7 ms·

I am a little upset that all of our "space enthusiasts" (including me) didn't have backups of the content from NTRS (NASA Technical Reports Server). NTRS is now

by kanzure 13y ago

I am a little upset that all of our "space enthusiasts" (including me) didn't have backups of the content from NTRS (NASA Technical Reports Server). NTRS is now back online after going down due to political pressures weeks ago, except 85% of the content is now missing. Taking NTRS down removed something like a whole 2% of science from the public record, plus the majority of everything we know about becoming a space-faring civilization. Gone. That is unacceptable. What's worse is that what happened to NTRS could happen to basically everything else in science. There's no complete backup and no mirrors. JSTOR has only a fraction of science; and even if Mendelsevier or SpringerKink were to go the way of the dinosaur, we wouldn't be able to get content out of JSTOR anyway, so it's useless in the first place. Heck, there's no lab in the world that has complete access to all of the papers out there. Science is all kinds of broken. We need to get way more serious about science. https://groups.google.com/group/science-liberation-front https://groups.google.com/group/science-liberation-front

dman 13y ago
Ive contacted Elsevier multiple times for setting up something reasonable like 50-100 bucks a month to give access to people who are not academics. Sadly if youre not in a university youre stuck paying per paper.
- kanzure 13y ago
  You could use http://deepdyve.com/ http://deepdyve.com/ or http://readcube.com/access http://readcube.com/access but it is still very expensive to read a healthy amount. Still, they have talked with the arms dealers and made prior arrangements, and apparently got better results than your emails did. I read >100 papers/month, and paying $45.95/paper or $4.95/paper or whatever really starts to cut into my mad science budget..
  - dman 13y ago
    I am on the verge of signing up for some throwaway course every semester at NYU just to get access to journals.
    - ics 13y ago
      Try CUNY if NYU is too expensive. I'm not sure how it varies from school to school, but you can see Brooklyn College's list here (http://qn6sj3qc3h.search.serialssolutions.com/ http://qn6sj3qc3h.search.serialssolutions.com/). I just logged in and apparently still have access (I haven't been registered for over a year).
    - xaa 13y ago
      If you're interested in biomedical papers, I'd be willing to set up a proxy for you to share my institutional subscription.
      - cinquemb 13y ago
        That's more along the lines what I do now with my friends who are still in universities who have access to documents behind a paywall I am interested in reading. I wish it was scalable because I think going to a website,posting a request for an article behind a pay wall to university students who then will download the file for free and send you the file would help open doors between the academic world and the world everyone else lives in.
        kanzure 13y ago
        > I wish it was scalable because I think going to a website,posting a request How about these: https://reddit.com/r/scholar https://reddit.com/r/scholar https://facebook.com/groups/freepapers https://facebook.com/groups/freepapers https://groups.google.com/group/getarticles https://groups.google.com/group/getarticles https://groups.google.com/group/getarticles2 https://groups.google.com/group/getarticles2 https://groups.google.com/group/slwaterflow https://groups.google.com/group/slwaterflow https://groups.google.com/group/science-liberation-front https://groups.google.com/group/science-liberation-front http://thepaperbay.com/ http://thepaperbay.com/ http://articleak.allalla.com/ http://articleak.allalla.com/ http://www.pirateuniversity.org/ http://www.pirateuniversity.org/ Also you can use (bias disclaimer) https://github.com/kanzure/paperbot https://github.com/kanzure/paperbot and (more bias) https://github.com/kanzure/pdfparanoia https://github.com/kanzure/pdfparanoia is a good idea for preserving anonymity.
  - gcr 13y ago
    In many fields of computer science, authors are allowed to publish preprints of their papers on their web site. Even if not, you can usually email the author and ask them to send you their work.
maeon3 13y ago
We need an off-planet backup of all data contained on the internet in anticipation of an apocalyptic event sending humanity back into survival hunter-gatherer mode for a few decades. Then several generations later when the intellectual education system needs to be restarted after having spent so many years in the "just stay alive education system" it will save thousands of years of scientific progress. I'm hoping one day our species will find one of these information silos, created by humans billions of years ago, on another planet somewhere, so we can regain what was lost.
- jacquesm 13y ago
  Just beam it into space and plot an intercept course. You'll have to deal with signal recovery a bit below the noise floor, the problem is that most likely a civilization in need of those documents would not be able to recover the data. Still, it's the cheapest and longest lasting form of back-up available. Other options: Dump a couple of titanium cannisters with the current state of the art on golden media on the moon.
  - jlgreco 13y ago
    I think a radio equivalent of the "10,000 year clock", placed on the moon, might be a good way to go. Fairly low barrier to read from the thing. Perhaps you could have it only broadcast just enough data to bootstrap any society that wanted to get to it to read the rest. You would need to bury most of it though, and have a great deal of redundancy. The moon doesn't have an atmosphere to protect it from meteorites.
    - Houshalter 13y ago
      You could do the same thing on Earth probably much cheaper. Bury it in a remote location like Antarctica or something. Just have a manual switch on it that will stop it from broadcasting for 20 years or so. That way it doesn't interfere with any radio traffic in the present, but if something happens to humanity that prevents us from going to it, it resets and starts broadcasting again. Anyone remaining on Earth will be able to listen to it. Even if all humans die out, it would still leave a legacy for (possibly) other intelligent races to find. It wouldn't have to be terribly expensive, though you would want to add things to make sure it would survive such a long time, which would add to the cost. I don't know how you would store information that long though. At least in a way that would be machine readable and not take up a ton of space.
kirk21 13y ago
Any alternatives for Mendeley? I've tried Colwiz and hope http://bohr.launchrock.com http://bohr.launchrock.com will be great.
- kanzure 13y ago
  > Any alternatives for Mendeley http://zotero.org/ http://zotero.org/ recent comments about mendelsevier vs. zotero: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5525111 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5525111
jonmrodriguez 13y ago
The loss of NTRS does seem unbelievably sad. Are there any efforts underway to get the 85% put back online through political or NASA-internal means? And is anyone trying to reconstruct the data from Internet caches? I think that at one point, a lot of the text was in Google caches -- idk if it's been evicted yet
- new299 13y ago
  https://archive.org/details/nasa_techdocs https://archive.org/details/nasa_techdocs
  - kanzure 13y ago
    That's only 20,000 documents. A good start, I guess. But there's a tremendous amount missing from that collection..
    - new299 13y ago
      That's a real shame, looks like we live in a world where we have to be seriously proactive about these things.
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
new299 13y ago
Did archive.org not grab them at: https://archive.org/details/nasa_techdocs https://archive.org/details/nasa_techdocs

