[Esip-preserve] Error discovered in Antarctic sea-ice record : Nature News & Comment

[Bruce Barkstrom via Esip-preserve]

We're probably hit by public expectations that the process of producing
high-quality,
homogeneous data can be done instantaneously.  After all, if we can get
weather
reports with data less than 6 hours old, how come it takes a couple of
decades
to get corrections to the old errors?

Another point is that the scientific review process is not well equipped to
handle
long, detailed technical analysis of algorithms that come with as many as
hundreds
of pages of derivations and assorted streams of technical data such as
calibration
coefficients, spectral responses, and perturbations to the operational
procedures.

I guess we may need to train some folks in physics and math so that they
can
understand the full picture, not just the semantic web or database issues.
There
may even be some necessity to teach IT folks FORTRAN (even 1977 FORTRAN)
and such numerical analysis details as roundoff and truncation errors that
were
part of routine physical science training forty years ago.

Or, to put it a bit more broadly, there's a need for a much deeper
education into
more than the mathematical graphs represented in provenance, there's a need
to understand the logic that gets designed into data production scenarios -
and
that's not sound bite stuff.

Bruce B.


On Wed, Jul 23, 2014 at 4:46 PM, Parsons, Mark via Esip-preserve <
esip-preserve at lists.esipfed.org> wrote:

>  provenance, baby!
>
> http://www.nature.com/news/error-discovered-in-antarctic-sea-ice-record-1.15605
>
>
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