6 ms·

Having backups is obviously always a good idea but that aside, how likely is it, that mirroring this data is actually necessary? There are obviously at least so

by danbruc 10y ago

Having backups is obviously always a good idea but that aside, how likely is it, that mirroring this data is actually necessary? There are obviously at least some people believing that it is necessary but then there are always people convinced that the most silly things are necessary. I am really unable to tell whether this is more of an overreaction or an urgent necessity, especially as someone not living in the US. Is the future just [perceived as] so unpredictable, that better safe than sorry is the right mindset?

po 10y ago
Besides redundancy, mirroring also helps spread the cost around. These groups tend to have pretty tight budgets.
- jefurii 10y ago
  Lots of copies keeps stuff safe.
dylz 10y ago
Think of it this way: servers cost money, bandwidth power costs money. When your budget is cut, servers will shut down at some point in the future. It isn't a "the gov says rm -rf everything"
- danbruc 10y ago
  I totally see how data could become unavailable, I am more asking whether it just really became more likely to happen. It is certainly no mistake not to rely on single sources, but if that is the motivation, then there is nothing special about now and climate data and mirroring all kinds of data would have been as good an idea a decade ago as now.
crispinb 10y ago
If you only create redundancy when you are sure it's necessary, you're too late.
- danbruc 10y ago
  Of course and I think having those mirrors is a good thing, stuff disappears from the internet all the time. But that is not the question I am asking. We could have started mirroring climate data and all kinds of other data last year or five years ago, there is always a risk of losing data. But this has obviously been triggered by the Trump presidency and is focused on climate data which implies that people are now more concerned than before and especially about one specific kind of data. Now I would like to know whether or not this elevated level of concern is justified.
  - untog 10y ago
    The Trump administration has stated that all future EPA studies and communications will be subject to political examination before release. It isn't a huge leap to imagine that they might do this retroactively.
  - 2bitencryption 10y ago
    Probably not a realistic concern. But. Lots of things seem to be in motion now that many people said could never possibly happen. An actual executive order on building a wall on the US/Mexico border. Government agencies unconventionally being silenced -- even if a presidential gag order on government agencies makes sense and should be allowed in certain conditions, these present conditions are nothing if not hostile. So it seems like this administration is proving that it doesn't care about convention, or if it comes off as aggressive and hostile towards the ideals it objects to. So... still probably not a justified fear, but we're closer to a reality where it is justifiable than we ever thought possible.
    - ska 10y ago
      The Harper government in Canada literally threw out decades worth of relevant data and historical records, removed websites, etc with little or no notice and (apparently) planning. (e.g. http://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/vanishing-canada-why-were-all-losers-in-ottawas-war-on-data/ http://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/vanishing-canada-why-were...) Not a great link but gives an overview. These things can happen - trusting individual federal governments to maintain sane policies towards national data handling is unfortunately a poor bet.
ajmurmann 10y ago
Well the EPA had been asked by Trump's transition team to provide a list of employees who have attended conferences about climate change. See NPR story: http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/12/09/505041927/trump-transition-asks-energy-dept-which-employees-work-on-climate-change http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/12/09/505041927/... They have also removed all mentions of climate change from the white House website and we now many Republicans don't believe in man made climate change. So I think this is an entirely reasonable fear. We are talking about a administration that thinks that getting coal out of the ground like it's 1910 is the future...
- gus_massa 10y ago
  > They have also removed all mentions of climate change from the white House website They replaced the old website with a new website. The old website is stored in: https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/ https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/ This is usual. Obama toke the same measure. Here is the Bush website if you like it: https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/ https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/ With the change, Trump (technical staff) removed many subject they disagree, and many subjects they agree with. If Obama had a page about how great are ginger hair people, it would have disappeared too.
  - ajmurmann 10y ago
    Yes, they disagree with climate change which isn't even a debate in any other country. That's how insane things have gotten.
paradite 10y ago
I'd like to discuss a slightly different issue here. Aren't there already a plethora of peer-reviewed journal articles on the issue of climate change? Why is it still necessary to store the presumably raw data? Even my high school geography notes have an abundance of information on the issue of climate change (for and against). So I doubt if this is necessary at all.
- untog 10y ago
  Why would you not? With storage costs being as minimal as they are I can't see a good argument not to store data that's under threat of deletion.
- danbruc 10y ago
  For [climate] models for example.
- JamisonM 10y ago
  If some large number of those peer-reviewed journal articles' conclusions are (or appear to be) undermined by future discoveries having the raw data to confirm or refute such a development taking into consideration assumptions about the data that might have since changed or been proven incorrect seems like a pretty important thing. What is in your high school geography notes was dictated in part by political decisions about school curriculum - you cannot assume that the future of even high school geography notes will match your experience.
- tukelully 10y ago
  A contrived analogy for this might be something like "Why wouldn't you delete the data once you've rendered a graph of it in PNG?". Data is always important. Just as much so as it's original interpretation and constraints.
- dagss 10y ago
  That is a bit like asking what you need source code for after having compiled the binary program. Just like you have new versions of a program building on changes to source code, you can run newer and improved analysis on the scientific data (whether to see if you get the same result, a new additional insight or whatever). Journal papers are often no better than having the binary (or perhaps more accurately the stdout dump of running the binary...)
danbruc 10y ago
Why was this comment by ajmurmann flagged? Up to now that seems the best evidence provided for answering my question even though I think it is relatively weak evidence and it lacks a source for the second paragraph. Well the EPA had been asked by Trump's transition team to provide a list of employees who have attended conferences about climate change. See NPR story: http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/12/09/505041927/.. http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/12/09/505041927/.... They have also removed all mentions of climate change from the white House website and we now many Republicans don't believe in man made climate change. So I think this is an entirely reasonable fear. We are talking about a administration that thinks that getting coal out of the ground like it's 1910 is the future...
- Turing_Machine 10y ago
  I didn't flag it, but I would guess that this is part of the reason: "They have also removed all mentions of climate change from the white House website " As gus_massa points out above, the entire Obama White House website (not just the pages dealing with climate change) has been transferred to the National Archives (not "removed") and has been replaced with a completely new site. While the web is still new enough that it's hard to argue tradition, Obama did the same thing to Bush II's site, and Bush II did the same thing to Clinton's site (Clinton was the first, so there's no data before that).
  - danbruc 10y ago
    It seems to me more like a technical detail whether you are no longer mentioning a topic because you removed it from the previous website or whether you replaced the whole website. In the end the topic is gone in both cases. You can admittedly draw somewhat different conclusions in both cases, in the former case they wanted to see the topic gone, in the later case they may just have forgotten to include the topic. Anyway flagging the comment seems a needless harsh reaction, reply with a comment pointing out the facts or maybe downvote it if you really believe the comment was made in bad faith.
    - Turing_Machine 10y ago
beatpanda 10y ago
"Lessons learned under former Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, a Conservative who was accused of muzzling scientists during his term, initially energized a "race" to save the U.S. government's climate data. Activists also studied policy papers by members of Trump's transition team to get a sense of what might be at risk. But what they have witnessed so far has been "unprecedented," Murphy said, and "much more intense and publicly celebrated" than the precedent set in Canada. "The transition team and Trump administration are very upfront and promoting of this plan; it's not that this is surreptitious," Murphy said." http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/01/trump-officials-suspend-plan-delete-epa-climate-web-page http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/01/trump-officials-suspe...
gillianlish 10y ago
This isn't about necessity. This is about sending a message. Message to Scientists - we value your work Message to the World - we are not all bad Message to future generations - we are not hopeless Message to Trump - good day sir

