Wednesday, September 21, 2011
Sunday, July 17, 2011
Citizen Science: Climatology for Everyone
Citizen Science: Climatology for Everyone
http://www.skepticalscience.com/news.php?n=892
With recent posts addressing personal action in the fight to combat global warming, I thought it would be interesting to dedicate a post to ways in which the average citizen can help global warming by directly contributing to our scientific understanding of it. That is, becoming a ‘citizen scientist’.
http://www.skepticalscience.com/news.php?n=892
With recent posts addressing personal action in the fight to combat global warming, I thought it would be interesting to dedicate a post to ways in which the average citizen can help global warming by directly contributing to our scientific understanding of it. That is, becoming a ‘citizen scientist’.
Monday, July 4, 2011
How collaboration works or does not work on the Internet - Open Science
Great TED video on open science and what kinds of open collaboration work - BSA]
Open Science on the Internet
How can the Internet help spread scientific discoveries?
Open Science on the Internet
How can the Internet help spread scientific discoveries?
Friday, May 27, 2011
Open science: a future shaped by shared experience
Mapping the human genome showed how the internet can play a vital part in collective scientific research. Now more scientists are collaborating – and inviting amateurs and colleagues from other disciplines to get involved
Wednesday, August 25, 2010
Citizens are playing an increasing important role in cyber-science
[Great article in iSGTW about how the Internet and clouds are allowing citizens to play a more direct role in scientific discovery. I believe that we have only scratched the surface on the potential of citizens and students to be more active participants in science. I think this could also be a very “green” approach to science if all the thousands of PCs that are used in such work, were powered solely by small renewable resources using 400 HZ connectivity. For example it would be easy to configure a PC that to be powered by the electrical grid when a user was interacting with the machine – but in sleep mode the computer could be powered by 400 Hz power which could be delivered by roof top solar panel or micro wind mill over existing copper wire in the home. If there was no renewable power available the machine simply shut down and go off line, as there are thousands of other machines elsewhere in the world that could still the processing. This would enable the millions of computers around the world to provided distributing computing capability for all sorts of scientific experiments without increasing the carbon footprint of the machines. -- BSA
http://www.isgtw.org/?pid=1002707
Opinion - Scientists, meet the citizens
________________________________________
François Grey is the coordinator of the Citizen Cyberscience Center.
In a week’s time, an unusual meeting of minds will occur in London.
Billed as a Citizen Cyberscience Summit, it will bring together scientists from a range of distributed, volunteer computing and volunteer thinking projects, to mingle with some of the volunteers who participate in these online projects.
The upshot of the event, hosted by King’s College London on 2-3 September, should be a stimulating dialogue about how to make citizen cyberscience even more compelling for the public and even more useful to science.
The timing of the event could not
be better. August saw a bumper crop of major scientific results from online science projects involving public participation. An article in Naturedescribed progress made in protein folding using an online multiplayer game called Foldit. The game allows participants to pull, twist and shake a 3D rendering of a given protein in a variety of ways, just using a mouse and a simple web interface.
Players score according to how energetically stable the resulting protein structure is. Fascinatingly, the scientists discovered that the players spontaneously team up sometimes to try to find new strategies for folding the proteins. This exploration of strategy space, not just the molecular conformation space, puts the human solvers streets ahead of standard computer algorithms, which just plod along with same old strategy.
The Einstein@home screensaver. The Einstein@home project is analysing both gravitational wave detector data and radio astronomy data. Image courtesy Einstein@home
Wave of the future?
This sort of volunteer thinking may well be a wave of the future, but there is still lots of mileage in volunteer computing, which invites participants to simply run scientific software in the background on their PCs or laptop. There are already dozens of such projects online, and one of these, Einstein@home, made waves two weeks ago with a publication in the journal Sciencewhich described the first pulsars to be discovered through public participation.
Over 250,000 volunteers contributed to this research, providing supercomputing-level processing power of 0,25 Petaflops. Over 100 pulsar candidates were discovered, including a highly unusual specimen which is probably the fastest spinning pulsar of its kind, rotating on its axis 41 times a second.
Speakers from research groups behind both Einstein@home and FoldIt are scheduled to speak at the London Summit. And they are also going to listen to a number of the volunteers, and learn about their perspective on participating in such projects.
One celebrated volunteer who will be there, Hanny van Arkel, discovered a mysterious astronomical object in 2007. Since she is Dutch, she referred to it as a “Voorwerp” — Dutch for “object” — when drawing other participants’ attention to it. The name stuck, and as a result, Ms van Arken – —who is a school teacher and also plays guitar in a band — is forever immortalized in the night sky as Hanny’s Voorwerp.
The Summit will feature several such stories of discovery by amateurs, providing a reminder that thanks to the internet, citizens are playing an increasingly direct role in science.
—François Grey for iSGTW
------
email: Bill.St.Arnaud@gmail.com
twitter: BillStArnaud
blog: http://billstarnaud.blogspot.com/
skype: Pocketpro
http://www.isgtw.org/?pid=1002707
Opinion - Scientists, meet the citizens
________________________________________
François Grey is the coordinator of the Citizen Cyberscience Center.
In a week’s time, an unusual meeting of minds will occur in London.
Billed as a Citizen Cyberscience Summit, it will bring together scientists from a range of distributed, volunteer computing and volunteer thinking projects, to mingle with some of the volunteers who participate in these online projects.
The upshot of the event, hosted by King’s College London on 2-3 September, should be a stimulating dialogue about how to make citizen cyberscience even more compelling for the public and even more useful to science.
The timing of the event could not
be better. August saw a bumper crop of major scientific results from online science projects involving public participation. An article in Naturedescribed progress made in protein folding using an online multiplayer game called Foldit. The game allows participants to pull, twist and shake a 3D rendering of a given protein in a variety of ways, just using a mouse and a simple web interface.
Players score according to how energetically stable the resulting protein structure is. Fascinatingly, the scientists discovered that the players spontaneously team up sometimes to try to find new strategies for folding the proteins. This exploration of strategy space, not just the molecular conformation space, puts the human solvers streets ahead of standard computer algorithms, which just plod along with same old strategy.
The Einstein@home screensaver. The Einstein@home project is analysing both gravitational wave detector data and radio astronomy data. Image courtesy Einstein@home
Wave of the future?
This sort of volunteer thinking may well be a wave of the future, but there is still lots of mileage in volunteer computing, which invites participants to simply run scientific software in the background on their PCs or laptop. There are already dozens of such projects online, and one of these, Einstein@home, made waves two weeks ago with a publication in the journal Sciencewhich described the first pulsars to be discovered through public participation.
Over 250,000 volunteers contributed to this research, providing supercomputing-level processing power of 0,25 Petaflops. Over 100 pulsar candidates were discovered, including a highly unusual specimen which is probably the fastest spinning pulsar of its kind, rotating on its axis 41 times a second.
Speakers from research groups behind both Einstein@home and FoldIt are scheduled to speak at the London Summit. And they are also going to listen to a number of the volunteers, and learn about their perspective on participating in such projects.
One celebrated volunteer who will be there, Hanny van Arkel, discovered a mysterious astronomical object in 2007. Since she is Dutch, she referred to it as a “Voorwerp” — Dutch for “object” — when drawing other participants’ attention to it. The name stuck, and as a result, Ms van Arken – —who is a school teacher and also plays guitar in a band — is forever immortalized in the night sky as Hanny’s Voorwerp.
The Summit will feature several such stories of discovery by amateurs, providing a reminder that thanks to the internet, citizens are playing an increasingly direct role in science.
—François Grey for iSGTW
------
email: Bill.St.Arnaud@gmail.com
twitter: BillStArnaud
blog: http://billstarnaud.blogspot.com/
skype: Pocketpro
Monday, April 19, 2010
Dis-intermediation of the university via open courseware -- NYTimes: An Open Mind
Dis-intermediation of the university via open courseware -- NYTimes: An Open Mind
[Some excerpts from NYtimes – BSA]
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/18/education/edlife/18open-t.html?pagewanted=1
Open courseware is a classic example of disruptive technology, which, loosely defined, is an innovation that comes along one day to change a product or service, often standing an industry on its head. Craigslist did this to newspapers by posting classified ads for free. And the music industry got blindsided when iTunes started unbundling songs from albums and selling them for 99 cents apiece.
Some imagine a situation in which the bulk of introductory course materials are online, as videos or interactive environments; students engage with the material when convenient and show up only for smaller seminars. “In an on-demand environment, they’re thinking,
Mr. Schonfeld sees still more potential in “unbundling” the four elements of educating: design of a course, delivery of that course, delivery of credit and delivery of a degree. “Traditionally, they’ve all lived in the same institutional setting.” Must all four continue to live together, or can one or more be outsourced?
Edupunks — the term for high-tech do-it-yourself educators who skirt traditional structures — are piloting wiki-type U’s that stitch together open course material from many institutions and combine it with student-to-student interaction. In September, Neeru Paharia, a doctoral student at Harvard Business School, and four others from the open education field started up Peer 2 Peer University, a tuition-free, nonprofit experiment financed with seed money from the Hewlett and Shuttleworth foundations.
Ms. Paharia doesn’t speak the same language as traditional educators: P2PU “runs” courses. It doesn’t “offer” them. There are currently 16 courses, in subjects as diverse as behavioral economics, music theory, cyberpunk literature and “managing election campaigns” (and all with a Creative Commons license that grants more freedom of use than a standard copyright). Several hundred people are taking classes, Ms. Paharia says.
P2PU’s mission isn’t to develop a model and stick with it. It is to “experiment and iterate,” says Ms. Paharia, the former executive director of Creative Commons. She likes to talk about signals, a concept borrowed from economics. “Having a degree is a signal,” she says. “It’s a signal to employers that you’ve passed a certain bar.” Here’s the radical part: Ms. Paharia doesn’t think degrees are necessary. P2PU is working to come up with alternative signals that indicate to potential employers that an individual is a good thinker and has the skills he or she claims to have — maybe a written report or an online portfolio.
