| ▲ | ggm 5 hours ago |
| I did marine biology field work almost 5 decades ago as a lowly junior lab tech. Work always has downsides, for me it was not really the Scots winter, cold feed, chapped hands, the land-rover having to reverse up steep icy roads to get back from the harbourside: it was washing the glassware and dealing with sodium hydroxide weighing (it absorbs moisture from the air so its a fools game). But, field work also brought amazing experiences, I visited the seaside 70+ times over a year, and got an insight into what a time series really means when you cover the tidal and weather and seasonal cycles. It's also always error-prone. Nothing in the field is perfect. Reality is a bad approximation for your model at times, if you take a model centric view. I would be immensely skeptical that field work is ever going away. There may be aspects of truth in this around cost of travel, risk, seniority. |
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| ▲ | defrost 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| I've always enjoyed field work, much of the code I've written has been well outside of any office. Exploration geophysics paid for me to travel to and across more than half he countries on the planet, calibrating old maps, datums, projections against the 'new' WGS84, scaling peaks to stage base stations, getting familiar with the ins and outs of tides, magnetic fields, gravity, radiometric backgrounds, finding a good band in Mali ... Loved it. |
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| ▲ | ggm 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Douglas Mawson ("home of the blizzard") had a rich life after Antartica as a field geologist, exploring the flinders ranges. He found a radium mine and was shipping ore to Europe for a while. He led students on field trips, one of whom, Reg Sprigg caught the bug, explored as much as he could, persuaded the Australian petro and uranium sector to fund pushing tracks into his favourite spots, and then converted the landscape into the Arkaroola Wilderness Sanctuary. I got to spend a night there last year on a flight safari to Lake Eyre, it's an amazing place, dark sky with a big telescope, wildlife, well worth a visit. Mawson had the field trip of a lifetime (for his two mates, it was the end of their lifetime!) and it didn't end his bug for the outside. I don't think he was made to sit in a lab. I'd say your Mali trip was the same: it hasn't made you want to stop being outside from the sound of it. | | |
| ▲ | defrost 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Not in the least, I still love the outdoors. I've "retired" to argriculture tech and labour support for W.Australian family grain production. We've almost finished harvest and I've been doing a lot of scrolling and posting here while hanging about near idle "on call" fire tenders (we had a hundred fires, mostly from lightening strikes, in a single week just recently) * https://www.watoday.com.au/national/western-australia/wa-bus... * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yulvSvtFVqc ^ Further south than I'm based, and a header fire, not a strike. Okay when caught early - life and town threatening if not. Oh, yeah: Songhoy Blues: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOValSt7YOY The Mali trip was notable for random types firing weapons at our aircraft while we were running lines with 80m ground clearance - we had to armour the cockpit bellies and stuff the fuel tanks with mesh. | | |
| ▲ | nullhole 2 minutes ago | parent [-] | | > The Mali trip was notable for random types firing weapons at our aircraft while we were running lines with 80m ground clearance - we had to armour the cockpit bellies and stuff the fuel tanks with mesh. Datums can get dull fast but there's adventure inherent in surveying. You should write a book, or at least a chapter or two. "Nadir Point" has a nice ring to it... |
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| ▲ | jofer 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I also have spent quite awhile as an exploration geophysicist. I miss it! I work purely with satellite data now, which is decidedly less tangible. I've done a fair bit in the field, but a huge part of my career has been mining old datasets and reinterpreting things in light of new data/etc. What the article is describing isn't new in any way. But it also doesn't remove the need for fieldwork or the need for the experience of having done fieldwork to use existing datasets. Observational sciences (e.g. geology, biology, etc) where you can't easily replicate the environment you are studying in the lab are always going to hinge on some sort of fieldwork. Finding creative ways to use existing data doesn't change that. | |
| ▲ | tootie 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I worked in a research lab like 30 years ago and it was all on computers. We had loads of generic data collected by someone somewhere and we just looked for patterns to infer sequences. I wrote Java and C++ and got my name on a paper. There were maybe a dozen scientists in the lab and they were all just coders with expertise in one or another field of biology. It was called a "dry lab". |
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| ▲ | tyre 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I hope it doesn’t go away, too. It’s been sad seeing journalism in the online era, where so much (not all!) content is produced without really visiting or researching things. Often it’s based only on statements / tweets, sometimes more seeping based on phone calls, sometimes reading a book on the topic, but rarely do journalists seem to show up anywhere. When reading something like Didion’s piece on the LA highway central command, it shows how irreplaceable lived experience is. |
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| ▲ | refactor_master 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| I think this is a classic old-vs-new tale. I started my PhD in biochemical research where analyzing data by hand was definitely a "craft" in some aspects. Later I forewent going to the lab entirely and instead spent all my time on developing machine learning for automated data analysis. But just like field work, you still need people in labs who can continue the craft. The article should perhaps introspect a bit more instead of setting up a false dichotomy between "rainforest field work or computers". |
