Slashdot Mirror
Scientific Data Disappears At Alarming Rate, 80% Lost In Two Decades
cold fjord writes "UPI reports, 'Eighty percent of scientific data are lost within two decades, disappearing into old email addresses and obsolete storage devices, a Canadian study (abstract, article paywalled) indicated. The finding comes from a study tracking the accessibility of scientific data over time, conducted at the University of British Columbia. Researchers attempted to collect original research data from a random set of 516 studies published between 1991 and 2011. While all data sets were available two years after publication, the odds of obtaining the underlying data dropped by 17 per cent per year after that, they reported. "Publicly funded science generates an extraordinary amount of data each year," UBC visiting scholar Tim Vines said. "Much of these data are unique to a time and place, and is thus irreplaceable, and many other data sets are expensive to regenerate.' — More at The Vancouver Sun and Smithsonian."
And in 20 years, these results too shall be lost.
thats okay, the nsa has a backup
Trying to ignore that a paper about the unavailability of scientific data is locked behind a paywall.
This is nothing new though, I do occasional conversion from ancient data formats, people need to pay better attention, imagine trying to read an 8" CP/M floppy today.
As libraries move to digital storage rather than the dead tree that's been fine for thousands of years they are inviting a catastrophe, possibly only one well aimed solar mass ejection from massive data loss.
So the institutions do not have any data lifecycle management for research data. Are we supposed to be surprised? Ensuring that data are not lost is a huge undertaking and cannot be left to the individual researcher. It may also require a change in the research culture at many institutions. As long as research is measured by the publications, that is where the resources go and where the focus will be.
Will this change? Probably not.
This is bang on. As a system administrator for a STEM department at a Canadian institution, my budget is 0 for data retention. Long term data retention is just not in the mindset of researchers.
... poorly collected unreliable data also vanishes at at least the same rate (hopefully faster). And assuming shoddy data disapears faster than good data, then the quality of available data should continually increase.
I'm a researcher and I don't have time or space to keep old data as I'm generating too much new data. We work hard to maximize the use of these data and analyses when we write and publish papers. If this was talking about the papers (or presentations), that were the product of the data, being lost at this rate it would be one thing, but the raw data isn't usually very useful to anyone without context or knowledge of subtle and poorly documented technicalities. This just seems like ammunition for the climate change deniers to bitch about. It's unreasonable to keep the old data indefinitely without a massive public repository that will be poorly indexed and organized.
I think it is ridiculous that Slashdot's keep posting articles that are behind paywalls. How the hell are we supposed to see them? Do you expect us to pay for subscriptions to services we'd only use once? you, OP, are out of your mind. articles such as this should be rejected as most users, if not all, can't even access the story. This site really has gone down hill in the last few years, over populated with clueless simpletons, frauds, so-called armchair IT experts and -obvious- subscription pushing trolls.
... wait what was it again ... its gone!
Whichever side of the "data is" vs. "data are" argument one falls on, I hope we can all agree that mixing both forms within the same sentence is definitely wrong.
> many other data sets are expensive to regenerate...
Or maybe impossible to regenerate (for certain values of impossible). I remember reading a classified technical report (dating from the 1940s) related to military life-jacket development, wherein the question arose as to whether a particular design would reliably turn an unconscious person face-up in the water. The experimental design used was to dress some servicemen (sailors, possibly, but I don't recall) in the prototype design, anaesthetise them and drop them in a large body of water, checking for face-down floaters to disprove the null hypothesis. Somehow, I don't think that those data are going to be regenerated any time soon. I hope to God not, anyway.
The Long Now Foundation has devised an interesting mechanism for storing important information which, although not optimal for machine readability, is dense and has an obvious format: a metal disk etched with microprinting, whose exterior shows text getting progressively smaller as an obvious way of saying "look at me under a microscope to see more":
http://rosettaproject.org/
I highly recommend reading The Clock of the Long Now if you're interested in the theory and practice of making things last.
Koans and fables for the software engineer
No but it is amazing what NEW science you can do with OLD data. I've worked with the Transportable Array project for example http://www.usarray.org/researchers/obs/transportable it's over a decade old and scientists are still discovering new ways to take advantage of the data and will likely be doing so for decades to come. On the other hand a lot of data is just junk due to poor quality metadata; when was that instrument calibrated? I dunno. Damn. At leat in geophysics we have the National Geophysical Data Center to curate this stuff http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/ at least until Congress cuts it's funding.
-73, de n1ywb
www.n1ywb.com
Some years ago I picked up a copy of "Dark Ages II -- When the Digital Data Die" by Bryan Bergeron (2002) but only now have gotten around to finishing reading (for some reason I never got past the first chapter at the time). When I bought it I had just had my own experience with the not-so-long life of digital data (some CDs I'd burned a few years earlier were already unreadable). The book's a bit dated (it says that there are many people out there with Zip drives connected to their PCs) as, obviously technology marches on, leaving older media in the dust but that's the point of the book and the ideas are still relevant. Worth looking for at your public library if you're still of the mind that a digital format is superior to everything else for long-term storage. Personally, I think we're looking at trouble if everything's converted to bits thinking that it'll always be available. Continued access to one of those aforementioned 8" CPM floppies is a good example. My failed CD-Rs are another.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
[OP] "disappearing into old email addresses and obsolete storage devices, a Canadian study (abstract, article paywalled) indicated
Well so much for the study. Money changes everything. Eventually one hundred thousand copies of the abstract will exist on the Internet, but the authors' future descendants will find only only one actual link that leads to content, which terminates at a page saying "this domain is for sale".