by danbruc 10y ago

po 10y ago

Besides redundancy, mirroring also helps spread the cost around. These groups tend to have pretty tight budgets.

jefurii 10y ago
Lots of copies keeps stuff safe.

dylz 10y ago

Think of it this way: servers cost money, bandwidth power costs money. When your budget is cut, servers will shut down at some point in the future. It isn't a "the gov says rm -rf everything"

danbruc 10y ago
I totally see how data could become unavailable, I am more asking whether it just really became more likely to happen. It is certainly no mistake not to rely on single sources, but if that is the motivation, then there is nothing special about now and climate data and mirroring all kinds of data would have been as good an idea a decade ago as now.

crispinb 10y ago

If you only create redundancy when you are sure it's necessary, you're too late.

danbruc 10y ago
Of course and I think having those mirrors is a good thing, stuff disappears from the internet all the time. But that is not the question I am asking. We could have started mirroring climate data and all kinds of other data last year or five years ago, there is always a risk of losing data. But this has obviously been triggered by the Trump presidency and is focused on climate data which implies that people are now more concerned than before and especially about one specific kind of data. Now I would like to know whether or not this elevated level of concern is justified.
- untog 10y ago
  The Trump administration has stated that all future EPA studies and communications will be subject to political examination before release. It isn't a huge leap to imagine that they might do this retroactively.
- 2bitencryption 10y ago
  Probably not a realistic concern. But. Lots of things seem to be in motion now that many people said could never possibly happen. An actual executive order on building a wall on the US/Mexico border. Government agencies unconventionally being silenced -- even if a presidential gag order on government agencies makes sense and should be allowed in certain conditions, these present conditions are nothing if not hostile. So it seems like this administration is proving that it doesn't care about convention, or if it comes off as aggressive and hostile towards the ideals it objects to. So... still probably not a justified fear, but we're closer to a reality where it is justifiable than we ever thought possible.
  - ska 10y ago
    The Harper government in Canada literally threw out decades worth of relevant data and historical records, removed websites, etc with little or no notice and (apparently) planning. (e.g. http://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/vanishing-canada-why-were-all-losers-in-ottawas-war-on-data/ http://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/vanishing-canada-why-were...) Not a great link but gives an overview. These things can happen - trusting individual federal governments to maintain sane policies towards national data handling is unfortunately a poor bet.

