At my day job I work a lot with data, from a multitude of sources. It amazes me how hard it is to build data products (you could think of it as an analog to scientific experiments) and know <i>exactly</i> what parts of the processing pipeline influenced what parts in the result.<p>On the other hand: When I hear that many scientists use Excel for complicated processing chains and are sometimes themselves hardly able to reproduce anything a few month after the paper was published, I believe we hit some new low point in scientific activity. Combined with an infrastructure focused on research <i>impact</i> and <i>number of papers</i> published, this is really a sad situation.