Dude, Your in the NYT

Happy off week everybody, here is a light piece but one which should still be interesting to us.

Congratulations, now when people ask you about what exactly it is that you are doing in school you don't have to give them vocab heavy monologues about metadata, data migration and petabytes, you can point them to this article in the New York Times.

The heart of this article is what we have been discussing through much of the semester, the sciences are going through a major change where the shear amount of data that is being gathered threatens to overwhelm researchers who don't have the training to deal with such datasets. The article goes then discusses how current students in the sciences are unable to access the vast scope of the information sets which are a part of their field s due to the limited nature of the computational facilities available to students. This causes the young minds to “imprint on these small systems, that becomes their frame of reference and what they’re always thinking about...”. I have doubts on the validity of this but still Google and IBM are going to solve these problems for scientist by providing them with access to better computers.

There is of course the unstated belief that shadows this article that all of these issues are inherently technical, and the application of computational power will solve the petabyte problem. Indeed the article quotes on researcher saying “Science these days has basically turned into a data-management problem”. A brief Google search does find that the scientist quoted here is a biology/ genetics researcher so in that field this might be a perfectly valid point, but I wonder if all scientist feel this way. And if they do why, and if they don't why not?

The question that I suppose I have from this article is where do we fit in? Do we work with the scientist to help them understand their data or are we only concerned with where the data is kept, and how to ensure that it remains available for use now and in the future?
I don't have good answers I have been looking at these problems for the better part of a year now and I am still not sure how we as a profession fit with this area, or if we do.