Published on Monday, February 28th, 02011 by Austin Brown
There is new media available from our monthly series, the Seminars About Long-term Thinking. Stewart Brand’s summaries and audio downloads or podcasts of the talks are free to the public; Long Now members can view HD video of the Seminars and comment on them.
Published on Monday, February 28th, 02011 by Alex Mensing
The figure shows the projected increase in global climate data holdings for climate models, remotely sensed data, and in situ.
On February 11 Science magazine published a special issue dedicated to the challenges that research communities face as they produce increasing quantities and types of data. One of the articles tells the story of particle physicist Siegfried Bethke, who wanted to reanalyze the data from an experiment conducted twenty years earlier. He discovered that no organized effort had been made to preserve the data, and it took him, his secretary and a graduate student two years to find it all and rewrite the now-obsolete code necessary to read it.
“The problem starts when the experiment is over, and the data used by one group of people is only understood by those people,” [Cristinel] Diaconu says. “When they go off and do other things, the data is orphaned; it has no parents anymore.” The orphan metaphor only goes so far: After a certain point, orphaned data can’t be adopted by later researchers who weren’t part of the original team. Even given the raw data, only someone intimately involved in the original experiment can make sense of it.
A particle physics study group has recommended that every large experiment hire a ‘data archivist,’ a sort of Receiver of Memory who would be responsible for making sure that data remains intelligible and accessible long after ‘the end’ of a project.
A data archivist would be a mix of librarian, IT expert, and physicist, with the computing skills to keep porting data to new formats but savvy enough about the physics to be able to crosscheck old results on new computer systems.
As indicated by another article in the special issue, “Climate Data Challenges in the 21st Century,” scientists not only need to make their data accessible to colleagues and to researchers of the future, but also to non-researchers of the present. As managers and policy-makers move to address time-sensitive issues such as climate change, the long-term soundness of their decisions will depend at least partly on the information available to them.
Increased support from the funding agencies is needed to enhance data access, manipulation, and modeling tools; improve climate system understanding; articulate model limitations; and ensure that the observations necessary to underpin it all are made. Otherwise, climate science will suffer, and the climate information needed by society—climate assessment, services, and adaptation capability—will not only fall short of its potential to reduce the vulnerability of human and natural systems to climate variability and change, but will also cause society to miss out on opportunities that will inevitably arise in the face of changing conditions.
Published on Friday, February 25th, 02011 by Alexander Rose - Twitter: @zander
Alexander Rose (left) and Steve Rowell (right) at the Svalbard Seed Vault
Long Now Executive Director and Clock Project Manager Alexander Rose is currently in Longyearbyen Svalbard in the Spitsbergen archipelago with artist Steven Rowell. We are here to visit the 1000 year seed vault and talk with its engineers. We will hopefully be getting into the vault on Sunday (the entry part anyway, no one but a few scrubbed down and sterilized technicians are allowed in the actual vault). But today we drove up there and shot the image above between 40 mph wind and snow gusts. Pictures by Steven Rowell below:
Published on Friday, February 25th, 02011 by Alexander Rose - Twitter: @zander
UPDATE (4/23/02011) Long Now’s Laura Welcher found another instance of Long Now graffiti at the BART track support along the Ohlone Greenway in Berkeley (pic below):
——–
We heard last week that some “Long Now Graffiti” showed up on the sidewalk out in front of the Pixar animation studios in Emeryville California. A friend just sent in pictures of it… I assume no one wants to come forward to tell us more about it, but I would really love to know why it only goes to the year 10,000. Why not 12011?
… and this one in Berlin:
Published on Thursday, February 24th, 02011 by Austin Brown
Via trade and other cultural activities, “ideas have sex,” and that drives human history in the direction of inconstant but accumulative improvement over time. The criers of havoc keep being proved wrong. A fundamental optimism about human affairs is deeply rational and can be reliably conjured with.
Trained at Oxford as a zoologist and an editor at The Economist for eight years, Matt Ridley’s newest book is The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves. His earlier works include Francis Crick; Nature via Nurture; Genome; and The Origins of Virtue.
Long Now is presenting this Seminar in partnership with Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, whose commitment to providing a forum for the most compelling contemporary thought continues with this collaboration.
Published on Monday, February 21st, 02011 by Kirk Citron
The Long News: stories that might still matter fifty, or a hundred, or ten thousand years from now.
Internet map of the Middle East
A computer defeats humans on a television game show. An information network brings down a series of dictatorships. We are witnessing a massive explosion in data, and an equally massive explosion in our ability to process and distribute it. The fall of the Soviet Union may have been driven, in part, by the fax machine; today, revolutions are driven by Wikileaks, Facebook, and Twitter. (You say you want a revolution? Google it.) Or, as Ken Jennings wrote on his monitor when he lost at Jeopardy to IBM’s Watson: “I for one welcome our new computer overlords.”
Some recent news articles about information overload — as well as some additional stories:
1. “A whopping 94% of global data is now stored digitally, up from 0.8% 25 years ago”: As computer capacity soars, users drowning in data
2. It tripled in 2010: Worldwide mobile data traffic exploding
3. The Internet = us: World’s total CPU power: one human brain
4. Or maybe, surpasses us: Robots replace teachers at 21 schools in South Korea
5. Meanwhile: maybe our energy problems are solvable: Today’s clean tech could power the world by 2050
6. Unsettling news for climate change deniers and creationists: Global warming may reroute evolution
7. Shocking how many Americans don’t believe in evolution (this time, it’s the science teachers): Evolution still struggling in public schools
8. That’s okay, we can rewrite evolution anyway: Mammoth ‘could be reborn in four years’
We invite you to submit Long News story suggestions here.