David Wiley, associate professor of instructional psychology and technology at Brigham Young University, is an adviser to P2PU. For the past several years, he has been referring to “the disaggregation of higher education,” the breaking apart of university functions. Dr. Wiley says that models like P2PU address an important component missing from open courseware: human support. That is, when you have a question, whom can you ask? “No one gets all the way through a textbook without a dozen questions,” he says. “Who’s the T.A.? Where’s your study group?”
“If you go to M.I.T. OpenCourseWare, there’s no way to find out who else is studying the same material and ask them for help,” he says. At P2PU, a “course organizer” leads the discussion but “you are working together with others, so when you have a question you can ask any of your peers. The core idea of P2PU is putting people together around these open courses.”
A similar philosophy is employed by Shai Reshef, the founder of several Internet educational businesses. Mr. Reshef has used $1 million of his own money to start theUniversity of the People, which taps open courses that other universities have put online and relies on student interaction to guide learning; students even grade one another’s papers.
The focus is business administration and computer science, chosen because they hold promise for employment. He says he hopes to seek accreditation, and offer degrees.
Mr. Reshef’s plan is to “take anyone, anyone whatsoever,” as long as they can pass an English orientation course and a course in basic computer skills, and have a high school diploma or equivalent. The nonprofit venture has accepted, and enrolled, 380 of 3,000 applicants, and is trying to raise funds through microphilanthropy — “$80 will send one student to UoPeople for a term” — through social networking.
A decade has passed since M.I.T. decided to give much of its course materials to the public in an act of largesse. The M.I.T. OpenCourseWare Initiative helped usher in the “open educational resources” movement, with its ethos of sharing knowledge via free online educational offerings, including podcasts and videos of lectures, syllabuses and downloadable textbooks. The movement has also helped dislodge higher education from its brick-and-mortar moorings.
If the mission of the university is the creation of knowledge (via research) and the dissemination of knowledge (via teaching and publishing), then it stands to reason that giving that knowledge away fits neatly with that mission. And the branding benefits are clear.
The Open University, the distance-learning behemoth based in England, has vastly increased its visibility with open courses, which frequently show up in the Top 5 downloads on Apple’s iTunes U, a portal to institutions’ free courseware as well as marketing material. The Open University’s free offerings have been downloaded more than 16 million times, with 89 percent of those downloads outside the U.K., says Martin Bean, vice chancellor of the university. Some 6,000 students started out with a free online course before registering for a paid online course.
Carnegie Mellon’s Open Learning Initiative is working with teams of faculty members, researchers on learning and software engineers to develop e-courses designed to improve the educational experience. So far there are 10 complete courses, including logic, statistics, chemistry, biology, economics and French, which cost about $250,000 each to build. Carnegie Mellon is working with community colleges to build four more courses, with the three-year goal of 25 percent more students passing when the class is bolstered by the online instruction.
The intended user is the beginning college student, whom Dr. Smith describes as “someone with limited prior knowledge in a college subject and with little or no experience in successfully directing his or her own learning.”
It works like this: Virtual simulations, labs and tutorials allow for continuous feedback that helps the student along. The student’s progress is tracked step by step, and that information is then used to make improvements to the course. Several studies have shown that students learn a full semester’s worth of material in half the time when the online coursework is added. More students stick with the class, too. “We now have the technology that enables us to go back to what we all know is the best educational experience: personalized, interactive engagement,” Dr. Smith says.
------
email: Bill.St.Arnaud@gmail.com
twitter: BillStArnaud
blog: http://billstarnaud.blogspot.com/
skype: Pocketpro
[Some excerpts from NYtimes – BSA]
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/18/education/edlife/18open-t.html?pagewanted=1
Open courseware is a classic example of disruptive technology, which, loosely defined, is an innovation that comes along one day to change a product or service, often standing an industry on its head. Craigslist did this to newspapers by posting classified ads for free. And the music industry got blindsided when iTunes started unbundling songs from albums and selling them for 99 cents apiece.
Some imagine a situation in which the bulk of introductory course materials are online, as videos or interactive environments; students engage with the material when convenient and show up only for smaller seminars. “In an on-demand environment, they’re thinking,
Mr. Schonfeld sees still more potential in “unbundling” the four elements of educating: design of a course, delivery of that course, delivery of credit and delivery of a degree. “Traditionally, they’ve all lived in the same institutional setting.” Must all four continue to live together, or can one or more be outsourced?
Edupunks — the term for high-tech do-it-yourself educators who skirt traditional structures — are piloting wiki-type U’s that stitch together open course material from many institutions and combine it with student-to-student interaction. In September, Neeru Paharia, a doctoral student at Harvard Business School, and four others from the open education field started up Peer 2 Peer University, a tuition-free, nonprofit experiment financed with seed money from the Hewlett and Shuttleworth foundations.
Ms. Paharia doesn’t speak the same language as traditional educators: P2PU “runs” courses. It doesn’t “offer” them. There are currently 16 courses, in subjects as diverse as behavioral economics, music theory, cyberpunk literature and “managing election campaigns” (and all with a Creative Commons license that grants more freedom of use than a standard copyright). Several hundred people are taking classes, Ms. Paharia says.
P2PU’s mission isn’t to develop a model and stick with it. It is to “experiment and iterate,” says Ms. Paharia, the former executive director of Creative Commons. She likes to talk about signals, a concept borrowed from economics. “Having a degree is a signal,” she says. “It’s a signal to employers that you’ve passed a certain bar.” Here’s the radical part: Ms. Paharia doesn’t think degrees are necessary. P2PU is working to come up with alternative signals that indicate to potential employers that an individual is a good thinker and has the skills he or she claims to have — maybe a written report or an online portfolio.
David Wiley, associate professor of instructional psychology and technology at Brigham Young University, is an adviser to P2PU. For the past several years, he has been referring to “the disaggregation of higher education,” the breaking apart of university functions. Dr. Wiley says that models like P2PU address an important component missing from open courseware: human support. That is, when you have a question, whom can you ask? “No one gets all the way through a textbook without a dozen questions,” he says. “Who’s the T.A.? Where’s your study group?”
“If you go to M.I.T. OpenCourseWare, there’s no way to find out who else is studying the same material and ask them for help,” he says. At P2PU, a “course organizer” leads the discussion but “you are working together with others, so when you have a question you can ask any of your peers. The core idea of P2PU is putting people together around these open courses.”
A similar philosophy is employed by Shai Reshef, the founder of several Internet educational businesses. Mr. Reshef has used $1 million of his own money to start theUniversity of the People, which taps open courses that other universities have put online and relies on student interaction to guide learning; students even grade one another’s papers.
The focus is business administration and computer science, chosen because they hold promise for employment. He says he hopes to seek accreditation, and offer degrees.
Mr. Reshef’s plan is to “take anyone, anyone whatsoever,” as long as they can pass an English orientation course and a course in basic computer skills, and have a high school diploma or equivalent. The nonprofit venture has accepted, and enrolled, 380 of 3,000 applicants, and is trying to raise funds through microphilanthropy — “$80 will send one student to UoPeople for a term” — through social networking.
A decade has passed since M.I.T. decided to give much of its course materials to the public in an act of largesse. The M.I.T. OpenCourseWare Initiative helped usher in the “open educational resources” movement, with its ethos of sharing knowledge via free online educational offerings, including podcasts and videos of lectures, syllabuses and downloadable textbooks. The movement has also helped dislodge higher education from its brick-and-mortar moorings.
If the mission of the university is the creation of knowledge (via research) and the dissemination of knowledge (via teaching and publishing), then it stands to reason that giving that knowledge away fits neatly with that mission. And the branding benefits are clear.
The Open University, the distance-learning behemoth based in England, has vastly increased its visibility with open courses, which frequently show up in the Top 5 downloads on Apple’s iTunes U, a portal to institutions’ free courseware as well as marketing material. The Open University’s free offerings have been downloaded more than 16 million times, with 89 percent of those downloads outside the U.K., says Martin Bean, vice chancellor of the university. Some 6,000 students started out with a free online course before registering for a paid online course.
Carnegie Mellon’s Open Learning Initiative is working with teams of faculty members, researchers on learning and software engineers to develop e-courses designed to improve the educational experience. So far there are 10 complete courses, including logic, statistics, chemistry, biology, economics and French, which cost about $250,000 each to build. Carnegie Mellon is working with community colleges to build four more courses, with the three-year goal of 25 percent more students passing when the class is bolstered by the online instruction.
The intended user is the beginning college student, whom Dr. Smith describes as “someone with limited prior knowledge in a college subject and with little or no experience in successfully directing his or her own learning.”
It works like this: Virtual simulations, labs and tutorials allow for continuous feedback that helps the student along. The student’s progress is tracked step by step, and that information is then used to make improvements to the course. Several studies have shown that students learn a full semester’s worth of material in half the time when the online coursework is added. More students stick with the class, too. “We now have the technology that enables us to go back to what we all know is the best educational experience: personalized, interactive engagement,” Dr. Smith says.
------
email: Bill.St.Arnaud@gmail.com
twitter: BillStArnaud
blog: http://billstarnaud.blogspot.com/
skype: Pocketpro
Wednesday, April 7, 2010
Cool new Middleware from Twitter for distributed data
http://bit.ly/a6ZwyV
"Twitter last night offered up the code for Gizzard, an open-source framework for accessing distributed data quickly, which Twitter built to help the site deal with the millions of requests it gets from users needing access to their friends and their own tweets. It could become an important component of building out web-based businesses, much likeFacebook’s Cassandra project has swept through the ranks of webscale startups and even big companies.
Gizzard is a middleware networking service that sits between the front-end web site client and the database and attempts to divide and replicate data in storage in intelligent ways that allows it to be accessed quickly by the site. Gizzard’s function it to take the requests coming in through the fire hose and allocate the stream of requests across multiple databases without slowing things down. It’s also fault-tolerant, which means if one section of data is compromised, the service will try to route to other sections. From the Twitter blog post:"
[...]
"Twitter last night offered up the code for Gizzard, an open-source framework for accessing distributed data quickly, which Twitter built to help the site deal with the millions of requests it gets from users needing access to their friends and their own tweets. It could become an important component of building out web-based businesses, much likeFacebook’s Cassandra project has swept through the ranks of webscale startups and even big companies.
