Tradeoffs In Archiving Data


If you’ve ever had to sort through old technical documents, wondering what still has value and what can be safely tossed, you can identify with the quandary of Thomas Levy, UCSD professor of anthropology and co-founder of the field of cyber-archaeology. Staring at thousands of pieces of pottery in a Jordanian dessert, he erred on the side of keeping it all. “My personal perspective when ... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: May 28


Archival storage Researchers at Harvard University and Northwestern University propose a method of long-lived archival data storage using low-weight molecules. DNA has been explored as a method of archival storage, but the researchers argue that it is inadequate, as the DNA macromolecule is large and requires skilled, repetitive labor to encode and read. Instead, the researchers turned... » read more