Published on Friday, February 18th, 02011 by Heather Louise Mae Bowden
If you plan to be in San Francisco next week, there is still time to register for the Personal Digital Archiving Conference. The conference is being held at the Internet Archive on February 24 & 25, 2011. The event blurb says it all:
From family photographs and personal papers to health and financial information, vital personal records are becoming digital. Creation and capture of new digital information has become a part of the daily routine for hundreds of millions of people. But what are the long-term prospects for this data? The combination of new capture devices (more than 1 billion camera phones will be sold in 2010) with the move from older forms of media is reshaping both our personal and collective memories. The size and complexity of personal collections growing, these collections are spread across different media (including film and paper!), and the lines between personal and professional, published and unpublished are being redrawn.
For individuals, institutions, investors, entrepreneurs, and funding agencies thinking about how best to address these issues, Personal Digital Archiving 2011 will include a variety of examples that may be replicated, and will clarify the technical, social, economic questions around personal archiving.
Long Now’s Laura Welcher will be presenting “An Archive Model with Long Term Benefits” Thursday evening.
Check out the full, provisional schedule HERE. As you will see from this line-up, this is a wonderful opportunity to see and talk to the leading researchers in this area.
You can register HERE. [Deadline: February 24]
Travel and location information is on the conference website.
Published on Thursday, February 17th, 02011 by Alexander Rose - Twitter: @zander
“The library is safe thanks to Egypt’s youth”
The famous burning of the Library of Alexandria is still considered to be one the greatest losses of ancient culture. History tells us it was actually several events that eventually destroyed the library. Events similar to the ones we have witnessed over the last few weeks in Egypt. Recent losses at national libraries and museums in Serbia, Iraq, and now Cairo show that in times of upheaval, there is a strong desire to erase the past, and that past often resides in libraries. One of Long Now’s board members is Mike Keller the head of Stanford libraries who has close ties with the modern Library at Alexanderia. We have all been waiting to hear how the library fared in the revolution, see the encouraging report below:
Stanford Libraries have a close collegial relationship with the new Library of Alexandria, known as the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, or BA. We have been anxiously watching the news of turmoil in Egypt with a particular concern about that inspiring institution (to say nothing of other cultural repositories, some of which were damaged in recent weeks). I am truly delighted and relieved to report that the BA is intact as of this writing. Indeed, some 50 volunteers formed a human cordon to protect and support it during mass demonstrations in its vicinity on the Corniche of that historic city. Even when all of Egypt was reportedly cut off from the Internet, the BA retained connectivity through its own international network, and its director, Dr. Ismail Seregeldin, was able to post several assuring messages to the BA’s friends around the world, complete with photographs and video showing how Alexandrians rallied to protect it. Concurrently, several of us at Stanford were exchanging messages with our friends there, which provided solace all around.
None of this predicts how the BA will fare hereafter. During the turmoil on the streets, one of the BA’s senior staff closed a message to me as follows: “Pray for us.” That may still be about all we can do. As momentous events unfold in a post-Mubarak Egypt, we will look for more tangible ways to express our support and solidarity.As a parting thought: as implausible as mass insurrection seems here, if something somehow comparable were to happen, would we put ourselves on the line to protect our libraries as did the citizens of Alexandria?
Bravi!
Andrew Herkovic
Published on Wednesday, February 16th, 02011 by Alex Mensing
As a recent New York Times article observes, the kilogram is officially defined as “a unit of mass equal to the mass of the international prototype of the kilogram.” Well, it turns out that the prototype, a chunk of platinum and iridium housed at the International Bureau of Weights and Measures in France, has lost a bit of weight since it was made in the 1880s. The builders of the prototype did their best to design for the long-term, choosing a 90% platinum / 10% iridium alloy for its corrosion resistance and good thermal properties, sheltering it with bell jars and a vault, and minimizing its surface area. Time, however, has proven their efforts insufficient. The New York Times points out that the method for standardizing the kilogram has been going out of style:
The kilogram is the last base unit of measurement to be expressed in terms of a manufactured artifact. (Its cousin, the international prototype of the meter, was retired from active duty in 1960, when scientists redefined the meter. They redefined it again in 1983; a meter is now officially “the length of the path traveled by light in a vacuum during a time interval of 1/299,792,458 of a second,” for those who would like to try it at home.)
Scientists now have similarly bold plans for the kilogram, and indeed for several other base units of measure. A draft resolution to be considered at the General Conference of Weights and Measures in October includes new and improved definitions for the ampere, the mole and the candela.
“This would be the biggest change in metrology since the metric system was introduced during the French Revolution,” Dr. Quinn said.
Which is all very exciting and very revolutionary. But it is easier said than done.
Indeed, we all take these standards for granted, but they are one of the things that allow us to build on the past and conceive into the future. Their definition may seem esoteric, but one only has to go to a gas station in a country without standards enforcement to see the potential pit falls of a lack of them. Moving into the future with standards not defined by physical items, the Bureau of Weights and Measures discusses some of the difficulties they face, such as the degree of uncertainty in Planck’s constant, here on its website.
Published on Friday, February 11th, 02011 by Danielle Engelman
There is new media available from our monthly series, the Seminars About Long-term Thinking. Stewart Brand’s summaries and audio downloads or podcasts of the talks are free to the public; Long Now members can view HD video of the Seminars and comment on them.
Ideas about Long-term Thinking.
The Long Now Foundation
Fostering Long-term Responsibility
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