Gizzard is a middleware networking service that sits between the front-end web site client and the database and attempts to divide and replicate data in storage in intelligent ways that allows it to be accessed quickly by the site. Gizzard’s function it to take the requests coming in through the fire hose and allocate the stream of requests across multiple databases without slowing things down. It’s also fault-tolerant, which means if one section of data is compromised, the service will try to route to other sections. From the Twitter blog post:"
[...]
Wednesday, March 3, 2010
Human Computing - Distributed Thinking - new age of Citizen Science
http://www.isgtw.org/?pid=1002401
By using the strengths of distributed computing technologies, both specialized researchers and citizens have the opportunity to participate in a new way of doing science.
We live in a time when nearly all information is available to nearly all people everywhere.
We are entering an age where all types of people can also contribute to many types of information. A school bus driver in rural Romania may be part of a biomedical research project. Or a banker in Los Angeles might moonlight as a collaborator in an astronomy project – classifying galaxies in her spare time.
This new movement in science, called “citizen science,” allows non-specialist volunteers to participate in global research. The projects are as diverse as backyard insect counts (the Firefly citizen science project), studies of how malaria develops and is transmitted (MalariaControl.net) or prime numbers searches (through PrimeGrid).
The marriage of distributed computing techniques with citizen science represents a potential revolution. It gives scientists access to more resources and makes “cybercitizens” participants in the research process. With a few mouse clicks and 20 minutes to spare a person can elect to aid scores of projects. They can aid as many or as few projects as they like, and their involvement does not damage the performance of their own computer.
Considering the average desktop is idle about 80% of the time, its spare computing cycles represent a large resource. After downloading the needed software, a computer’s spare analytical power is harvested to work on small pieces of a large problem that has been sent from the project’s server. Once completed, the results are sent back to the project. By sharing out large tasks to many computers a distributed “grid” of computers can reduce the time needed to solve complicated problems.
In the Galaxy Zoo project, everyday citizens can help astronomers do things such as catch exploding stars, or supernovae. Data for the site is provided by an automatic survey in California, at the world-famous Palomar Observatory. Image courtesy Galaxy Zoo Supernovae
Where to start
Many of these projects use the common software platform BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing). The BOINC webpages point to nearly 50 projects, coming many domains including climate change, astrophysics, earthquake monitoring, epidemiology and searches for extraterrestrial life. These count among them Rosetta@home, Climate prediction.net, Einstein@home, LHC@home, Chess960@home including the well-known SETI@home. BOINC’s volunteers, number about a third of a million people, donate an average of 4,540.83 TeraFLOPS in 24 hours.
Other portals leading to multiple applications include World Community Grid and EDGeS. World Community Grid, sponsored by IBM, with nearly half a million members, collects humanitarian and medical applications such as Nutritious Rice for the World and FightAIDS@home.
The EDGeS project, or Enabling Desktop Grids for e-Science, allows information to pass between desktop grids based on BOINC, and service grids (publicly funded grids of connected computing clusters) such as Enabling Grids for E-sciencE (EGEE.) This makes it possible both for volunteers to contribute to applications on service grids and for researchers to put their service grid applications on volunteer, desktop grid systems.
Human computing – distributed thinking
An intriguing sub-variety of volunteer projects call for “volunteer thinking.” These projects that share out tasks which require human intelligence for accurate processing.
Through Galaxy Zoo, volunteers classify images of the near quarter million galaxies that have been collected through the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. The human brain is able to recognize shape and type much more quickly and accurately than any computer. This work helps astronomers understand how galaxies form.
AfricaMap, a UNOSAT project (the United Nations Institute for Training and Research Operational Satellite Applications Program), will give volunteers satellite images of rural Africa, who will mark roads, bridges, human settlements, rivers, agriculture fields, barren fields and more. This will update old maps and create maps for areas where they did not exist before.
This project, and others like it, are being collected under the umbrella of the Citizen Cyberscience Centre, a partnership of the University of Geneva, the UN Institute for Training and Research and CERN, Europe’s center for physics research, to help regional authorities, humanitarian workers and scientists. Accurate maps will help aid workers reach needy areas and will track the progress of climate change.
Specialized researchers and volunteer citizens can now collaborate on some of the world’s most serious problems. The internet and the Web led to a revolution in the way we access and use information. These tools, coupled with distributing computing technologies, may be ushering in a research revolution as well.
—Danielle Vention, EGEE, is a former iSGTW editor
By using the strengths of distributed computing technologies, both specialized researchers and citizens have the opportunity to participate in a new way of doing science.
We live in a time when nearly all information is available to nearly all people everywhere.
We are entering an age where all types of people can also contribute to many types of information. A school bus driver in rural Romania may be part of a biomedical research project. Or a banker in Los Angeles might moonlight as a collaborator in an astronomy project – classifying galaxies in her spare time.
This new movement in science, called “citizen science,” allows non-specialist volunteers to participate in global research. The projects are as diverse as backyard insect counts (the Firefly citizen science project), studies of how malaria develops and is transmitted (MalariaControl.net) or prime numbers searches (through PrimeGrid).
The marriage of distributed computing techniques with citizen science represents a potential revolution. It gives scientists access to more resources and makes “cybercitizens” participants in the research process. With a few mouse clicks and 20 minutes to spare a person can elect to aid scores of projects. They can aid as many or as few projects as they like, and their involvement does not damage the performance of their own computer.
Considering the average desktop is idle about 80% of the time, its spare computing cycles represent a large resource. After downloading the needed software, a computer’s spare analytical power is harvested to work on small pieces of a large problem that has been sent from the project’s server. Once completed, the results are sent back to the project. By sharing out large tasks to many computers a distributed “grid” of computers can reduce the time needed to solve complicated problems.
In the Galaxy Zoo project, everyday citizens can help astronomers do things such as catch exploding stars, or supernovae. Data for the site is provided by an automatic survey in California, at the world-famous Palomar Observatory. Image courtesy Galaxy Zoo Supernovae
Where to start
Many of these projects use the common software platform BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing). The BOINC webpages point to nearly 50 projects, coming many domains including climate change, astrophysics, earthquake monitoring, epidemiology and searches for extraterrestrial life. These count among them Rosetta@home, Climate prediction.net, Einstein@home, LHC@home, Chess960@home including the well-known SETI@home. BOINC’s volunteers, number about a third of a million people, donate an average of 4,540.83 TeraFLOPS in 24 hours.
Other portals leading to multiple applications include World Community Grid and EDGeS. World Community Grid, sponsored by IBM, with nearly half a million members, collects humanitarian and medical applications such as Nutritious Rice for the World and FightAIDS@home.
The EDGeS project, or Enabling Desktop Grids for e-Science, allows information to pass between desktop grids based on BOINC, and service grids (publicly funded grids of connected computing clusters) such as Enabling Grids for E-sciencE (EGEE.) This makes it possible both for volunteers to contribute to applications on service grids and for researchers to put their service grid applications on volunteer, desktop grid systems.
Human computing – distributed thinking
An intriguing sub-variety of volunteer projects call for “volunteer thinking.” These projects that share out tasks which require human intelligence for accurate processing.
Through Galaxy Zoo, volunteers classify images of the near quarter million galaxies that have been collected through the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. The human brain is able to recognize shape and type much more quickly and accurately than any computer. This work helps astronomers understand how galaxies form.
AfricaMap, a UNOSAT project (the United Nations Institute for Training and Research Operational Satellite Applications Program), will give volunteers satellite images of rural Africa, who will mark roads, bridges, human settlements, rivers, agriculture fields, barren fields and more. This will update old maps and create maps for areas where they did not exist before.
This project, and others like it, are being collected under the umbrella of the Citizen Cyberscience Centre, a partnership of the University of Geneva, the UN Institute for Training and Research and CERN, Europe’s center for physics research, to help regional authorities, humanitarian workers and scientists. Accurate maps will help aid workers reach needy areas and will track the progress of climate change.
Specialized researchers and volunteer citizens can now collaborate on some of the world’s most serious problems. The internet and the Web led to a revolution in the way we access and use information. These tools, coupled with distributing computing technologies, may be ushering in a research revolution as well.
—Danielle Vention, EGEE, is a former iSGTW editor
Monday, January 25, 2010
Tom Friedman on innovation and National Lab Day
From: Ed Lazowska 'Tom Friedman on innovation and National Lab
Day'
Tom Friedman has a wonderful op-ed in today's New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/24/opinion/24friedman.html
Then go to the National Lab Day website, and register!
http://www.nationallabday.org/
"What the country needs most now is not more government stimulus, but more
stimulation. We need to get millions of American kids, not just the geniuses,
excited about innovation and entrepreneurship [...]
Introduced last November by a coalition of educators and science and engineering associations, Lab Day aims to inspire a wave of future innovators, by pairing veteran scientists and engineers with students in grades K-12 to inspire thousands of hands-on science projects around the country.
Any teacher in America, explains the entrepreneur Jack Hidary, the chairman of N.L.D., can go to the Web site NationalLabDay.org and enter the science project he or she is interested in teaching, or get an idea for one. N.L.D. will match teachers with volunteer scientists and engineers in their areas for mentoring.
“As soon as you have a match, the scientists and the students communicate directly or via Skype and collaborate on a project,” said Hidary. “We have a class in Chicago asking for civil engineers to teach them how to build a bridge. In Idaho, a class is asking for a scientist to help them build a working river delta inside their classroom.”
[...]
You may view the latest post at
http://www.cccblog.org/2010/01/24/tom-friedman-on-innovation-and-national-lab-day/
Day'
Tom Friedman has a wonderful op-ed in today's New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/24/opinion/24friedman.html
Then go to the National Lab Day website, and register!
http://www.nationallabday.org/
"What the country needs most now is not more government stimulus, but more
stimulation. We need to get millions of American kids, not just the geniuses,
excited about innovation and entrepreneurship [...]
Introduced last November by a coalition of educators and science and engineering associations, Lab Day aims to inspire a wave of future innovators, by pairing veteran scientists and engineers with students in grades K-12 to inspire thousands of hands-on science projects around the country.