by kanzure 13y ago

dman 13y ago

Ive contacted Elsevier multiple times for setting up something reasonable like 50-100 bucks a month to give access to people who are not academics. Sadly if youre not in a university youre stuck paying per paper.

kanzure 13y ago
You could use http://deepdyve.com/ http://deepdyve.com/ or http://readcube.com/access http://readcube.com/access but it is still very expensive to read a healthy amount. Still, they have talked with the arms dealers and made prior arrangements, and apparently got better results than your emails did. I read >100 papers/month, and paying $45.95/paper or $4.95/paper or whatever really starts to cut into my mad science budget..
- dman 13y ago
  I am on the verge of signing up for some throwaway course every semester at NYU just to get access to journals.
  - ics 13y ago
    Try CUNY if NYU is too expensive. I'm not sure how it varies from school to school, but you can see Brooklyn College's list here (http://qn6sj3qc3h.search.serialssolutions.com/ http://qn6sj3qc3h.search.serialssolutions.com/). I just logged in and apparently still have access (I haven't been registered for over a year).
  - xaa 13y ago
    If you're interested in biomedical papers, I'd be willing to set up a proxy for you to share my institutional subscription.
    - cinquemb 13y ago
      That's more along the lines what I do now with my friends who are still in universities who have access to documents behind a paywall I am interested in reading. I wish it was scalable because I think going to a website,posting a request for an article behind a pay wall to university students who then will download the file for free and send you the file would help open doors between the academic world and the world everyone else lives in.
      - kanzure 13y ago
        > I wish it was scalable because I think going to a website,posting a request How about these: https://reddit.com/r/scholar https://reddit.com/r/scholar https://facebook.com/groups/freepapers https://facebook.com/groups/freepapers https://groups.google.com/group/getarticles https://groups.google.com/group/getarticles https://groups.google.com/group/getarticles2 https://groups.google.com/group/getarticles2 https://groups.google.com/group/slwaterflow https://groups.google.com/group/slwaterflow https://groups.google.com/group/science-liberation-front https://groups.google.com/group/science-liberation-front http://thepaperbay.com/ http://thepaperbay.com/ http://articleak.allalla.com/ http://articleak.allalla.com/ http://www.pirateuniversity.org/ http://www.pirateuniversity.org/ Also you can use (bias disclaimer) https://github.com/kanzure/paperbot https://github.com/kanzure/paperbot and (more bias) https://github.com/kanzure/pdfparanoia https://github.com/kanzure/pdfparanoia is a good idea for preserving anonymity.
- gcr 13y ago
  In many fields of computer science, authors are allowed to publish preprints of their papers on their web site. Even if not, you can usually email the author and ask them to send you their work.

