Scientist Tech Help
Scientist Tech Help
What tech people think scientists need help with: [Cueball, Ponytail, and Megan are facing a second Cueball and Hairbun. Ponytail is gesturing with her hand out. The second Cueball has his finger raised.] Ponytail: Please–our data, it's too complex! Can your magical machine minds unearth the patterns that lie within? Cueball 2: We shall marshal our finest algorithms!
What scientists actually need: [The two Cueballs, Ponytail, Megan, and Hairbun are in the same position as before. The second Cueball no longer has his finger raised.] Ponytail: For a few weeks in June, the lab was infested by wasps, so we had to take pictures of the equipment through the window. Ponytail: How do you get graphs from a Polaroid photo into Excel?

In this comic, Randall pokes fun at stereotypes of scientists that "tech people" hold.
In the first panel Randall, presents an idealized view of the tasks of tech people. A group of scientists have run their experiments and compiled their data, but find that the data is simply too complicated for humans, even advanced scientists such as themselves; the tech people resolve in heroic statements to decipher the data with their most advanced algorithms. Large portions of machine learning and data science hinge around finding a pattern (either regression or classification) in a given data set, but the more common, real-world problem is in data cleaning and preparation. For the most part, the rest can be done with preexisting implementations. These types of tasks are those that tech people both expect to perform, and hope to expand upon.
The second panel presents a different reality. The scientists are fully confident they can interpret the data on their own, provided they can access it, because the methods of recording their data are incredibly sub-par. Apparently wasps had infested the lab, and the scientists had to take photos of their equipment through the window. This created a much more fundamental problem of data format than normal (image vs spreadsheet, as opposed to something more normal like pixel-wise vs vertex-based segmentation).  The joke is that the scientists' questions for their tech specialists are very mundane in nature; it presents not a chance to test and prove their machine learning systems, but a simple and tedious process of untangling digital paperwork. This is true in real life — experts' expertise is usually deep, but not broad, and helping them with issues outside their comfort zone is rarely glamorous.
Polaroid is a brand of instant camera , though "Polaroid" is often used to refer to instant cameras in general. Excel is referring to Microsoft Excel , a spreadsheet management program.
The title text refers to WebPlotDigitizer , a tool which may be used on visual displays of data such as graphs and charts in order to extract the underlying data. This tool would have the potential to solve the problem which the scientists have by extracting data from the images taken of the equipment. Randall acknowledges the usefulness of the tool, but also expresses some dislike that the tool was invented at all — someone must have had the original data to draw the graph, thus if they had made the data available then he wouldn't have to reverse engineer the plot. Other possibilities are that he simply feels that the tool is too powerful and leaving him less work to do, or that tools so trite and seemingly unnecessary prove so useful in the end.
2116: .NORM Normal File Format deals with nested file formats.
What tech people think scientists need help with: [Cueball, Ponytail, and Megan are facing a second Cueball and Hairbun. Ponytail is gesturing with her hand out. The second Cueball has his finger raised.] Ponytail: Please–our data, it's too complex! Can your magical machine minds unearth the patterns that lie within? Cueball 2: We shall marshal our finest algorithms!
What scientists actually need: [The two Cueballs, Ponytail, Megan, and Hairbun are in the same position as before. The second Cueball no longer has his finger raised.] Ponytail: For a few weeks in June, the lab was infested by wasps, so we had to take pictures of the equipment through the window. Ponytail: How do you get graphs from a Polaroid photo into Excel?