Any teacher in America, explains the entrepreneur Jack Hidary, the chairman of N.L.D., can go to the Web site NationalLabDay.org and enter the science project he or she is interested in teaching, or get an idea for one. N.L.D. will match teachers with volunteer scientists and engineers in their areas for mentoring.
“As soon as you have a match, the scientists and the students communicate directly or via Skype and collaborate on a project,” said Hidary. “We have a class in Chicago asking for civil engineers to teach them how to build a bridge. In Idaho, a class is asking for a scientist to help them build a working river delta inside their classroom.”
[...]
You may view the latest post at
http://www.cccblog.org/2010/01/24/tom-friedman-on-innovation-and-national-lab-day/
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
Anthony Doesburg: Idle time put to work, all in the cause of science
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/news/article.cfm?c_id=3&objectid=10602226
....in a field referred to as cyberscience, a subset of what has come to be called citizen science. To Bill St Arnaud, head of research at CANARIE, a high-speed network connecting 50,000 Canadian researchers, citizen science is a way of democratising science.
It has echoes of another internet-borne phenomenon, citizen journalism, the idea of members of the public reporting news from their communities without the filters of the corporate media.
Citizen science, however, is not about second-guessing the work of scientists, but can contribute to their efforts by giving them many sets of eyes with which to make observations and measurements, and by lending them computer power.
[...]
....in a field referred to as cyberscience, a subset of what has come to be called citizen science. To Bill St Arnaud, head of research at CANARIE, a high-speed network connecting 50,000 Canadian researchers, citizen science is a way of democratising science.
It has echoes of another internet-borne phenomenon, citizen journalism, the idea of members of the public reporting news from their communities without the filters of the corporate media.
Citizen science, however, is not about second-guessing the work of scientists, but can contribute to their efforts by giving them many sets of eyes with which to make observations and measurements, and by lending them computer power.
[...]
Monday, October 5, 2009
Community Remote Sensing and Citizen Science
[Here is a great concept that integrates citizen science, cyber-infrastructure and web 2.0 tools -- BSA]
Community Remote Sensing
http://www.igarss2010.org/CommunityRemoteSensing.asp
What is Community Remote Sensing?
Remote sensing is the sensing or collection of information ‘from a distance’. Community remote sensing is a new field that combines remote sensing with citizen science, social networks, and crowd-sourcing to enhance the data obtained from traditional sources. It includes the collection, calibration, analysis, communication, or application of remotely sensed information by these community means.
The Earth information needs of our society are vast. Until now, we have relied on government-sponsored satellites and observing systems as the foundation for this information. The rapid emergence of citizen science and social networks introduces an exciting new means for augmenting this knowledge.
The Vision for Community Remote Sensing
Information technologies will provide the foundation for society’s rapid progress in the 21st century. Information about the environment (both natural and human-built) is central to this progress. The enormity of the required undertaking – observing and understanding our world at all space and time scales – takes your breath away.
Accomplishing it will be enabled in part by citizens who contribute to ‘remotely sensed’ versions of the world around them. Governments will depend on such information to understand local details of climate change and respond to natural disasters. The private sector will use it to build online maps and virtual worlds that make commerce more efficient and accessible. Within just a decade or so, the influence of community remote sensing will be as profound for understanding our Earth as the satellite revolution has been over the last five decades.
If you are working in this area, your participation in the Collaboration will benefit both your project and the greater community. Further information, including a detailed description of the Collaboration, can be obtained from the Conference Plenary Chair Bill Gail (plenarychair@igarss2010.org, 1.303.513.5474). Limited funding may be available to help support selected projects.
An International Community Remote Sensing Collaboration
The Organizing Committee of the 2010 IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium (IGARSS) is sponsoring a novel project exploring the emerging field of community remote sensing and invites your participation.
IGARSS 2010 will spotlight this emerging field with a plenary session entirely dedicated to the topic, supporting the conference theme “Remote Sensing: Global Vision for Local Action”. During the year leading up to the plenary, the Organizing Committee is identifying and highlighting existing projects that embody the plenary theme. Participating projects, selected for their promise to create either new knowledge or new technologies associated with community remote sensing, are highlighted here on the website (see links in table below). Progress is being tracked throughout the year, and results will be presented during the IGARSS 2010 plenary session. Plenary speakers will be selected from major organizations that reflect public sector, private sector, academia, and NGO perspectives on community remote sensing.
Community Remote Sensing
http://www.igarss2010.org/CommunityRemoteSensing.asp
What is Community Remote Sensing?
Remote sensing is the sensing or collection of information ‘from a distance’. Community remote sensing is a new field that combines remote sensing with citizen science, social networks, and crowd-sourcing to enhance the data obtained from traditional sources. It includes the collection, calibration, analysis, communication, or application of remotely sensed information by these community means.
The Earth information needs of our society are vast. Until now, we have relied on government-sponsored satellites and observing systems as the foundation for this information. The rapid emergence of citizen science and social networks introduces an exciting new means for augmenting this knowledge.
The Vision for Community Remote Sensing
Information technologies will provide the foundation for society’s rapid progress in the 21st century. Information about the environment (both natural and human-built) is central to this progress. The enormity of the required undertaking – observing and understanding our world at all space and time scales – takes your breath away.
Accomplishing it will be enabled in part by citizens who contribute to ‘remotely sensed’ versions of the world around them. Governments will depend on such information to understand local details of climate change and respond to natural disasters. The private sector will use it to build online maps and virtual worlds that make commerce more efficient and accessible. Within just a decade or so, the influence of community remote sensing will be as profound for understanding our Earth as the satellite revolution has been over the last five decades.
If you are working in this area, your participation in the Collaboration will benefit both your project and the greater community. Further information, including a detailed description of the Collaboration, can be obtained from the Conference Plenary Chair Bill Gail (plenarychair@igarss2010.org, 1.303.513.5474). Limited funding may be available to help support selected projects.
An International Community Remote Sensing Collaboration
The Organizing Committee of the 2010 IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium (IGARSS) is sponsoring a novel project exploring the emerging field of community remote sensing and invites your participation.
IGARSS 2010 will spotlight this emerging field with a plenary session entirely dedicated to the topic, supporting the conference theme “Remote Sensing: Global Vision for Local Action”. During the year leading up to the plenary, the Organizing Committee is identifying and highlighting existing projects that embody the plenary theme. Participating projects, selected for their promise to create either new knowledge or new technologies associated with community remote sensing, are highlighted here on the website (see links in table below). Progress is being tracked throughout the year, and results will be presented during the IGARSS 2010 plenary session. Plenary speakers will be selected from major organizations that reflect public sector, private sector, academia, and NGO perspectives on community remote sensing.
Friday, September 18, 2009
CERN launches citzen cyber-infrastructure project
http://www.unitar.org/citizen_cyberscience_centre_project
UNITAR, UNIGE and CERN Collaborate on a Citizen Cyberscience Centre
The United Nations Institute for Training and Research, UNITAR, the University of Geneva, UNIGE, and the European Organization for Nuclear Research, CERN (hereafter referred to collectively as "the Partners") have formally agreed to collaborate on a Citizen Cyberscience Centre Project.
Citizen Cyberscience
The Partners have a common interest in, and experience of, developing Citizen Cyberscience applications for humanitarian and fundamental research.
Citizen Cyberscience provides scientists with an inexpensive form of distributed computing power that is complementary to Grid technology. This is especially true for processing-intensive problems, as illustrated by the LHC@home project developed by CERN and partners for Large Hadron Collider beam studies.
[...]
The areas of collaboration include:
* use of Citizen Cyberscience to help local authorities and humanitarian workers in developing regions to use earth imagery acquired from space for emergency response and improved territorial planning and management, including disaster risk reduction and adaptation to climate change;
* use of Citizen Cyberscience to help scientists discover new drugs for infectious tropical or neglected diseases using computer-aided screening of potential drug compounds, as well as to predict the impact of using such drugs in large-scale epidemiological simulations.
* use of Citizen Cyberscience to enable scientists in developing countries with limited resources to contribute in meaningful ways to international collaborations in fundamental science, such as particle physics and astrophysics.
UNITAR, UNIGE and CERN Collaborate on a Citizen Cyberscience Centre
The United Nations Institute for Training and Research, UNITAR, the University of Geneva, UNIGE, and the European Organization for Nuclear Research, CERN (hereafter referred to collectively as "the Partners") have formally agreed to collaborate on a Citizen Cyberscience Centre Project.
Citizen Cyberscience
The Partners have a common interest in, and experience of, developing Citizen Cyberscience applications for humanitarian and fundamental research.
Citizen Cyberscience provides scientists with an inexpensive form of distributed computing power that is complementary to Grid technology. This is especially true for processing-intensive problems, as illustrated by the LHC@home project developed by CERN and partners for Large Hadron Collider beam studies.
[...]
The areas of collaboration include:
* use of Citizen Cyberscience to help local authorities and humanitarian workers in developing regions to use earth imagery acquired from space for emergency response and improved territorial planning and management, including disaster risk reduction and adaptation to climate change;
* use of Citizen Cyberscience to help scientists discover new drugs for infectious tropical or neglected diseases using computer-aided screening of potential drug compounds, as well as to predict the impact of using such drugs in large-scale epidemiological simulations.
* use of Citizen Cyberscience to enable scientists in developing countries with limited resources to contribute in meaningful ways to international collaborations in fundamental science, such as particle physics and astrophysics.
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
The age of Citizen cyber-infrastructure
[For more examples of citizen cyber-infrastructure please see http://citizen-science.blogspot.com/. Some excerpts from iSGTW--BSA]
http://www.isgtw.org/?pid=1001877
Opinion - The age of citizen cyberspace
________________________________________
Using LHC@home, particle beam dynamics can be studied with volunteer computing. Image courtesy CERN
(François Grey, one of the key people behind the founding of the present-day iSGTW and a frequent contributor to these pages, argues that with volunteer computing, we are about to embark upon a new era of “citizen science.”)
….PrimeGrid, is tackling a host of numerical challenges, such as finding the longest arithmetic progression of prime numbers (the current record is 25). Professional mathematicians now eagerly collaborate with Rytis to analyze the gems that his volunteers dig up. Yet he funds his project by selling PrimeGrid mugs and t-shirts. In short, Rytis and his online volunteers are a web-enabled version of a venerable tradition: they are “citizen scientists.”