You'd think that even science data of extremely low bit rate such as original weather station temperature data should be out there somewhere. A lot of other people did too... but all that is available now might be "value added" ajusted data. Not an evil conspiracy per se, it's human nature at it's best and worst.
A handy chronology of the history of data retention:
[2500BC] King Fuckemup boldly slew the enemy and I, Scribe Asskissus hath inscribed it in stone. He is an asshole who owes me back wages."
[1500] "With quivering quill I will write mine own data."
[1866] "Data published at great expense into leather-bound volumes. Dust sold separately."
[1970] "This is really important. we should print it and store it in a binder."
[1971] They didn't.
[1983] "I'll write it to floppy disk with a notsosticky label"
[1985] "After a long and desperate search, the label has been found!"
[1987] "Unlabeled floppy disk keeps coffeemaker level."
[1995] "Roxio CD storage is forever, and Real Scientists don't close their data sessions."
[2003] "Microsoft Word has experienced a problem updating from an older document format and will now close. Save your work as soon as possible."
[2005] "I'll just email it to myself and shut the computer off immediately, then pick it up at work."
[2009] "Yes, three copies! In the safe. There was a fire. Yes, inside the safe. It was a fireproof safe, so no one noticed."
[2010] "This is really important. I should print it and store it in a binder. But my ink cartridge is dry."
[2013] "Our data has been uploaded to the Cloud where it will live forever."
[2500] "King Grapeape slew the primitive humans and buried their statue on the beach. I, Scribe Anthopoapologus hath incribed it in stone."
Perhaps the most mystiying data retention escapade of Modern Times is the missing Apollo 11 SSTV moon tapes which contained a multiplexed stream of raw telemetry and the original slow-scan TV signal broadcast from the moon. Not 'missing' really, rather we know they were re-used and recorded over because everyone assumed it was someone else's job to ensure that at least one copy was in a safe place. While the earth station operators dutifully sent their tapes to NASA where the sharpest signal of the moon landing was sure to be perserved for posterity (not), fortunately there were some librarians on duty, and you can aquire DVDs of the moonwalk with better quality than the recordings you've seen in countless movies -- an 8mm film camera pointed at an original SSTV monitor at Honeysuckle Creek, and the best quality scan-converted version.
In the Foundation series, Asimov envisioned Gaia, a world in which a telepathic network of sentient (and sensuous) beings kept a 'working set' retrievable data in-memory -- but also via access to progressively less and non-sentient objects, such as plants and even rocks -- a vast archive. Ask the mountain, it will answer in time, a long time.
Our own Earth has a Gaia storage mechanism, a record of its magnetic field over geologic time stored as polarization in crystallized lava floes. But it i
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
Our scientific research system is built around the process of joining a lab, mastering the work there, and then leaving. There are very few long term research partnerships. The people who stay in place are the professors, who generally do not do the research work.
So you join a lab, produce a few terabytes of data a year, pull a few publishable nuggets out of that and then leave. I have a few backup hard drives that move around with me with what I consider my most important data, probably total 1/10 of the data I have taken. After a few years, this data is really unimportant to me as the labs I have left have done a good job of continuing the research and I have to spend my time and money on something else.
The original data is eventually overwritten by researchers a few "generations" removed from me and that's the end of it.
When John Knoll (yes, THE John Knoll, co-creator of Photoshop and VFX wizard extraordinaire) wanted to reproduce the Apollo moon landing in CG he ran into a small problem. He went to NASA to obtain the telemetry data for altitude and orientation but apparently the data had been tossed a long time ago. However, he was able to find physical prints of graphs of the telemetry channels. So he scanned them in, made them an underlay in a 3D modeling program, and painstakingly traced them by hand in order to extract the data. The results can be seen in Magnificent Desolation Apollo 15 landing sequence. And BTW, that's his modeling work for the lander too.
Since the data is unique to a time & place and irreplaceable, it would completely destroy the reproducibility aspect of the scientific process.
This gets tricky in some fields, however. I work in a field where generating the data is a notoriously difficult and haphazard process, subject to many non-experimental variables, such that the use of a different pipette or stock solution can make the difference - or even just the speed of the researcher's manual labor. Temperature and humidity play a role too, and these are not as precisely calibrated as one might like. So if an experiment is performed at 8pm on a Saturday night by a grad student in Colorado, there is no guarantee that a postdoc in Singapore will be able to do the same thing based on reading the paper. (Actually, from past experience, there's no guarantee that the original experimenter will be able to reproduce it either!) But the data may be just as good, and they're difficult to fake, and they're deposited in a public database. Since everyone in the field is accustomed to the complexities of the process and we have decent archival policies, this problem is accepted as a fact of life.
I am quite certain that some of my (published) results from grad school would be difficult at best to reproduce exactly. I stand by my data - and am happy to share them - but it is always troubling to wonder if someone else in a different environment would have reached different conclusions.
"Any independent researcher may freely obtain the primary station data. It is impossible for a third party to withhold access to the data. Regarding data availability, there is no basis for the allegations that CRU prevented access to raw data. It was impossible for them to have done so." [Muir Russell Review, p48,53]
That's why it was "impossible" for CRU to have withheld access to the raw data. Because they didn't collect it in the first place. Anyone who was actually interested in the data could always have gotten them from the same sources that CRU did.