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Academic Torrents

academictorrents.com

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Re: Academic Torrents

#41

Post by whadar »

pixelcort wrote: post #16
sillysaurus2 wrote: post #11

One problem with offering a dataset as a torrent is that it's impossible to edit it after it's released. However, it seems like that doesn't matter at all in this case, because any scenario I can think of which could be solved by editing the dataset (like redacting private info that was accidentally included) wouldn't avoid the original problem: that they accidentally released private info in the first place. Perhaps…

BitTorrent Sync might be useful for that: http://www.bittorrent.com/sync

Hopefully sharefest.me would be another alternative pretty soon

Re: Academic Torrents

#43

Post by icebraining »

glomph wrote: post #31
runarberg wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps if universities would robustly seed their staffs and students torrents?

Kind of solves a problem that doesn't exist though doesn't it? It isn't like these universities are crying about bandwidth costs and it isn't like demand is maxing out their upstream.

It's not just about their bandwidth; some countries / zones / networks have much better local connectivity than external, particularly international.

For example, until a few years ago, some of our ISPs had different caps for national vs international traffic, and there were popular forks of P2P clients that allowed you to filter based on that.

We have since moved to unlimited everything, but I wouldn't be surprised if some countries still had different caps or speeds for international traffic.

Re: Academic Torrents

#44

Post by jackmaney »

rfoeorfisdjus wrote: post #22
jackmaney wrote: post #4

Excellent! It's far too early to tell, but I'd like to be hopeful that this distribution network could be another nail in the coffin of the old, expensive, dead-tree journals.

I guess you mean papers. Go back to reddit, libtard.

Yes, I do mean papers. I'm not on reddit, you mouth-breathing neanderthal.

Re: Academic Torrents

#45

Post by aroch »

blueblob wrote: post #40
reitzensteinm wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, it's quite cheap to get a seeding box from LeaseWeb, in ascending levels of sophistication: * 100mbps unmetered 2x2tb 39 eur/mo * 1gbps unmetered 24x2tb 349 eur/mo * 10gbps unmetered 24x2tb 1089 eur/mo I'm tempted to grab the first, and open a GitTip account in case anyone wants to chip in towards the second (4tb isn't a lot of space as far as this stuff goes). The third is unlikely to be useful; this stuff is lo…

That does not sound cheap to me as a graduate student.

$50/month for a side project that I want to grow and nurture isn't a lot by any stretch, even on a gTA stipend. Given that you could subsidize it through your program, it becomes even cheaper

Re: Academic Torrents

#46

Post by capnrefsmmat »

_delirium wrote: post #27
cing wrote: post #7

The team should learn from the ghost-town that is BioTorrents[1] and offer more than just a tracker. [1] http://www.biotorrents.net/browse.php?incldead=1

That's one reason I'd prefer that academics just put data into some kind of local university archive, where possible. Many universities provide resources to host scientific data (and have done so for decades, since the days of ftp.dept.university.edu servers), and putting it there makes it more likely that it'll still be there in 10 years. Torrents by comparison tend to be: 1) slow, as you rely on random seeders rath…

Another alternative is something like the Dryad Digital Repository:

http://datadryad.org/

It's meant to include companion datasets for published papers, and gives out DOIs so datasets can be cited in other works. And it's mirrored at various universities to prevent loss.

Re: Academic Torrents

#47

Post by rodolphoarruda »

pixelcort wrote: post #16
sillysaurus2 wrote: post #11

One problem with offering a dataset as a torrent is that it's impossible to edit it after it's released. However, it seems like that doesn't matter at all in this case, because any scenario I can think of which could be solved by editing the dataset (like redacting private info that was accidentally included) wouldn't avoid the original problem: that they accidentally released private info in the first place. Perhaps…

BitTorrent Sync might be useful for that: http://www.bittorrent.com/sync

I'd used BT Sync for a couple of weeks to sync data between my own machines. It works neatly. One question here. When you modify some part of a big file, does the program send out only the difference to the other authorized machines, or entire file? Let's say a researcher exports her data to a 1GB CSV file of my interest. I download it. In the following week the same researcher updates her CVS with more data, now it has 1.01GB in size. How big my next download will be?

Re: Academic Torrents

#50

Post by dspillett »

sillysaurus2 wrote: post #11

One problem with offering a dataset as a torrent is that it's impossible to edit it after it's released. However, it seems like that doesn't matter at all in this case, because any scenario I can think of which could be solved by editing the dataset (like redacting private info that was accidentally included) wouldn't avoid the original problem: that they accidentally released private info in the first place. Perhaps…

> but in that case they could just release a second dataset as an addendum

Or for some data it would make sense to partition the data into smaller chunks instead of one huge archive. That way adding a chunk (the new year's data for a multi-year dataset perhaps) just menas releasing a new torrent with the extra srchive in and a name meaningful enough to indicate the difference. Anyone with the last set could then just download the new partition (and any modified ones).

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