Posted by Ohene Akuoko
My data nightmare occurred this past summer as I began workin a new project, taking ove for an exiting PhD student. The project requires the use of field instrumentation that collects continuous data sets of multiple vaiables.The primary data we were looking to obtain was the reponse of the soil to a heat pulse to be used to determine the bulk density.
This past summer was meant for my training to eventually take over of the project,by the current PhD student. The instrumentation was supposed to be calibrated and out in the field rather quickly, but unfortunately we kept running into issue after issue attemping to get the circuitry and heating working properly. The team eventually had to build a new circuit for our instrumentation. But the new circuits meant new ways of monitoring the data as well. With the new circuiry an important continuous measurement of data would now have to be measured manually which was mentioned but noted in a different notebook that I would eventually switch from using.
By the time we got the circuits outputting power correctly it was time for the PhD student to depart, but we were still far from being ready to deploy. To ensure that the deployment went smooth as it possibly could, he left a very detailed field check list a few days after I had solved the other issues and was set to deploy. Since the manaul measurements were not taken the year before they were not on the list. With the time that past solving of the new problems that came up I forgot about to look to the other notebook for a reminder of the manual field meaurements.
So the manual field measurements were not taken until a month into the project,essentially loosing about a month’s worth of the main data in this portion of the project. Though there may be a way where we can mathematically approximate the missing data and hopefully retain that month’s work. In the future, I would definitely take more detailed note of any changes when altering instumentation and also ensure I utilize the same notebook throughout or atleast transfer my notes from the previous notebook.