maeon3 13y ago

We need an off-planet backup of all data contained on the internet in anticipation of an apocalyptic event sending humanity back into survival hunter-gatherer mode for a few decades. Then several generations later when the intellectual education system needs to be restarted after having spent so many years in the "just stay alive education system" it will save thousands of years of scientific progress. I'm hoping one day our species will find one of these information silos, created by humans billions of years ago, on another planet somewhere, so we can regain what was lost.

jacquesm 13y ago
Just beam it into space and plot an intercept course. You'll have to deal with signal recovery a bit below the noise floor, the problem is that most likely a civilization in need of those documents would not be able to recover the data. Still, it's the cheapest and longest lasting form of back-up available. Other options: Dump a couple of titanium cannisters with the current state of the art on golden media on the moon.
- jlgreco 13y ago
  I think a radio equivalent of the "10,000 year clock", placed on the moon, might be a good way to go. Fairly low barrier to read from the thing. Perhaps you could have it only broadcast just enough data to bootstrap any society that wanted to get to it to read the rest. You would need to bury most of it though, and have a great deal of redundancy. The moon doesn't have an atmosphere to protect it from meteorites.
  - Houshalter 13y ago
    You could do the same thing on Earth probably much cheaper. Bury it in a remote location like Antarctica or something. Just have a manual switch on it that will stop it from broadcasting for 20 years or so. That way it doesn't interfere with any radio traffic in the present, but if something happens to humanity that prevents us from going to it, it resets and starts broadcasting again. Anyone remaining on Earth will be able to listen to it. Even if all humans die out, it would still leave a legacy for (possibly) other intelligent races to find. It wouldn't have to be terribly expensive, though you would want to add things to make sure it would survive such a long time, which would add to the cost. I don't know how you would store information that long though. At least in a way that would be machine readable and not take up a ton of space.

kirk21 13y ago

Any alternatives for Mendeley? I've tried Colwiz and hope http://bohr.launchrock.com http://bohr.launchrock.com will be great.

kanzure 13y ago
> Any alternatives for Mendeley http://zotero.org/ http://zotero.org/ recent comments about mendelsevier vs. zotero: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5525111 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5525111

jonmrodriguez 13y ago

The loss of NTRS does seem unbelievably sad. Are there any efforts underway to get the 85% put back online through political or NASA-internal means? And is anyone trying to reconstruct the data from Internet caches? I think that at one point, a lot of the text was in Google caches -- idk if it's been evicted yet

new299 13y ago
https://archive.org/details/nasa_techdocs https://archive.org/details/nasa_techdocs
- kanzure 13y ago
  That's only 20,000 documents. A good start, I guess. But there's a tremendous amount missing from that collection..
  - new299 13y ago
    That's a real shame, looks like we live in a world where we have to be seriously proactive about these things.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]

new299 13y ago

Did archive.org not grab them at: https://archive.org/details/nasa_techdocs https://archive.org/details/nasa_techdocs