[vox-tech] collaborative data storage (of excel files)

[Bryan Richter]

On Jan 16, 2008 1:30 PM, Dylan Beaudette <dylan.beaudette at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> They work exclusively with Excel.
>
> A discussion about this problem with my sig. other last night resulted in
> mutual distrust of the way most people in academics and "professional"
> circles are handling data. There really should be a 'data management' course
> which is either part of the Technical Writing courses (which are required) or
> taught as a single quarter class. Everyone who is not in computer science or
> mathematics should be required to either test out of the course or take it.
>

No joke!

A friend of mine (anonymized as 'Sue' for good measure) worked for a
project where she was the only person with any computer science
experience. She was also the least-degreed member, with a B.S. This
project was in a government lab and she was responsible for parsing
data coming back from a satellite and storing it for later retrieval.
The big cheese couldn't understand that they needed a database
application! We're talking terabytes of data over the life of the
project, and they're trying to get Sue to whip something together all
by herself because of their complete unfamiliarity with the concept.

It's rather widespread, though. Being relatively inexperienced, Sue
had to be convinced of the need for a database, herself. And I myself
only had the knowledge to suggest it from working at a LAMP shop. I
certainly experienced data loss and frustrating file usage
(test_results_bryan_new.really_new, anyone?) in my physics classes,
but we never discussed version control or databases.

(And for some unknown reason, taking a class in databases always
sounded really boring to me. :) Now, most of what I do is writing SQL,
and I love it...)

-Bryan
aka chreekat