@goetzFreeingDarkData

[!info] - Cite Key: @goetzFreeingDarkData - Abstract: In 1981, the New England - Bibliography: Goetz, T. n.d. Freeing the Dark Data of Failed Scientific Experiments. Wired. - Tags: #discoveries, #magazine-15.10, #start-archive, #start-magazine-15-10

Annotations¶

%% begin annotations %% - "publication bias, where science gets skewed because only positive correlations see the light of day. After all, the surprising findings are what makes the news (and careers)." - Agree: This is very true, the filing drawer effect (another name for this situation) is very common and strong in the scientific community - and it hurts our ability to do effective science and the general populations ability to consume science and understand the world people don't understand technology - "The result is a vast body of squandered knowledge that represents a waste of resources and a drag on scientific progress. This information — call it dark data — must be set free." - Agree: there is no reason this information shouldn't be published to be used to cross reference in future, or to use for meta-analyses, or even just as a demonstration of poor lab practice - It is a heavy waste of resources which isn't an angle I'd considered until now - "the idea that more scientific publications should be freely available — not locked behind firewalls and subscriptions" - Agree: I strongly agree, the use of the deep-web to gatekeep scientific knowledge behind such blatant classist boundries is unfair and counterproductive for both society and science as a movement - Open access allows for more ideas and people to enter the field than ever before and that should be what we want and encourage! - "It also makes many scientists deeply uncomfortable, because it calls for them to reveal their "failures."" - It is interested to call them failures, as is mentioned in Connections Ep 10 Yesterday, Tomorrow, and You calling science or an invention a failure is a guess as who knows how it will be used/applied in the future (accidents cause change) - and by not publishing you are sqandering that opportunity - "But in this data-intensive age, those apparent dead ends could be more important than the breakthroughs. After all, some of today's most compelling research efforts aren't one-off studies that eke out statistically significant results, they're meta-studies — studies of studies — that crunch data from dozens of sources, producing results that are much more likely to be true." - This is so true, and compounded by the advent of modern AI systems like ChatGPT where science data could be coilated and used. - Perhaps using AI and this "Dark Data" we could parse general ways to preform stronger, more controlled studies as to avoid this "failure" papers from happening again in future - "What's more, your dead end may be another scientist's missing link, the elusive chunk of data they needed." - again relates to Connections Ep 10 Yesterday, Tomorrow, and You and accidents cause change - "In part, it's a logistics problem: Advocating the release of dark data is one thing, but it's quite another to actually collect it, juggling different formats and standards. And, of course, there's the issue of storage. These days, an astronomical study of quasars or an ambitious bioinformatics project can generate several terabytes of data. Few have the capacity to store that, let alone analyze it." - This is interesting, I never considered the infrastructure side of making this data available but I suppose it does add up to a very large mass of data - and it would cost a great deal to make available which may be partly why some have decided to simply not - "More and more, research is funded by commercial entities, which deem any results proprietary." - This is an interesting way science has been infected by capitalism wherein research isn't pure its done with the intent to prove a product good truth be bent or no - Also the idea of Proprietary knowledge is very dystopian - "Congress should mandate that all federally funded research be disseminated, whatever the results." - Agree: I think that capitalism and corperations aside, if it was funded by the public it should be publically available even if it doesn't yield "interesting" results - I also believe it should be available free of charge and not through the current gatekeeping methods - "Once you start looking for it, dark data is everywhere: It's locked away in out-of-print books and orphaned art" - This is very true, I know someone working for the Internet Archive whose primary goal is to archive old floppy disks and out of date digital mediums which by this point are starting to wear out and there is a limited amount of time left to crack their copy protection to preserve them on the internet, or be lost forever - "Speaking of which: Hey, Google! Know all those research projects your employees do that the company will never green-light? How about letting the rest of the world take a crack at them?" - This would be so good! But Google and other companies for that matter are inherently anti-competition and would rather the world be worse off rather than someone else profit from something %% end annotations %%

%% Import Date: 2023-03-07T20:38:21.924-05:00 %%