Two smart people I read, who probably don’t know each other, and work in disparate fields, both have a post today about using a distributed collection of data and analysts to answer problems that we’re just now being able to address.

Here’s Jon Udell talking about distributed communities of climate scientists studying CO₂ fluctuations.

Here’s Steve Hsu talking about the quantitative finance firm Horton Point, and how they’re assembling teams of academics from diverse fields such as psychology and data mining, to come up with dynamic models of how markets work.