There are nearly 100 science projects using such volunteer computing. Like PrimeGrid, most are based on an open-source software platform called BOINC (see 15 October 2008 iSGTW, “Reaching for the Exa-scale”) with volunteer computing. Many address topical themes, such as modelling climate change with ClimatePrediction.net), developing drugs for AIDS with FightAids@home, or simulating the spread of malaria with MalariaControl.net. (See 7 May 2008 iSGTW, “WISDOM unplugged: Malaria drug-leads graduate to the wet lab”)
Fundamental science projects are also well represented. Einstein@Home (iSGTW 14 May 2008) analyzes data from gravitational wave detectors, MilkyWay@Home simulates galactic evolution, and LHC@home studies accelerator beam dynamics. Each of these projects has easily attracted tens of thousands of volunteers.
[..]
A new wave of online science projects, which can be described as “volunteer thinking,” takes the idea of participative science to a higher level. A popular example is the project GalaxyZoo, where volunteers can classify images of galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey as either elliptical or spiral, via a simple web interface. In a matter of months, some 100,000 volunteers classified more than 1 million galaxies. People do this sort of pattern recognition more accurately than any computer algorithm. And by asking many volunteers to classify the same image, their statistical average proves to be more accurate than even a professional astronomer.
[..]
Going one step farther in interactivity, the project Foldit is an online game that scores a player’s ability to fold a protein molecule into a minimal-energy structure. Through a nifty web interface, players can shake, wiggle and stretch different parts of the molecule. Again, people are often much faster at this task than computers, because of their aptitude to reason in three dimensions. And the best protein folders are usually teenage gaming enthusiasts rather than trained biochemists.
Who can benefit from this web-based boom in citizen science? In my view, scientists in the developing world stand to gain most by effectively plugging in to philanthropic resources: the computers and brains of supportive citizens, primarily those in industrialized countries with the necessary equipment and leisure time. A project called Africa@home, which I've been involved in, has trained dozens of African scientists to use BOINC. Some are already developing new volunteer-thinking projects, and the first African BOINC server is running at the University of Cape Town.
A new initiative called Asia@home was launched last month with a workshop at Academia Sinica in Taipei and a seminar at the Institute of High Energy Physics in Beijing, to drum up interest in that region. Asia represents an enormous potential, in terms of both the numbers of people with internet access (more Chinese are now online than Americans) and the high levels of education and interest in science.
To encourage such initiatives further, CERN, the United Nations Institute for Training and Research and the University of Geneva will establish a Citizen Cyberscience Center on 2 July. This will help disseminate volunteer computing in the developing world and encourage new technical approaches. For example, as mobile phones become more powerful they, too, can surely be harnessed.
There are about one billion internet connections on the planet and three billion mobile phones. That represents a huge opportunity for citizen science.
http://www.isgtw.org/?pid=1001877
Opinion - The age of citizen cyberspace
________________________________________
Using LHC@home, particle beam dynamics can be studied with volunteer computing. Image courtesy CERN
(François Grey, one of the key people behind the founding of the present-day iSGTW and a frequent contributor to these pages, argues that with volunteer computing, we are about to embark upon a new era of “citizen science.”)
….PrimeGrid, is tackling a host of numerical challenges, such as finding the longest arithmetic progression of prime numbers (the current record is 25). Professional mathematicians now eagerly collaborate with Rytis to analyze the gems that his volunteers dig up. Yet he funds his project by selling PrimeGrid mugs and t-shirts. In short, Rytis and his online volunteers are a web-enabled version of a venerable tradition: they are “citizen scientists.”
There are nearly 100 science projects using such volunteer computing. Like PrimeGrid, most are based on an open-source software platform called BOINC (see 15 October 2008 iSGTW, “Reaching for the Exa-scale”) with volunteer computing. Many address topical themes, such as modelling climate change with ClimatePrediction.net), developing drugs for AIDS with FightAids@home, or simulating the spread of malaria with MalariaControl.net. (See 7 May 2008 iSGTW, “WISDOM unplugged: Malaria drug-leads graduate to the wet lab”)
Fundamental science projects are also well represented. Einstein@Home (iSGTW 14 May 2008) analyzes data from gravitational wave detectors, MilkyWay@Home simulates galactic evolution, and LHC@home studies accelerator beam dynamics. Each of these projects has easily attracted tens of thousands of volunteers.
[..]
A new wave of online science projects, which can be described as “volunteer thinking,” takes the idea of participative science to a higher level. A popular example is the project GalaxyZoo, where volunteers can classify images of galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey as either elliptical or spiral, via a simple web interface. In a matter of months, some 100,000 volunteers classified more than 1 million galaxies. People do this sort of pattern recognition more accurately than any computer algorithm. And by asking many volunteers to classify the same image, their statistical average proves to be more accurate than even a professional astronomer.
[..]
Going one step farther in interactivity, the project Foldit is an online game that scores a player’s ability to fold a protein molecule into a minimal-energy structure. Through a nifty web interface, players can shake, wiggle and stretch different parts of the molecule. Again, people are often much faster at this task than computers, because of their aptitude to reason in three dimensions. And the best protein folders are usually teenage gaming enthusiasts rather than trained biochemists.
Who can benefit from this web-based boom in citizen science? In my view, scientists in the developing world stand to gain most by effectively plugging in to philanthropic resources: the computers and brains of supportive citizens, primarily those in industrialized countries with the necessary equipment and leisure time. A project called Africa@home, which I've been involved in, has trained dozens of African scientists to use BOINC. Some are already developing new volunteer-thinking projects, and the first African BOINC server is running at the University of Cape Town.
A new initiative called Asia@home was launched last month with a workshop at Academia Sinica in Taipei and a seminar at the Institute of High Energy Physics in Beijing, to drum up interest in that region. Asia represents an enormous potential, in terms of both the numbers of people with internet access (more Chinese are now online than Americans) and the high levels of education and interest in science.
To encourage such initiatives further, CERN, the United Nations Institute for Training and Research and the University of Geneva will establish a Citizen Cyberscience Center on 2 July. This will help disseminate volunteer computing in the developing world and encourage new technical approaches. For example, as mobile phones become more powerful they, too, can surely be harnessed.
There are about one billion internet connections on the planet and three billion mobile phones. That represents a huge opportunity for citizen science.
Thursday, April 23, 2009
Free storage in the cloud for scientific datasets
[A number of cloud organizations are offering free hosting for open scientific datasets. If this trend continues to develop it will create a further impetus for “open” data which is a result of government funded research as well as the architecture of research networks and the need for large physical scientific computational facilities. One of the challenges facing researchers in the use of clouds or virtualization is the high cost of storage and the time it takes to ship large datasets over the network. Free storage and collocating large datasets with the computational cloud eliminates both challenges. Here are some pointers to initiatives in this area. Thanks to Richard Ackerman’s blog for this pointer – BSA]
Google provides free storage for datasets
http://www.dailybits.com/google-provides-free-storage-for-scientific-data/
Under Project Palimpsest, Google will be providing free storage and public access to large scientific data sets in what could be a major data organization challenge.
The storage would fill a major need for scientists who want to openly share their data, and would allow citizen scientists access to an unprecedented amount of data to explore. For example, two planned datasets are all 120 terabytes of Hubble Space Telescope data and the images from the Archimedes Palimpsest, the 10th century manuscript that inspired the Google dataset storage project.
The challenge would be in the ways in which Google is able to represent the data to the public. Also, the Trendanalyzer acquisition would come really handy here. The data source is open to the public which means that additions can be made to it as well.
There is also a presentation available at SearchEngineJournal on the talk delivered last May. And if you have huge datasets that just won’t get uploaded, Google is providing 3TB disk arrays for shipping them whole file system for the dataset.
-----
Talis Connected Commons
http://scilib.typepad.com/science_library_pad/
Talis Connected Commons is about fostering the Linked Data community, by providing a rich hosting service:
For qualifying data sets, Talis will provide, through the Talis Platform:
• Free hosting of up to 50 million RDF triples and 10Gb of content
• Access to data access services that operate on that data, including data retrieval and text search
• Free access to a public SPARQL endpoint for each dataset.
I asked Leigh how this fits with the Talis Project Xiphos initiative, and he explained that Xiphos is a more focussed initiative around "data in the education, library and publishing sectors", whereas Connected Commons is about any kind of data.
Talis, like Amazon, understands that a modern business is about fostering an ecosystem, a combination of shared data and services that can be used as a platform for software development and business development.
------
Amazon Public Datasets service
http://aws.amazon.com/publicdatasets/
Public Data Sets on AWS provides a centralized repository of public data sets that can be seamlessly integrated into AWS cloud-based applications. AWS is hosting the public data sets at no charge for the community, and like all AWS services, users pay only for the compute and storage they use for their own applications.
Previously, large data sets such as the mapping of the Human Genome and the US Census data required hours or days to locate, download, customize, and analyze. Now, anyone can access these data sets from their Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances and start computing on the data within minutes. Users can also leverage the entire AWS ecosystem and easily collaborate with other AWS users. For example, users can produce or use prebuilt server images with tools and applications to analyze the data sets. Users can also discuss best practices and solutions in the dedicated Public Data Sets forum.
By hosting this important and useful data with cost-efficient services such as Amazon EC2, AWS hopes to provide researchers across a variety of disciplines and industries with tools to enable more innovation, more quickly.
Google provides free storage for datasets
http://www.dailybits.com/google-provides-free-storage-for-scientific-data/
Under Project Palimpsest, Google will be providing free storage and public access to large scientific data sets in what could be a major data organization challenge.
The storage would fill a major need for scientists who want to openly share their data, and would allow citizen scientists access to an unprecedented amount of data to explore. For example, two planned datasets are all 120 terabytes of Hubble Space Telescope data and the images from the Archimedes Palimpsest, the 10th century manuscript that inspired the Google dataset storage project.
The challenge would be in the ways in which Google is able to represent the data to the public. Also, the Trendanalyzer acquisition would come really handy here. The data source is open to the public which means that additions can be made to it as well.
