For marine ecologists, late-night work doesn’t just happen in the office. Squid come to the surface when it’s dark. To research them during my Ph.D., I worked on ships from sunset to sunrise, attracting squid with glow-in-the dark lures.
After two years in grad school and many late nights catching and releasing Humboldt squid as big as I am, I finally retrieved a pop-up satellite archival tag filled with ocean depth and temperature data that might help untangle whether climate change was the reason those creatures were migrating northward. But I was overwhelmed to realize the file was too big for Excel, the only data analysis software I knew. This was not “big data,” but it felt like big data to me because it was too big for the skill sets I had.
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