Connections (last post from the 2007 tour)
Harry and everyone who planned this tour did a marvelous job of not only managing the logistics but also, intentionally or not, creating an experience full of connections. Not only do I feel more connected with all of you on this trip, your departments, your campuses and the state as a whole, but I’ve also been finding connections between those we visited, aside from their geographic location and relationship to the University.
Being the librarian for Atmospheric Sciences, I felt a connection with the presentation on how weather data is used by the WSU Research Center at Prosser to create and maintain a website using current weather information to help farmers know when to spray their crops to keep certain fungi at bay. It also hit home how the weather can make or break a farmer in any given year. (Before going on this trip, did you know it took two years of moisture to grow one year’s crop of wheat in Sprague?)
The link between weather data and farming is kind of a no brainer but I never really thought about the impact of weather on utility companies. The idea of Itron’s advanced metering infrastructure for electricity, gas and water that tracks more than just amount of consumption but can also track time of consumption got me excited. Particularly when they made the connection of combining it with weather data to help utility companies identify peak consumption times.
This increase in data production obviously brings with it issues of data storage. We learned of a similar problem on a larger scale on our visit to LIGO. They’re generating terabytes upon terabytes of information and are trying to keep it all. These data storage problems resonate with me in my second position with the Libraries in the Office of Assessment & Planning where we deal with using Libraries statistics to aid in decision-making. Now at the Libraries, our current issue with data has less to do with storage space and more with data collection and organization but I can foresee a time when we may need to consider how we’re going to store what we collect.
The connections that have been forming in my mind may not be the most obvious but they’re there and make me feel much more connected to the communities we’ve been visiting across the state and our own university community. So THANK YOU Harry, Eva, Norm and everyone who made this trip possible.