Teamwork improves with time: America's National Transportation Safety Board found that 73% of the incidents in its civil-aviation database occurred on a crew's first day of flying together.

Historically, scientists have objected to sharing for many reasons: it is a lot of work; until recently, good databases did not exist; grant funders were not pushing for sharing; it has been difficult to agree on standards for formatting data; and there is no agreed way to assign credit for data.

This settlement hands Google the power - but only with the agreement of individual rights holders?–?to exploit its database of out-of-print books.

Google's further exploitation of its database

Algorithms that were right 95% of the time when they were dealing with a 13,000-image database, for example, were accurate about 70% of the time when confronted with 1 million images.

give the right computer a massive database of faces, and it can process what it sees—then recognize a face it's told to find—with remarkable speed and precision.

The idea was to test the machines on a database that included up to 1 million different images of nearly 700, 000 different people—and not just a large database featuring a relatively small number of different faces, more consistent with what's been used

To begin to figure out how computers are struggling, researchers at the University of Washington created a massive database of faces—they call it MegaFace—and tested a variety of facial-recognition algorithms as they scaled up in complexity.