More On Failures From FAST 2020

A Study of SSD Reliability in Large Scale Enterprise Storage Deployments by Stathis Maneas et al, which I discussed in Enterprise SSD Reliability, wasn't the only paper at this year's Usenix FAST conference about storage failures. Below the fold I comment on one specifically about hard drives rather than SSDs, making it more relevant to archival storage.

Proof-of-Stake In Practice

At the most abstract level, the work of Eric Budish, Raphael Auer, Joshua Gans and Neil Gandal is obvious. A blockchain is secure only if the value to be gained by an attack is less than the cost of mounting it. These papers all assume that actors are "economically rational", driven by the immediate monetary bottom line, but this isn't always true in the real world. As I wrote when commenting on Gans and Gandal:

As we see with Bitcoin's Lightning Network, true members of the cryptocurrency cult are not concerned that the foregone interest on capital they devote to making the system work is vastly greater than the fees they receive for doing so. The reason is that, as David Gerard writes, they believe that "number go up". In other words, they are convinced that the finite supply of their favorite coin guarantees that its value will in the future "go to the moon", providing capital gains that vastly outweigh the foregone interest.

Follow me below the fold for a discussion of a recent attack on a Proof-of-Stake blockchain that wasn't motivated by the immediate monetary bottom line.

Enterprise SSD Reliability

I couldn't attend this year's USENIX FAST conference. Because of the COVID-19 outbreak the normally high level of participation from Asia was greatly reduced, with many registrants and even some presenters unable to make it. But I've been reading the papers, and below the fold I have commentary on an extremely interesting one about the reliability of SSD media in enterprise applications.

Guest Post: Michael Nelson's Response

Back last June I posted a three part series on Michael Nelson's CNI keynote Web Archives at the Nexus of Good Fakes and Flawed Originals and offered him a guest post to respond. Now, I owe Nelson a profound apology. He e-mailed me in January, but I completely misunderstood his e-mail and missed the attachment containing the HTML of the guest post. It is no real excuse that I was on painkillers and extremely short of sleep at the time.

So, below the fold, greatly delayed through my failure, is Michael Nelson's response, which is also available here.

Falling Research Productivity Revisited

Last year, in Falling Research Productivity, I commented on Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find? by Nicholas Bloom et al. Now, The Economist's current issue has a Free Exchange column entitled How to get more innovation bang for the research buck that takes off from the same paper:

In a paper by Nicholas Bloom, Charles Jones and Michael Webb of Stanford University, and John Van Reenen of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the authors note that even as discovery has disappointed, real investment in new ideas has grown by more than 4% per year since the 1930s. Digging into particular targets of research—to increase computer processing power, crop yields and life expectancy—they find that in each case maintaining the pace of innovation takes ever more money and people.

Follow me below the fold for some commentary on a number of the other papers they cite.

Ludwig Siegele On Data

Ludwig Siegele's latest Special report for The Economist is entitled A deluge of data is giving rise to a new economy. He provides an excellent overview of the impact the availability of vast amounts of data is having on business. But follow me below the fold for my two quibbles.

The Scholarly Record At The Internet Archive

The Internet Archive has been working on a Mellon-funded grant aimed at collecting, preserving and providing persistent access to as much of the open-access academic literature as possible. The motivation is that much of the "long tail" of academic literature comes from smaller publishers whose business model is fragile, and who are at risk of financial failure or takeover by the legacy oligopoly publishers. This is particularly true if their content is open access, since they don't have subscription income. This "long tail" content is thus at risk of loss or vanishing behind a paywall.

The project takes two opposite but synergistic approaches:

• Top-Down: Using the bibliographic metadata from sources like CrossRef to ask whether that article is in the Wayback Machine and, if it isn't trying to get it from the live Web. Then, if a copy exists, adding the metadata to an index.
• Bottom-up: Asking whether each of the PDFs in the Wayback Machine is an academic article, and if so extracting the bibliographic metadata and adding it to an index.

Below the fold, a discussion of the progress that has been made so far.