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Class
of '05
Information
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Updated: 24 Mach 2005 28
May 2005 - 6 August 2005
As the result of a catastrophic web server crash on 9 February 2005 resulting in the irretrievably loss of all data, the 2005 session of the RTP was canceled. Schedule
of Events |
Poster |
Program
Summary Events
Summary
From an applicant pool of 176, a pre-screening panel nominated 96 applicants as semi-finalists. These 96 semifinalists were divided into six (6) sets. Review set size varied from 12 to 22 applicants per set. Twelve (12) members from the NMNH scientific community were asked to review each application folder in their set. The review sets were:
All semi finalists were to be reviewed and scored by two different reviewers. Reviewers had until 3:00 p.m. Tuesday, 8 February 2005 to complete their review and enter their scores. One reviewer (Scherer) was late in filing scores. Two reviewers (Stephen Loring and Ed Vicenzi) failed to review applicants in their set and another (William Billeck) didn't complete the review of all folders thereby resulting in 47 semi finalists who were not scored/ranked at the time of scheduled normalization, which began Wednesday morning 9 Feb 05, at 6:30 a.m. with a review of protocols and printing of documents. Evaluators were asked to completed a 100 point score sheet for all application folders in their set. Elements considered during scoring included:
Reviewers typically score differently with some generally awarding higher scores and others awarding lower scores. To adjust for these differences, semifinalist scores were to be normalized on Wednesday, 9 February 2005 to eliminate reviewer bias and equalize scores across reviewer sets. To ensure a diverse representation across divisions and disciplines in the finalist set, the top 40 scoring applications, after score normalization, were to be evaluated and compared using four categories:
The normalization and evaluation of the top scoring applications from the semifinalist set was to take place Wednesday, 9 February 2005. The actual normalization process began at 7:05 a.m. with a listing of all review scores and rank. A preliminary listing of the top 40 ranking finalists had been produced, but because 29 applicants had not been scored the listing produced is a false representation of who the top 40 would have been had the all scores been entered and process completed. However, the list was printed and is reported here as the first report list. At 8:43 a.m. 9 Feb 05 the Web4 (web4.si.edu) server experienced a complete hard drive failure when an unprecedented 2 of the 4 hard drives failed at the same time thereby preventing a rebuild of the server.
Research
Training Program
At
8:43 a.m. on Wednesday, 9 Feb 05 the
Web4 (web4.si.edu) server experienced a complete hard drive failure when
an unprecedented 2 of the 4 hard drives failed at the same time thereby
preventing a rebuild of the server. As a result, multiple Smithsonian websites and web-based applications were off-line until they could be moved to another web server, after restoring them from backup tapes. This problem was further compounded when it was discovered that the directory containing the Microsoft Access database (19 MBytes) for the Smithsonian Online Academic Appointments (SOLAA) system hosted on the server was not being backed up. OCIO and NMNH were able to locate and restore a previous copy of the database (dated Dec 11, 2004) in the possession of a NMNH contractor working on an upgrade to the existing system. On 2/17/05 OCIO sent the failed hard drives to an outside vendor to attempt to recover any of the missing data between Dec 12th and Feb 9th. Unfortunately the SOLAA data was not recoverable. The Web4 server was hosted on a Dell 2550 whose 3-year warranty expired on 6/14/2004. The Smithsonian's current funding restrictions accept a planned risk of operating servers on a 4-year replacement cycle that extends one year past the industry best practice of replacing Intel-based servers every 3 years. The age of the server and its high utilization (the popular National Zoo site with the recent webcasting of the cheetah cubs received 70 million hits in January and had recently been moved off of Web4) may have contributed to the simultaneous failure of the two hard drives. Web4 is a RAID 5 server. With RAID 5, redundancy is inherently built into the hardware to allow one hard drive to fail. The failed drive can then be swapped with a new drive, and the system will automatically rebuild itself to restore service within a couple of hours. Since multiple drives failed, the rebuild was beyond the capabilities of the preventative measures that were put in place with the RAID 5 setup. Further complicating the situation, the SOLAA Access database file was removed from back up protocols by the Smithsonian Webmaster, who decided approximately a year ago (January 2004) to only backup specific directories on Web4 in order to prevent the backup process from running into production hours. Unknown to NMNH, the directory containing the SOLAA data was accidentally excluded from this scaled back list of directories. Web Services Division mistakenly believed that the database was being backed up by the customer. In actuality, the NMNH development contractor had made a copy for test purposes but was not creating regular backup and none were made for recovery purposes. In addition, the limited back up did not support a "bare bones build" of Web4 after the hard drive failure. A "bare bones build" would have allowed OCIO to restore Web4 from the backup ta | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Semi Finalist Review
