t.’ When all you have to do is let your algorithms loose on a trove of publicly available data, there won’t be any reason not to pull in everything that’s out there. ” Read more

Capturing JFK’s Space-Age TWA Terminal Before It’s Revamped | Curbed

When Lori Walters heard that the future of the iconic TWA Flight Center at JFK airport was up in the air—given that the Eero Saarinen-designed landmark from 1962 was being eyed for redevelopment—she acted quickly. A historian and researcher at the University of Central Florida’s Institute for Simulation & Training, Walters and her team at ChronoPoints use three-dimensional terrestrial laser scanning to document historic buildings. The scanning process results in highly detailed digital models that can eventually be incorporated into educational programming about the structures. While the terminal, beloved during its prime and even to this day (even though it sits unused), had long been on Walters’s mind, she said news of the plan to convert it into a hotel caused her to bump it up to the top of her scanning queue.

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Who Owns the Digital Map of the World? — Laura Bliss | CityLab

“Last week, Mapbox, a map development company based in Washington, D.C., announced that it has raised some $52.55 million in Series B funding, a sum CEO Eric Gunderson called the biggest ever for a mapping company. Mapbox doesn’t exactly make maps, though. It builds towers of software that organize sets of geo-spatial data for other kinds of businesses—real estate, transportation, agriculture, government, smartphone apps.” Read more

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