There is also a presentation available at SearchEngineJournal on the talk delivered last May. And if you have huge datasets that just won’t get uploaded, Google is providing 3TB disk arrays for shipping them whole file system for the dataset.
-----
Talis Connected Commons
http://scilib.typepad.com/science_library_pad/
Talis Connected Commons is about fostering the Linked Data community, by providing a rich hosting service:
For qualifying data sets, Talis will provide, through the Talis Platform:
• Free hosting of up to 50 million RDF triples and 10Gb of content
• Access to data access services that operate on that data, including data retrieval and text search
• Free access to a public SPARQL endpoint for each dataset.
I asked Leigh how this fits with the Talis Project Xiphos initiative, and he explained that Xiphos is a more focussed initiative around "data in the education, library and publishing sectors", whereas Connected Commons is about any kind of data.
Talis, like Amazon, understands that a modern business is about fostering an ecosystem, a combination of shared data and services that can be used as a platform for software development and business development.
------
Amazon Public Datasets service
http://aws.amazon.com/publicdatasets/
Public Data Sets on AWS provides a centralized repository of public data sets that can be seamlessly integrated into AWS cloud-based applications. AWS is hosting the public data sets at no charge for the community, and like all AWS services, users pay only for the compute and storage they use for their own applications.
Previously, large data sets such as the mapping of the Human Genome and the US Census data required hours or days to locate, download, customize, and analyze. Now, anyone can access these data sets from their Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances and start computing on the data within minutes. Users can also leverage the entire AWS ecosystem and easily collaborate with other AWS users. For example, users can produce or use prebuilt server images with tools and applications to analyze the data sets. Users can also discuss best practices and solutions in the dedicated Public Data Sets forum.
By hosting this important and useful data with cost-efficient services such as Amazon EC2, AWS hopes to provide researchers across a variety of disciplines and industries with tools to enable more innovation, more quickly.
Thursday, March 19, 2009
Citizen Science - how you can make a contribution to study of climate change
[From Climate Progress - “the indispensable blog” — Tom Friedman, New York Times –BSA]
http://climateprogress.org/2009/03/19/so-you-want-to-be-a-citizen-scientist/
[..]
Online social networking is no longer just about tagging a picture of your dog on Facebook or announcing to the world what you’re having for dinner on Twitter. Scientific institutions worldwide are beginning to harness the power of online social networking for scientific research. Online communities are an ideal vehicle for matching professional scientists with armies of enthusiastic amateurs. This corps of citizen scientists has the capacity to capture far more data over a vastly expanded geographical spectrum than professional scientists can on their own.
The USA National Phenology Network is one organization that is reaching out to citizen scientists via the Internet. People have used phenology, the study of the timing of lifecycle events of plants and animals, to detect the signs of spring since the early 18th century. The rising threat posed by global warming has spurred scientists to put phenology to another use: to detect the signs of climate change.
Plants and animals are very sensitive to even the smallest changes in their climates. Shifts in the timing of their lifecycle events can therefore be an important indicator in the study of climate change and its effects. Slight changes can have huge repercussions; mutual relationships between species and even entire systems can begin to fall apart.
USA-NPN is asking people across the country to record the phenology of their local flora and then report it online. Amateur hikers and photographers can also participate in NPN’s Project Budburst. They are asked to identify the phenological stage of the flowers and plants they see using information provided by the project’s website. The participants record the location, longitude, and latitude of what they observe. Eventually, Project Budburst will use this information to include real-time mapping with Google maps.
Relying on anonymous volunteers to collect data that will be entered into important scientific databases certainly raises questions about the reliability of the information gathered. Yet it turns out that most of the data is remarkably accurate, and researchers do perform checks on anomalous data. What’s more, the large pool of samples collected by a large group of volunteers diminishes the impact of any faulty data.
This creative new use for social networking also answers critics’ accusations about the frivolity of Facebook, Twitter, and other sites with proof that online networking has the potential to mobilize users to actively participate in innovative programs. Jack Weltzin, executive director of NPN, has said that in the future NPN hopes to make it possible for people to submit their findings via Twitter. NPN, a nonprofit organization, also hopes that iPhone and Facebook applications might be created to more easily facilitate volunteer participation.
Climate change scientists are not the only members of the scientific profession to tap into the potential of these online communities. In addition to tracking climate change, the information participants collect can help scientists predict wildfires and pollen production and monitor droughts as well as detect and control invasive species. Other online projects, such as “The Great World Wide Star Count,” rely on volunteer participation to gauge the level of light pollution across the globe. Several websites are also dedicated to tracking the migratory and breeding patterns of animals such as birds, frogs, and butterflies. All of these observations will augment the databases available to scientists attempting to understand annual fluctuations.
http://climateprogress.org/2009/03/19/so-you-want-to-be-a-citizen-scientist/
[..]
Online social networking is no longer just about tagging a picture of your dog on Facebook or announcing to the world what you’re having for dinner on Twitter. Scientific institutions worldwide are beginning to harness the power of online social networking for scientific research. Online communities are an ideal vehicle for matching professional scientists with armies of enthusiastic amateurs. This corps of citizen scientists has the capacity to capture far more data over a vastly expanded geographical spectrum than professional scientists can on their own.
The USA National Phenology Network is one organization that is reaching out to citizen scientists via the Internet. People have used phenology, the study of the timing of lifecycle events of plants and animals, to detect the signs of spring since the early 18th century. The rising threat posed by global warming has spurred scientists to put phenology to another use: to detect the signs of climate change.
Plants and animals are very sensitive to even the smallest changes in their climates. Shifts in the timing of their lifecycle events can therefore be an important indicator in the study of climate change and its effects. Slight changes can have huge repercussions; mutual relationships between species and even entire systems can begin to fall apart.
USA-NPN is asking people across the country to record the phenology of their local flora and then report it online. Amateur hikers and photographers can also participate in NPN’s Project Budburst. They are asked to identify the phenological stage of the flowers and plants they see using information provided by the project’s website. The participants record the location, longitude, and latitude of what they observe. Eventually, Project Budburst will use this information to include real-time mapping with Google maps.
Relying on anonymous volunteers to collect data that will be entered into important scientific databases certainly raises questions about the reliability of the information gathered. Yet it turns out that most of the data is remarkably accurate, and researchers do perform checks on anomalous data. What’s more, the large pool of samples collected by a large group of volunteers diminishes the impact of any faulty data.
This creative new use for social networking also answers critics’ accusations about the frivolity of Facebook, Twitter, and other sites with proof that online networking has the potential to mobilize users to actively participate in innovative programs. Jack Weltzin, executive director of NPN, has said that in the future NPN hopes to make it possible for people to submit their findings via Twitter. NPN, a nonprofit organization, also hopes that iPhone and Facebook applications might be created to more easily facilitate volunteer participation.
Climate change scientists are not the only members of the scientific profession to tap into the potential of these online communities. In addition to tracking climate change, the information participants collect can help scientists predict wildfires and pollen production and monitor droughts as well as detect and control invasive species. Other online projects, such as “The Great World Wide Star Count,” rely on volunteer participation to gauge the level of light pollution across the globe. Several websites are also dedicated to tracking the migratory and breeding patterns of animals such as birds, frogs, and butterflies. All of these observations will augment the databases available to scientists attempting to understand annual fluctuations.
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
Science 2.0: New online tools may revolutionize research
[Excellent article on how Web 2.0 tools are transforming science. The 2 projects mentioned have been funded by CANARIE in the latest NEP program amongst a total of 11 similar projects . For more examples of how web 2.0 is revolutionizing science please see my Citizen Science Blog. Thanks to Richard Ackerman for some of the FriendFeed pointers. Some excerpts from CBC website– BSA]
http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2009/01/08/f-tech-research.html
Citizen Science
http://citizen-science.blogspot.com/
CANARIE NEP program
http://www.canarie.ca/funding/nep/eoi.html
Described as an extension of the internet under the ocean, the Venus Coastal Observatory off Canada's west coast provides oceanographers with a continuous stream of undersea data once accessible only through costly marine expeditions. When its sister facility Neptune Canada launches next summer, the observatories' eight nodes will provide ocean scientists with an unprecedented wealth of information.
Sifting through all that data, however, can be quite a task. So the observatories, with the help of CANARIE Inc., operator of Canada's advanced research network, are developing a set of tools they call Oceans 2.0 to simplify access to the data and help researchers work with it in new ways. Some of their ideas look a lot like such popular consumer websites as Facebook, Flickr, Wikipedia and Digg.
And they're not alone. This set of online interaction technologies called Web 2.0 is finding its way into the scientific community.
Michael Nielsen, a Waterloo, Ont., physicist who is working on a book on the future of science, says online tools could change science to an extent that hasn't happened since the late 17th century, when scientists started publishing their research in scientific journals.
One way to manage the data boom will involve tagging data, much as users of websites like Flickr tag images or readers of blogs and web pages can "Digg" articles they approve. On Oceans 2.0, researchers might attach tags to images or video streams from undersea cameras, identifying sightings of little-known organisms or examples of rare phenomena.
The Canadian Space Science Data Portal (CSSDP), based at the University of Alberta, is also working on online collaboration tools. Robert Rankin, a University of Alberta physics professor and CSSDP principal investigator, foresees scientists attaching tags to specific data items containing occurrences of a particular process or phenomenon in which researchers are interested.
"You've essentially got a database that has been developed using this tagging process," he says.
If data tagging is analogous to Flickr or Digg, other initiatives look a bit like Facebook.
Pirenne envisions Oceans 2.0 including a Facebook-like social networking site where researchers could create profiles showing what sort of work they do and what expertise they have. When a scientist is working on a project and needs specific expertise — experience in data mining and statistical analysis of oceanographic data, for example — he or she could turn to this facility to find likely collaborators.
