From the Editors

Contexts editors Rashawn Ray and Fabio Rojas introduce the spring issue, focusing on various economic experiences.

From the Editors

Contexts editors Rashawn Ray and Fabio Rojas introduce the spring issue, which tells diverse stories of gender and sexuality.

Editorial Board, Advisors, and Acknowledgments

The Editorial Board for the 2016 spring issue, volume 2, issue 2 of USURJ. Advisors for USURJ. Acknowledgments to campus partners and contributors.

Coping with big: Does big data lead to ‘bigger’ innovation?

This Spring Issue will discuss about big data and multiple aspects of its usability and applicability. Many of us have seen blockbuster movies Back to the future (premiere in 1985), The Terminator (1984) or Minority report (2002). The unifying element of the above mentioned movies is that manuscripts are introducing a superior competitive advantage factor. The protagonists create an advantage by having either real-time data (sometimes from the future) or all relevant (big and historical) data with enormous computing capacity over competitors. A bit after first two of those movies premiered, NASA scientists Cox and Ellsworth (1997) published an article where term ‘big data’ appeared first time (Press, 2014). Intelligence needs to be topped up in a way to create advantage. Data has been there for a long time, in all forms and sizes. It is applied in almost single every business sector and it is getting faster in sense of usability. The data storage capacity has been exponentially increasing over time, but the usability of this wealth of data remains a critical issue.(...)