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The archive
Technology · Machines
…four football fields that opened on the lake’s south shore in 2021. Its operator, Vessen Data, rents computing power to whoever needs it: banks, universities, the national weather service, and, increasingly,…
Politics · Water
…utility hired a contractor to turn the ledgers and renewal cards into its first computer database. The database had a single field for the material of each connection, and the contractor’s data-entry manual—which…
Technology · Forecasting
…farmers, hikers and the valley’s older residents and tested each against 12 years of station data. Twenty-eight failed. Three held up well enough to be built into the model’s corrections. The most useful is a…
Science · Biodiversity
…itself a thing that needs looking after. In 2021 the repository moved its records from a database built in the 1990s to a new one, and in the move about 2,300 samples lost the field that said when they were…
Technology · Engineering
…bridges usually go. They fail expensively, a long time before they fail dangerously. The data was telling us that for over a year. It just wasn’t telling anyone in particular.” They fail expensively, a long…
Culture · Archives
…cake that failed, on a night when there was nothing else to notice. “The weather columns are data,” she says. “The remarks are the job. I thought I was archiving lighthouses. I’m archiving attention.” The bricks…
Technology · Infrastructure
…parallel with Cass for the first time, calculating the same month’s pensions from the same data. The two systems disagreed about 14,812 of them. Kurtz was 27 then, an analyst on Fennick Rowe’s team, and she…
Science · Astronomy
…for the purpose. The plate will be foggy and of little scientific use. “It’s not for the data,” Albright said. “It’s for the cabinet.” Hale has already written its sleeve, in pencil, leaving the date blank.…
Technology · Right to repair
…program the co-op wrote and called Hedgerow, which has three menus: read faults, show live data and relearn a replaced component. That is all it does. Dunmore and Tomasz deliberately left out anything that…
Ideas · Essay
…the number consoling, and then deflating. I had imagined myself a lone sufferer; I was a data point, and not a novel one. So I did what people in my line of work do when they are annoyed and own a library…
Science · Ecology
…us on the right timescale. Weller’s group spent two winters turning the notebooks into a database, and much of that time went into deciding what not to use. Ekland’s skill grew over the years; she can now…
Science · Climate
…which way to face when reading a stake on a slope. A change of hands can put a step in the data as abrupt as any change in the weather. So for the past three seasons Malm and Rask have read every stake independently…
Technology · Hospitals
…that slips through stone and concrete in a way the signals carrying phone calls and wireless data do not. Every pager in the building hears every message and ignores the ones not addressed to it. Nothing has…