"It's a really exciting time," Lok says, "a really active time for Science 2.0."
it got lots of buzz on FriendFeed, there are multiple mentions of it
http://friendfeed.com/e/b2dc0a15-e076-4d2b-8771-d0e37733077e/Science-2-0-on-CBC/
http://friendfeed.com/e/7649d8b6-9f28-424e-9344-875bf2abfc25/Several-conference-attendees-are-quoted-in-this/
(The conference Eva's referring to is Science Online 2009.)
http://friendfeed.com/e/dcfc7f91-82e9-5aac-c7a4-b2cfea8f6b40/Science-2-0-New-online-tools-may-revolutionize/
http://friendfeed.com/e/333a5973-3aab-a3f7-0b84-993e20b94ce4/Science-2-0-New-online-tools-may-revolutionize/
http://friendfeed.com/e/c1824ca1-93d5-452a-b404-199b5d8e04d3/Nature-Network-in-the-news-Expression-Patterns/
http://friendfeed.com/e/9a2d1d68-fb76-c5a6-c43e-3909d7bebec4/Science-2-0-article-quotes-four-ScienceOnline-09/
http://friendfeed.com/e/556befb8-bfa0-4c3e-8c7a-63b94243bf5e/Science-2-0-article-quotes-four-ScienceOnline-09/
http://friendfeed.com/e/03dca000-9f33-849c-b40a-b22178339428/CBCnews-Article-on-Science2-0/
http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2009/01/08/f-tech-research.html
Citizen Science
http://citizen-science.blogspot.com/
CANARIE NEP program
http://www.canarie.ca/funding/nep/eoi.html
Described as an extension of the internet under the ocean, the Venus Coastal Observatory off Canada's west coast provides oceanographers with a continuous stream of undersea data once accessible only through costly marine expeditions. When its sister facility Neptune Canada launches next summer, the observatories' eight nodes will provide ocean scientists with an unprecedented wealth of information.
Sifting through all that data, however, can be quite a task. So the observatories, with the help of CANARIE Inc., operator of Canada's advanced research network, are developing a set of tools they call Oceans 2.0 to simplify access to the data and help researchers work with it in new ways. Some of their ideas look a lot like such popular consumer websites as Facebook, Flickr, Wikipedia and Digg.
And they're not alone. This set of online interaction technologies called Web 2.0 is finding its way into the scientific community.
Michael Nielsen, a Waterloo, Ont., physicist who is working on a book on the future of science, says online tools could change science to an extent that hasn't happened since the late 17th century, when scientists started publishing their research in scientific journals.
One way to manage the data boom will involve tagging data, much as users of websites like Flickr tag images or readers of blogs and web pages can "Digg" articles they approve. On Oceans 2.0, researchers might attach tags to images or video streams from undersea cameras, identifying sightings of little-known organisms or examples of rare phenomena.
The Canadian Space Science Data Portal (CSSDP), based at the University of Alberta, is also working on online collaboration tools. Robert Rankin, a University of Alberta physics professor and CSSDP principal investigator, foresees scientists attaching tags to specific data items containing occurrences of a particular process or phenomenon in which researchers are interested.
"You've essentially got a database that has been developed using this tagging process," he says.
If data tagging is analogous to Flickr or Digg, other initiatives look a bit like Facebook.
Pirenne envisions Oceans 2.0 including a Facebook-like social networking site where researchers could create profiles showing what sort of work they do and what expertise they have. When a scientist is working on a project and needs specific expertise — experience in data mining and statistical analysis of oceanographic data, for example — he or she could turn to this facility to find likely collaborators.
"It's a really exciting time," Lok says, "a really active time for Science 2.0."
it got lots of buzz on FriendFeed, there are multiple mentions of it
http://friendfeed.com/e/b2dc0a15-e076-4d2b-8771-d0e37733077e/Science-2-0-on-CBC/
http://friendfeed.com/e/7649d8b6-9f28-424e-9344-875bf2abfc25/Several-conference-attendees-are-quoted-in-this/
(The conference Eva's referring to is Science Online 2009.)
http://friendfeed.com/e/dcfc7f91-82e9-5aac-c7a4-b2cfea8f6b40/Science-2-0-New-online-tools-may-revolutionize/
http://friendfeed.com/e/333a5973-3aab-a3f7-0b84-993e20b94ce4/Science-2-0-New-online-tools-may-revolutionize/
http://friendfeed.com/e/c1824ca1-93d5-452a-b404-199b5d8e04d3/Nature-Network-in-the-news-Expression-Patterns/
http://friendfeed.com/e/9a2d1d68-fb76-c5a6-c43e-3909d7bebec4/Science-2-0-article-quotes-four-ScienceOnline-09/
http://friendfeed.com/e/556befb8-bfa0-4c3e-8c7a-63b94243bf5e/Science-2-0-article-quotes-four-ScienceOnline-09/
http://friendfeed.com/e/03dca000-9f33-849c-b40a-b22178339428/CBCnews-Article-on-Science2-0/
Tuesday, January 6, 2009
e-science, virtual organisations, data curation
[Thanks to Richard Ackerman for this pointer, and I agree with his assessment there are lots of interesting presentations here –BSA]
A lot of interesting presentations here
Proceedings from the ARL/CNI Fall Forum
October 16-17, 2008
Arlington, Virginia
http://www.arl.org/resources/pubs/fallforumproceedings/forum08proceedings.shtml
E-Science: Trends, Transformations & Responses
E-Science: Trends, Transformations & Responses
Chris Greer, Director, National Coordination Office (NCO) for the multiagency Federal Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) Program
Audio [MP3 22 min.] | Slides [PPS 24.7 MB]
A Case Study in E-Science: Building Ecological Informatics Solutions for Multi-Decadal Research
William Michener, Research Professor (Biology) and Associate Director, Long-Term Ecological Research Network Office, University of New Mexico
Audio [MP3 26 min.] | Slides [PPS 8 MB]
Making a Quantum Leap to eResearch Support
Rick Luce, Vice Provost and Director of University Libraries, Emory University Libraries
Audio [MP3 19 min.] | Slides [PDF 2.5 MB]
Data Curation: Issues and Challenges
Transition or Transform? Repositioning the Library for the Petabyte Era
Liz Lyon, Director, UKOLN
Audio [MP3 23 min.] | Slides [PPS 10.3 MB]
Research and Data
Fran Berman, Director of the San Diego Supercomputer Center, UC San Diego, and Co-chair Blue Ribbon Task Force on Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access
Audio [MP3 44 min.] | Slides [PPS 5.5 MB]
Data Curation Issues and Challenges
Sayeed Choudhury, Associate Dean of University Libraries and Hodson Director of the Digital Research and Curation Center, Johns Hopkins University
Audio [MP3 20 min.] | Slides [PPS 424 KB]
Data Curation Panel
Pam Bjornson, Director-General, Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information
Audio [MP3 6 min.] | Slides [PPS 1.9 MB]
Supporting Virtual Organizations
The Coming Age of Virtual Organizations: The Early History and Future of Geographically Distributed Collaboration
Thomas A. Finholt, Director, Collaboratory for Research on Electronic Work (CREW) and Research Professor & Associate Dean for Research and Innovation, School of Information, University of Michigan
Audio [MP3 24 min.] | Slides [PPS 7.3 MB]
Cyberinfrastructure for Discovery, Learning, and Engagement:
The nanoHUB Experience
Mark Lundstrom, Don and Carol Scifres Distinguished Professor, Director, Network for Computational Nanotechnology, School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Purdue University
Audio [MP3 22 min.] | Slides [PPS 3.5 MB]
Reactor Panel: Supporting the Virtual Organization: A Role for Libraries?
Medha Devare, Life Sciences and Bioinformatics Librarian, Mann Library, Cornell University
Audio [MP3 20 min.] | Slides [PPS 3.2 MB]
Reactor Panel: Supporting the Virtual Organization
D. Scott Brandt, Associate Dean for Research, Purdue University Library
Audio [MP3 7 min.] | Slides [PPS 4.3 MB]
A lot of interesting presentations here
Proceedings from the ARL/CNI Fall Forum
October 16-17, 2008
Arlington, Virginia
http://www.arl.org/resources/pubs/fallforumproceedings/forum08proceedings.shtml
E-Science: Trends, Transformations & Responses
E-Science: Trends, Transformations & Responses
Chris Greer, Director, National Coordination Office (NCO) for the multiagency Federal Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) Program
Audio [MP3 22 min.] | Slides [PPS 24.7 MB]
A Case Study in E-Science: Building Ecological Informatics Solutions for Multi-Decadal Research
William Michener, Research Professor (Biology) and Associate Director, Long-Term Ecological Research Network Office, University of New Mexico
Audio [MP3 26 min.] | Slides [PPS 8 MB]
Making a Quantum Leap to eResearch Support
Rick Luce, Vice Provost and Director of University Libraries, Emory University Libraries
Audio [MP3 19 min.] | Slides [PDF 2.5 MB]
Data Curation: Issues and Challenges
Transition or Transform? Repositioning the Library for the Petabyte Era
Liz Lyon, Director, UKOLN
Audio [MP3 23 min.] | Slides [PPS 10.3 MB]
Research and Data
Fran Berman, Director of the San Diego Supercomputer Center, UC San Diego, and Co-chair Blue Ribbon Task Force on Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access
Audio [MP3 44 min.] | Slides [PPS 5.5 MB]
Data Curation Issues and Challenges
Sayeed Choudhury, Associate Dean of University Libraries and Hodson Director of the Digital Research and Curation Center, Johns Hopkins University
Audio [MP3 20 min.] | Slides [PPS 424 KB]
Data Curation Panel
Pam Bjornson, Director-General, Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information
Audio [MP3 6 min.] | Slides [PPS 1.9 MB]
Supporting Virtual Organizations
The Coming Age of Virtual Organizations: The Early History and Future of Geographically Distributed Collaboration
Thomas A. Finholt, Director, Collaboratory for Research on Electronic Work (CREW) and Research Professor & Associate Dean for Research and Innovation, School of Information, University of Michigan
Audio [MP3 24 min.] | Slides [PPS 7.3 MB]
Cyberinfrastructure for Discovery, Learning, and Engagement:
The nanoHUB Experience
Mark Lundstrom, Don and Carol Scifres Distinguished Professor, Director, Network for Computational Nanotechnology, School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Purdue University
Audio [MP3 22 min.] | Slides [PPS 3.5 MB]
Reactor Panel: Supporting the Virtual Organization: A Role for Libraries?
