375981 external_news 1423561251 1475893432 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.

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