THOUGHT FOR THE DAY

Business

“I don't pay good wages because I have a lot of money; I have a lot of money because I pay good wages. ” - Robert Bosch

TOPIC OF THE DAY

How to Turn Old Data into Business Gold

As I gaze around my office at the stacks of odd-sized discs and tapes containing data in forgotten formats from companies such as Quadronix and General Automation, I keep wondering: When am I going to have my NASA moment?

Everyone thinks of NASA as the quintessential forward-looking organization, but to me a NASA moment is a sudden insight in which a present-day problem is solved with "useless" resources from the past.

I call it a NASA moment because at the beginning of January I was impressed to read that a team of scientists at the space agency struck gold in a stash of data from lunar seismometers that had been beaming signals to Earth from 1969 through 1977. Somehow no one had erased the data, and when NASA needed seismic moon readings, there they were. The scientists were able to apply new analytical techniques to the data, yielding valuable insights such as that the moon has an iron-rich core similar to Earth's. Needless to say, delving into the archives was a lot less expensive, time-consuming, and risky than sending new seismic probes to the moon would have been.

Read on...

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