ABSTRACT
As a budding occupational sociologist, the author eagerly dug his shovel into a groundbreaking article by Joseph Eaton in the very first issue of the American journal Social Work entitled “Whence and whither social work: A sociological analysis”. In it, Eaton likened social work to a “rambling historic building, redecorated sporadically by many sub-tenants, with a new management bent on modernizing it to serve a more integrated purpose as fast as it can get around to do the job”. The heroic computer science graduate student at the University of Hong Kong, and apparently on a methodological mission, attended every one of the author's many clinical data mining (CDM) guest lectures and CDM workshops over a period of years, only to raise her hand after each one to denounce him for calling it CDM, because it was not “real” data mining. Data mining, she contended, involved much more complex data analytic strategies, algorithms and massive, computer-generated databases.