ajmurmann 10y ago

Well the EPA had been asked by Trump's transition team to provide a list of employees who have attended conferences about climate change. See NPR story: http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/12/09/505041927/trump-transition-asks-energy-dept-which-employees-work-on-climate-change http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/12/09/505041927/... They have also removed all mentions of climate change from the white House website and we now many Republicans don't believe in man made climate change. So I think this is an entirely reasonable fear. We are talking about a administration that thinks that getting coal out of the ground like it's 1910 is the future...

gus_massa 10y ago
> They have also removed all mentions of climate change from the white House website They replaced the old website with a new website. The old website is stored in: https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/ https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/ This is usual. Obama toke the same measure. Here is the Bush website if you like it: https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/ https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/ With the change, Trump (technical staff) removed many subject they disagree, and many subjects they agree with. If Obama had a page about how great are ginger hair people, it would have disappeared too.
- ajmurmann 10y ago
  Yes, they disagree with climate change which isn't even a debate in any other country. That's how insane things have gotten.

paradite 10y ago

I'd like to discuss a slightly different issue here. Aren't there already a plethora of peer-reviewed journal articles on the issue of climate change? Why is it still necessary to store the presumably raw data? Even my high school geography notes have an abundance of information on the issue of climate change (for and against). So I doubt if this is necessary at all.

untog 10y ago
Why would you not? With storage costs being as minimal as they are I can't see a good argument not to store data that's under threat of deletion.
danbruc 10y ago
For [climate] models for example.
JamisonM 10y ago
If some large number of those peer-reviewed journal articles' conclusions are (or appear to be) undermined by future discoveries having the raw data to confirm or refute such a development taking into consideration assumptions about the data that might have since changed or been proven incorrect seems like a pretty important thing. What is in your high school geography notes was dictated in part by political decisions about school curriculum - you cannot assume that the future of even high school geography notes will match your experience.
tukelully 10y ago
A contrived analogy for this might be something like "Why wouldn't you delete the data once you've rendered a graph of it in PNG?". Data is always important. Just as much so as it's original interpretation and constraints.
dagss 10y ago
That is a bit like asking what you need source code for after having compiled the binary program. Just like you have new versions of a program building on changes to source code, you can run newer and improved analysis on the scientific data (whether to see if you get the same result, a new additional insight or whatever). Journal papers are often no better than having the binary (or perhaps more accurately the stdout dump of running the binary...)

danbruc 10y ago

Why was this comment by ajmurmann flagged? Up to now that seems the best evidence provided for answering my question even though I think it is relatively weak evidence and it lacks a source for the second paragraph. Well the EPA had been asked by Trump's transition team to provide a list of employees who have attended conferences about climate change. See NPR story: http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/12/09/505041927/.. http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/12/09/505041927/.... They have also removed all mentions of climate change from the white House website and we now many Republicans don't believe in man made climate change. So I think this is an entirely reasonable fear. We are talking about a administration that thinks that getting coal out of the ground like it's 1910 is the future...

Turing_Machine 10y ago
I didn't flag it, but I would guess that this is part of the reason: "They have also removed all mentions of climate change from the white House website " As gus_massa points out above, the entire Obama White House website (not just the pages dealing with climate change) has been transferred to the National Archives (not "removed") and has been replaced with a completely new site. While the web is still new enough that it's hard to argue tradition, Obama did the same thing to Bush II's site, and Bush II did the same thing to Clinton's site (Clinton was the first, so there's no data before that).
- danbruc 10y ago
  It seems to me more like a technical detail whether you are no longer mentioning a topic because you removed it from the previous website or whether you replaced the whole website. In the end the topic is gone in both cases. You can admittedly draw somewhat different conclusions in both cases, in the former case they wanted to see the topic gone, in the later case they may just have forgotten to include the topic. Anyway flagging the comment seems a needless harsh reaction, reply with a comment pointing out the facts or maybe downvote it if you really believe the comment was made in bad faith.
  - Turing_Machine 10y ago

beatpanda 10y ago

"Lessons learned under former Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, a Conservative who was accused of muzzling scientists during his term, initially energized a "race" to save the U.S. government's climate data. Activists also studied policy papers by members of Trump's transition team to get a sense of what might be at risk. But what they have witnessed so far has been "unprecedented," Murphy said, and "much more intense and publicly celebrated" than the precedent set in Canada. "The transition team and Trump administration are very upfront and promoting of this plan; it's not that this is surreptitious," Murphy said." http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/01/trump-officials-suspend-plan-delete-epa-climate-web-page http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/01/trump-officials-suspe...

gillianlish 10y ago

This isn't about necessity. This is about sending a message. Message to Scientists - we value your work Message to the World - we are not all bad Message to future generations - we are not hopeless Message to Trump - good day sir