arXiv subjects

Eamon Duede

Publications and source records attributed to Eamon Duede.

21 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2016

A Secure Data Enclave and Analytics Platform for Social Scientists

Data-driven research is increasingly ubiquitous and data itself is a defining asset for researchers, particularly in the computational social sciences and humanities. Entire careers and research communities are built around valuable, proprietary or sensitive datasets. However, many existing computation resources fail to support secure and cost-effective storage of data while also enabling secure and flexible analysis of the data. To address these needs we present CLOUD KOTTA, a cloud-based architecture for the secure management and analysis of social science data. CLOUD KOTTA leverages reliable, secure, and scalable cloud resources to deliver capabilities to users, and removes the need for users to manage complicated infrastructure. CLOUD KOTTA implements automated, cost-aware models for efficiently provisioning tiered storage and automatically scaled compute resources. CLOUD KOTTA has been used in production for several months and currently manages approximately 10TB of data and has been used to process more than 5TB of data with over 75,000 CPU hours. It has been used for a broad variety of text analysis workflows, matrix factorization, and various machine learning algorithms, and more broadly, it supports fast, secure and cost-effective research.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2016

Convergence of Economic Growth and the Great Recession as Seen From a Celestial Observatory

Macroeconomic theories of growth and wealth distribution have an outsized influence on national and international social and economic policies. Yet, due to a relative lack of reliable, system wide data, many such theories remain, at best, unvalidated and, at worst, misleading. In this paper, we introduce a novel economic observatory and framework enabling high resolution comparisons and assessments of the distributional impact of economic development through the remote sensing of planet earth's surface. Striking visual and empirical validation is observed for a broad, global macroeconomic sigma-convergence in the period immediately following the end of the Cold War. What is more, we observe strong empirical evidence that the mechanisms driving sigma-convergence failed immediately after the financial crisis and the start of the Great Recession. Nevertheless, analysis of both cross-country and cross-state samples indicates that, globally, disproportionately high growth levels and excessively high decay levels have become rarer over time. We also see that urban areas, especially concentrated within short distances of major capital cities were more likely than rural or suburban areas to see relatively high growth in the aftermath of the financial crisis. Observed changes in growth polarity can be attributed plausibly to post-crisis government intervention and subsidy policies introduced around the world. Overall, the data and techniques we present here make economic evidence for the rise of China, the decline of U.S. manufacturing, the euro crisis, the Arab Spring, and various, recent, Middle East conflicts visually evident for the first time.

q-fin.GN↗

arXiv2016

Amplifying the Impact of Open Access: Wikipedia and the Diffusion of Science

With the rise of Wikipedia as a first-stop source for scientific knowledge, it is important to compare its representation of that knowledge to that of the academic literature. Here we identify the 250 most heavily used journals in each of 26 research fields (4,721 journals, 19.4M articles in total) indexed by the Scopus database, and test whether topic, academic status, and accessibility make articles from these journals more or less likely to be referenced on Wikipedia. We find that a journal's academic status (impact factor) and accessibility (open access policy) both strongly increase the probability of it being referenced on Wikipedia. Controlling for field and impact factor, the odds that an open access journal is referenced on the English Wikipedia are 47% higher compared to paywall journals. One of the implications of this study is that a major consequence of open access policies is to significantly amplify the diffusion of science, through an intermediary like Wikipedia, to a broad audience.

cs.DL↗