Tag Archives: digital archiving

NanoRosetta; a Kickstarter archiving project for the human genome

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The NanoRosetta Kickstarter project needs to raise $100,000 by June 2, 2013 if the organizers are to shrink the human genome to the nanoscale and archive it by printing  it on five nickel discs which will be good for 10,000 years. From the NanoRosetta campaign page,

NanoRosetta is seeking to bring the archival industry into the modern age by using nanotechnology to print analog information onto nickel discs. With a life-span of 10,000 years, no other technology can match the durability and longevity of these discs, and because of the microscopic size of the images printed on the discs, we are able to print high volumes of data that were once thought to be unprintable.

To showcase this paradigm-shifting technology, we are seeking to print multiple sets of all 3.2 BILLION characters of the Human genome on five nickel discs about the size of CDs. Previously, this task would have required a room of books to archive the information as analog data.

Storing this information digitally may be effective in the short term, but for the purposes of long-term archiving, the computer, the operating system and the software would also need to be archived equally well. This is the Achilles heel of digital archiving, and the reason why an analog system is the only way to properly archive important data.

Such passion for archiving warms my heart and I love this notion which reminds me of certain types of science fiction novels (from NanoRosetta campaign page),

No matter how well something is stored, it is always susceptible to a single point of failure.

This is where you come in.

With 80 custodians of the Human genome, with at least one custodian located on each continent, we can avoid the problem of a single point of failure and give you a unique piece to hang on your wall.

After the campaign started in early April, the team partnered with the Moon Arts Project with a plan to send the discs into outer space,

This Kickstarter has just gone from a 10,000 year archiving project to a 1 Billion year archiving project! Thanks to the vision of Lowry Burgess, the former dean of the College of Fine Arts at Carnegie Mellon University and head of the mission’s Moon Arts Project, the university’s engineers and artists have made room for the Human genome discs on their lunar lander.

“One of these days, one of these days…” 

Launching in 2015.

More information on the university’s mission, their status, and the Moon Arts Project can be found at: http://www.cmu.edu/google-lunar-x/
http://moonarts.org/

As for the original Rosetta Stone which provides the inspiration for this project, here’s a little information from its Wikipedia essay (Note: Links have been removed),

Originally displayed within a temple, the stone was probably moved during the early Christian or medieval period and eventually used as building material in the construction of Fort Julien near the town of Rashid (Rosetta) in the Nile Delta. It was rediscovered there in 1799 by a soldier, Pierre-François Bouchard, of the French expedition to Egypt. As the first Ancient Egyptian bilingual text recovered in modern times, the Rosetta Stone aroused widespread public interest with its potential to decipher this hitherto untranslated ancient language. Lithographic copies and plaster casts began circulating among European museums and scholars. Meanwhile, British troops defeated the French in Egypt in 1801, and the original stone came into British possession under the Capitulation of Alexandria. Transported to London, it has been on public display at the British Museum since 1802. It is the most-visited object in the British Museum.

The NanoRosetta team has created a campaign video,

For those who like to know something about the people behind a project, this team doesn’t provide much information (from the campaign page),

Bruce Ha, John Bishop, and Jakub Svec make up the NanoRosetta team bringing technical expertise and the archiving industry together.

Websites

The team (also known as Norsam Technologies) notes on its campaign page that it has worked with the Long Now Foundation on that organization’s, The Rosetta Project.

I wish them the best of luck with NanoRosetta.

There are other pieces about archives on the blog but this Mar. 8, 2012 posting, Digital disasters, probably provides the best justifications for this NanoRosetta project.

Dem bones at McGill; innovation from the Canadian business community?; the archiving frontier; linking and copyright

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I have a number of bits today amongst them, Canadian nanotechnology, Canadian business innovation, digital archiving, and copyrights and linking.

A Quebec biotech company, Enobia Pharma is working with Dr. Marc McKee on treatments for genetic bone diseases. From the news item on Nanowerk,

The field is known as biomineralization and it involves cutting-edge, nanotech investigation into the proteins, enzymes and other molecules that control the coupling of mineral ions (calcium and phosphate) to form nano-crystals within the bone structure. The treatment, enzyme replacement therapy to treat hypophosphatasia, is currently undergoing clinical testing in several countries including Canada. Hypophosphatasia is a rare and severe disorder resulting in poor bone mineralization. In infants, symptoms include respiratory insufficiency, failure to thrive and rickets.

This research in biomineralization (coupling of mineral ions to form nano-crystals) could lead to better treatments for other conditions such as cardiovascular diseases, arthritis, and kidney stones.

McKee’s research is being funded in part by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research  From the Nanowerk news item,

McKee’s research program is a concrete example of how university researchers are working with private sector partners as an integral part of Canada’s innovative knowledge economy, and the positive outcomes their collaborations can offer.

