Shutdown delays University research

Students often use a variety of excuses when they don’t complete their work on time. “My dog ate my homework,” “I left my notebook at home” and “My printer wasn’t working” are token examples.

But for more than two weeks, students and staff alike were able to use a new excuse: “My government shut down.”

During the approximately two-week government shutdown that began on Oct. 1, government agency websites were temporarily inaccessible to individuals seeking data that these agencies typically provide. For some classes or programs at Pitt that depend on this data for their curricula, the virtual blackout posed a problem.

After Congress failed to pass a continuing resolution that appropriated funds for the 2014 fiscal year, non-essential government programs temporarily lost funding. From Oct. 1 to Oct. 16, the United States government entered a partial shutdown that resulted in the furloughing of about 800,000 workers, and several government agencies were forced to cease their operations due to a lack of funding until the Continuing Appropriations Act 2014 was passed by Congress on Oct. 16.

These government agencies included the U.S. Geological Survey, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Centers for Disease Control, National Center for Health Statistics, U.S. Census Bureau and National Center for Education Statistics.

Christina Das, a senior majoring in politics and philosophy, encountered a problem in her public service class. Her class typically uses the most recent data from the CDC or NIH websites, but without access, the students used older data, predominantly from 2012.

The CDC and NIH post statistics online about common illnesses, including diabetes and heart disease, every month.

For Das, the use of older, possibly outdated statistics made the class experience less beneficial. She worried that studying older information would jeopardize how job-market-ready she was.

“It really isn’t conducive to learning about what we can do today,” she said about using past data during the shutdown. “We should be using the most recent data.”

The government website outage also impacted students and professors in the urban studies program, according to program director William Chase.

Michael Glass, an urban studies professor, teaches a seminar based on practical research methods, and his students often utilize U.S. Census data for projects. 

For instance, students conducting research on the Lawrenceville neighborhood of Pittsburgh would typically verify that their household samples were accurate by comparing the samples to U.S. Census data. Because of the shutdown, students could not confirm their compiled data.

The shutdown also affected Pitt’s University Center for Social and Urban Research, although the center’s core operations were able to continue.

Essentially an intermediary, the center makes information such as data from the Census Bureau or the Bureau of Labor Statistics available to individuals and organizations. As a research affiliate of the Pennsylvania State Data Center, the commonwealth’s official source of data, the center is responsible for disseminating census information.

“For a lot of our research, it is not a big problem if the shutdown is temporary,” Christopher Briem, a center economist said in an email. “Once data comes back online, as long as it is not an extended period, our normal work will not be impacted.”

Although the Center for Social and Urban Research utilizes data from government programs, it solely relies on government websites to access that data. The center already had some data downloaded in various forms.

Pre-downloaded data did not save everyone from the repercussions of the shutdown, however. 

Michael Ramsey, who teaches a geology class on remote sensing, said his class could not download necessary data in advance. The graduate-level class requires students to conduct an independent research project using newly collected satellite data from a massive database of archives.

Ramsey said that there is no way to pre-download and save some of the data to use at a later time.

While the data come from NASA, they are stored in the U.S. Geological Society’s Eros Data Center in Sioux Falls, S.D. Students download the satellite images and use image-processing software to analyze factors such as land-cover change over time, deforestation, urbanization and natural-hazard impacts.

Ramsey received a notification that these sites would become inoperable less than one hour before they shut down. He said that the shutdown also compromised his own research, which relies on near-real-time coverage of active volcanic eruptions.

While the data is back online now, Ramsey said the disturbance added stress to his students, who were unable to access necessary information for their assignments.

In Ramsey’s class, no contingency plan in the event of a shutdown or similar occurrence is possible due to the nature of the data, as the data come from a live feed that constantly updates.

Although Glass said there is no plan in place regarding government data in the event of another shutdown, he did have one sarcastic suggestion for his urban studies class:“Move to Canada.”