I don’t think that businesses partnering with academic institutions in research collaborations is precisely what they mean when they talk about business innovation (research and development). From a March 2, 2010 article about innovation by Preston Manning in the Globe & Mail,

Government competition policy and support for science, technology, and innovation (STI) can complement business leadership on the innovation front, but it is not a substitute for such leadership. Action to increase innovation in the economy is first and foremost a business responsibility.

Manning goes on to describe what he’s done on this matter and asks for suggestions on how to encourage Canadian business to be more innovative. (Thanks to Pasco Phronesis for pointing me to Manning’s article.) I guess the problem is that what we’ve been doing has worked well enough and so there’s no great incentive to change.

I’ve been on an archiving kick lately and so here’s some more. The British Library recently (Feb.25.10) announced public access to their UK Web Archive, a project where they have been saving online materials. From the news release,

British Library Chief Executive, Dame Lynne Brindley said:

“Since 2004 the British Library has led the UK Web Archive in its mission to archive a record of the major cultural and social issues being discussed online. Throughout the project the Library has worked directly with copyright holders to capture and preserve over 6,000 carefully selected websites, helping to avoid the creation of a ‘digital black hole’ in the nation’s memory.

“Limited by the existing legal position, at the current rate it will be feasible to collect just 1% of all free UK websites by 2011. We hope the current DCMS consultation will enact the 2003 Legal Deposit Libraries Act and extend the provision of legal deposit through regulationto cover freely available UK websites, providingregular snapshots ofthe free UK web domain for the benefit of future research.”

Mike Masnick at Techdirt notes (here) that the British Library has to get permission (the legal position Dame Brindley refers to) to archive these materials and this would seem to be an instance where ‘fair use’ should be made to apply.

On the subject of losing data, I read an article by Mike Roberts for the Vancouver Province, January 22, 2006, p. B5 (digital copy here) that posed this question, What if the world lost its memory? It was essentially an interview with Luciana Duranti (chair of the Master of Archival Studies programme and professor at the School of Library, Archival and Information Studies at the University of British Columbia, Canada) where she commented about the memories we had already lost. From the article,

Alas, she says, every day something else is irretrievably lost.

The research records of the U.S. Marines for the past 25 years? Gone.

East German land-survey records vital to the reunification of Germany? Toast.

A piece of digital interactive music recorded by Canadian composer Keith Hamel just eight years ago?

“Inaccessible, over, finito,” says Duranti, educated in her native Italy and a UBC prof since 1987.

Duranti, director of InterPARES (International Research on Permanent Authentic Records in Electronic Systems), an international cyber-preservation project comprising 20 countries and 60 global archivists, says original documentation is a thing of the past.

I was shocked by how much ‘important’ information had been lost and I assume still is. (Getting back to the UK Web Archives, if they can only save 1% of the UK’s online material then a lot has got to be missing.)

For anyone curious about InterPARES, I got my link for the Roberts article from this page on the InterPARES 1 website.

Back to Techdirt and Mike Masnick who has educated me as to a practice I had noted but not realized is ‘the way things are done amongst journalists’. If you spend enough time on the web, you’ll notice stories that make their way to newspapers without any acknowledgment of  their web or writerly origins and I’m not talking about news releases which are designed for immediate placement in the media or rewritten/reworked before placement. From the post on Techdirt,

We recently wrote about how the NY Post was caught taking a blogger’s story and rewriting it for itself — noting the hypocrisy of a News Corp. newspaper copying from someone else, after Rupert Murdoch and his top execs have been going around decrying various news aggregators (and Google especially) for “stealing” from News Corp. newspapers. It’s even more ridiculous when you think about it — because the “stealing” that Rupert is upset about is Google linking to the original story — a step that his NY Post writer couldn’t even be bothered to do.

Of course, as a few people pointed out in the comments, this sort of “re-reporting” is quite common in the traditional news business. You see it all the time in newspapers, magazines and broadcast TV. They take a story that was found somewhere else and just “re-report” it, so that they have their own version of it.

That’s right, it’s ‘re-reporting’ without attributions or links. Masnick’s post (he’s bringing in Felix Salmon’s comments) attributes this to a ‘print’ mentality where reporters are accustomed to claiming first place and see acknowledgments and links as failure while ‘digital natives’ acknowledge and link regularly since they view these as signs of respect. I’m not going to disagree but I would like to point out that citing sources is pretty standard for academics or anyone trained in that field. I imagine most reporters have one university or college degree, surely they learned the importance of citing one’s sources. So does training as a journalist erode that understanding?

And, getting back to this morning’s archival subtheme, at the end of Clark Hoyt’s (blogger for NY Times) commentary about the plagiarism he had this to say,

Finally, The Times owes readers a full accounting. I asked [Philip] Corbett [standards editor] for the examples of Kouwe’s plagiarism and suggested that editors’ notes be appended to those articles on the Web site and in The Times’s electronic archives. Corbett would not provide the examples and said the paper was not inclined to flag them, partly because there were some clear-cut cases and others that were less clear. “Where do you draw the line?” he asked.

I’d draw it at those he regards as clear. To do otherwise is to leave a corrupted record within the archives of The Times. It is not the way to close the case.

One last thing, Heather Haley is one of the guests appearing tonight in Rock Against Prisons.

Tuesday, March 9, 2010

7:00pm – 11:55pm

Little Mountain Gallery

195 east 26th Ave [Vancouver, Canada]

More details from my previous announcement about this event here.

French want more nanotech public debates; British science oral history project

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After last month’s post about disturbances (causing at least one cancellation) taking place during a series of nanotechnology public debates in France, it was a surprise to find that at least one French group wants to continue the ‘discussion’. This last series of  events has been completed with a report due in April 2010. According to a news item on Chemical Watch, France Nature Environnement (FNE) is urging more public debates. From Chemical Watch,

The French public debate on nanotechnologies that began in September ended this week. An official summary of the 17 debates will be published at the end of April, but environmental organisation France Nature Environnement (FNE) says in its conclusions that further discussion is needed to decide where the technology is useful for human advancement and where its use is unacceptable.

You can look at the FNE news item here but it is in French and the site doesn’t seem hospitable to Firefox,  so do try another browser.

Meanwhile, the Brits are embarking on an oral history of British science. From the news item on BBC News,

The British Library has begun a project to create a vast, online oral history and archive of British science.

The three-year project will see 200 British scientists interviewed and their recollections recorded for the audio library.

…

“We have long been painfully aware that there’s a marked absence of significant recordings of scientists,” said Dr Rob Perks, curator of oral history at the British Library.

For instance, said Dr Perks, in the current sound archives there are only two recordings of Ernest Rutherford, none of computer pioneer Alan Turing, hovercraft inventor Christopher Cockerell or AV Hill, a physiologist and Nobel laureate.

A study carried out prior to the project being started found that in the last ten years, 30 leading British scientists including 9 Nobel winners have died leaving little or no archive of their work.

I’m glad to hear that this oral history is being preserved although I do wonder about the recording formats. One of the problems with archiving materials is maintaining to access them afterwards.

Coincidentally, one of the local Vancouver papers (The Georgia Straight) has an article by Rhiannon Coppin (in the Feb. 25 – March 4, 2010 issue) about the City of Vancouver archives and their attempts at digital archiving. From the article,

Every day, Vancouver’s city archivist and director of records and archives runs a rescue operation on our past. Les Mobbs might send out film reels from the ’30s for repair, or he could receive a donation of early-20th-century photographic negatives that need to be catalogued, scanned, and put into cold storage.

Lately, Mobbs has been putting equal consideration into how to preserve our future. More and more of the city’s legal and cultural record is being created in a digital format; in other words, it’s “born digital”, he told the Georgia Straight.

…

The pitfall in digital archiving is that we’re poor caretakers of electronic file formats. In 50 or 100 years, we’ll know we’ve won the preservation game if we can open and read a computer document created today. But even in 2010, we’re missing out on 20-year-old WordStar files stuck on five-and-a-quarter-inch floppy disks. Ironically, it may be safer to keep a paper copy of a document than to store the original computer file.

“We’ve been dealing with paper for 2,000 years,” Mobbs said. “We have a lot of experience with what paper is, what it looks like, and how it’s preserved.”

While acid decay, mould, brittleness, and water damage are formidable but vanquishable foes, machine decay, format obsolescence, and file integrity degradation are virtually unconquerable. The short lifetime of many licensed software formats and the quick deaths of so much hardware (remember LaserDisc?) have posed a particular challenge for archivists like Mobbs.

“How do we preserve material that is, for all intents and purposes, essentially transitory?” he asked.

While this discussion might seem irrelevant on a mostly science-oriented blog, the ‘memristor’ story highlights why information about the past is so important. In 2008, R. Stanley Williams (HP Labs) and his colleagues published two papers, the first proving the existence of a fourth member, a memristor, of electrical engineering’s ‘holy trinity’ of the resistor, capacitor, and inductor and the second paper where they established engineering control over the memristor. Williams  and his team both solved a problem they were experiencing in the lab and made engineering history, in part  by reviewing engineering theories dating back at least 30 years. You can read my post about it here.

Imagine if those theories had been locked into formats that were no longer accessible. That’s one of the major reasons for preserving the past, it can yield important information.

In the interest of full disclosure, I once worked for the City of Vancouver archives.