Medha Devare, Life Sciences and Bioinformatics Librarian, Mann Library, Cornell University
Audio [MP3 20 min.] | Slides [PPS 3.2 MB]
Reactor Panel: Supporting the Virtual Organization
D. Scott Brandt, Associate Dean for Research, Purdue University Library
Audio [MP3 7 min.] | Slides [PPS 4.3 MB]
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
Web 2.0 and social networking for scientists
[Excellent slide deck on various web 2.0 tools available for scientists and researchers, and the impact they are having on research. Thanks to Richard Ackerman for this pointer-BSA]
http://scilib.typepad.com/science_library_pad/2008/12/science-networking-online.html
http://scilib.typepad.com/science_library_pad/2008/12/science-networking-online.html
Tuesday, September 2, 2008
Many eyes
From the New York Times --
Novelties
Lines and Bubbles and Bars, Oh My! New Ways to Sift Data By Anne Eisenberg
PEOPLE share their videos on YouTube and their photos at Flickr. Now they can share more technical types of displays: graphs, charts and other visuals they create to help them analyze data buried in spreadsheets, tables or text.
At an experimental Web site, Many Eyes, (www.many-eyes.com), users can upload the data they want to visualize, then try sophisticated tools to generate interactive displays. These might range from maps of relationships in the New Testament to a display of the comparative frequency of words used in speeches by Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama.
The site was created by scientists at the Watson Research Center of I.B.M. in Cambridge, Mass., to help people publish and discuss graphics in a group. Those who register at the site can comment on one another's work, perhaps visualizing the same information with different tools and discovering unexpected patterns in the data.
Collaboration like this can be an effective way to spur insight, said Pat Hanrahan, a professor of computer science at Stanford whose research includes scientific visualization. "When analyzing information, no single person knows it all," he said. "When you have a group look at data, you protect against bias. You get more perspectives, and this can lead to more reliable decisions."
The site is the brainchild of Martin Wattenberg and Fernanda B.
Viégas, two I.B.M. researchers at the Cambridge lab. Dr. Wattenberg, a computer scientist and mathematician, says sophisticated visualization tools have historically been the province of professionals in academia, business and government. "We want to bring visualization to a whole new audience," he said — to people who have had relatively few ways to create and discuss such use of data.
"The conversation about the data is as important as the flow of data from the database," he said.
The Many Eyes site, begun in January 2007, offers 16 ways to present data, from stack graphs and bar charts to diagrams that let people map relationships. TreeMaps, showing information in colorful rectangles, are among the popular tools.
Initially, the site offered only analytical tools like graphs for visualizing numerical data. "The interesting thing we noticed was that users kept trying to upload blog posts, and entire books," Dr. Viégas said, so the site added techniques for unstructured text. One tool, called an interleaved tag cloud, lets users compare side by side the relative frequencies of the words in two passages — for instance, President Bush's State of the Union addresses in 2002 and 2003.
Almost all the tools are interactive, allowing users to change parameters, zoom in or out or show more information when the mouse moves over an image, Dr. Wattenberg said.
Users can embed images and links to their visualizations in their Web sites or blogs, just as they can embed YouTube videos. "It's great that people can paste in a YouTube video of cats" on their blogs, Dr.
Viégas said. "So why not a visual that gives you some insight into the sea of data that surrounds us? I might find one thing; someone else, something completely different, and that's where the conversation starts."
Rich Hoeg, a technology manager who lives in New Hope, Minn., and has a blog at econtent.typepad.com, was so taken with the possibilities for group collaboration that he wrote a tutorial on using Many Eyes as part of his series called "NorthStar Nerd Tutorials."
[snip]RSS Feed:
Novelties
Lines and Bubbles and Bars, Oh My! New Ways to Sift Data By Anne Eisenberg
PEOPLE share their videos on YouTube and their photos at Flickr. Now they can share more technical types of displays: graphs, charts and other visuals they create to help them analyze data buried in spreadsheets, tables or text.
At an experimental Web site, Many Eyes, (www.many-eyes.com), users can upload the data they want to visualize, then try sophisticated tools to generate interactive displays. These might range from maps of relationships in the New Testament to a display of the comparative frequency of words used in speeches by Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama.
The site was created by scientists at the Watson Research Center of I.B.M. in Cambridge, Mass., to help people publish and discuss graphics in a group. Those who register at the site can comment on one another's work, perhaps visualizing the same information with different tools and discovering unexpected patterns in the data.
Collaboration like this can be an effective way to spur insight, said Pat Hanrahan, a professor of computer science at Stanford whose research includes scientific visualization. "When analyzing information, no single person knows it all," he said. "When you have a group look at data, you protect against bias. You get more perspectives, and this can lead to more reliable decisions."
The site is the brainchild of Martin Wattenberg and Fernanda B.
Viégas, two I.B.M. researchers at the Cambridge lab. Dr. Wattenberg, a computer scientist and mathematician, says sophisticated visualization tools have historically been the province of professionals in academia, business and government. "We want to bring visualization to a whole new audience," he said — to people who have had relatively few ways to create and discuss such use of data.
"The conversation about the data is as important as the flow of data from the database," he said.
The Many Eyes site, begun in January 2007, offers 16 ways to present data, from stack graphs and bar charts to diagrams that let people map relationships. TreeMaps, showing information in colorful rectangles, are among the popular tools.
Initially, the site offered only analytical tools like graphs for visualizing numerical data. "The interesting thing we noticed was that users kept trying to upload blog posts, and entire books," Dr. Viégas said, so the site added techniques for unstructured text. One tool, called an interleaved tag cloud, lets users compare side by side the relative frequencies of the words in two passages — for instance, President Bush's State of the Union addresses in 2002 and 2003.
Almost all the tools are interactive, allowing users to change parameters, zoom in or out or show more information when the mouse moves over an image, Dr. Wattenberg said.
Users can embed images and links to their visualizations in their Web sites or blogs, just as they can embed YouTube videos. "It's great that people can paste in a YouTube video of cats" on their blogs, Dr.
Viégas said. "So why not a visual that gives you some insight into the sea of data that surrounds us? I might find one thing; someone else, something completely different, and that's where the conversation starts."
Rich Hoeg, a technology manager who lives in New Hope, Minn., and has a blog at econtent.typepad.com, was so taken with the possibilities for group collaboration that he wrote a tutorial on using Many Eyes as part of his series called "NorthStar Nerd Tutorials."
[snip]RSS Feed:
Monday, August 25, 2008
Impact of Citizen Science on academic research
[Good article on the impact of citizen science on academic research.
Cyber-infrastructure will not only impact the way we do science at
universities but with the advent of clouds, grids, SOA, remote
instrumentation and Web 2.0 I believe we are entering a new renaissance era
where amateur scientists can have access to the same tools and techniques
used by professional researchers. Of course these same tools also allow us
to move power hungry laboratory and computer equipment off of our campuses
to more environmentally friendly zero carbon renewable energy sites -
accessible to all. From a posting on Dewayne Hendricks list. BSA]
http://www.nypost.com/seven/08242008/postopinion/postopbooks/crowdsourcing_1
25790.htm
"CROWDSOURCING"
Wired writer Jeff Howe's "Crowdsourcing" thesis is this: the "experts" -
whether they're top-tier physicists or movie-studio heads - don't have a
monopoly on the creation or distribution of information anymore. The crowd,
through technology that's been available for little more than a decade, has
broken that monopoly, transforming everything from entertainment to cancer
research.
.
Howe introduces this change with an amusing story about birdwatchers. Until
the Internet age, it was the experts who decided whether a bird is extinct
or not - and those experts still think they do. A few years ago, the
official scientific birdwatchers decided, after much study, that an extinct
bird in Mexico was actually not extinct.
But the amateur birdwatchers had long beaten them to this discovery with
their own online literature. "The birdwatchers were like, 'That's
interesting, but we did that a few years ago,' " one professional
ornithologist told Howe.
.
Before the 19th century, it was amateurs - often, but not always, from the
aristocracy - who made scientific discoveries, writing to each other to
share knowledge through informal societies like "the Invisible College,"
which later became the Royal Society.
But by the 1800s, universities and their increasingly specialized graduates
were jealous of the competition posed by amateurs, and started to shut them
out - successfully, until recently, when amateurs in fields ranging from
organic chemistry to investigative journalism could once again fairly
compete with the pros.
.
In science, an Italian homemaker with a heretofore unused organic chemistry
degree can put her talents to use after she puts her kids to bed, helping
companies like Procter and Gamble solve problems their own scientists
couldn't solve through a venture called InnoCentive. Participating companies
pay successful problem-solvers tens of thousands of dollars for their
breakthroughs. Video-renter Netflix has a $1 million reward on offer for
anyone who can increase a component of its customer-service software by 10
percent.
Cyber-infrastructure will not only impact the way we do science at
universities but with the advent of clouds, grids, SOA, remote
instrumentation and Web 2.0 I believe we are entering a new renaissance era
where amateur scientists can have access to the same tools and techniques
used by professional researchers. Of course these same tools also allow us
to move power hungry laboratory and computer equipment off of our campuses
to more environmentally friendly zero carbon renewable energy sites -
accessible to all. From a posting on Dewayne Hendricks list. BSA]
http://www.nypost.com/seven/08242008/postopinion/postopbooks/crowdsourcing_1
25790.htm
"CROWDSOURCING"
Wired writer Jeff Howe's "Crowdsourcing" thesis is this: the "experts" -
whether they're top-tier physicists or movie-studio heads - don't have a
monopoly on the creation or distribution of information anymore. The crowd,
through technology that's been available for little more than a decade, has
broken that monopoly, transforming everything from entertainment to cancer
research.
.
Howe introduces this change with an amusing story about birdwatchers. Until
the Internet age, it was the experts who decided whether a bird is extinct
or not - and those experts still think they do. A few years ago, the
official scientific birdwatchers decided, after much study, that an extinct
bird in Mexico was actually not extinct.
But the amateur birdwatchers had long beaten them to this discovery with
their own online literature. "The birdwatchers were like, 'That's
interesting, but we did that a few years ago,' " one professional
ornithologist told Howe.
.
Before the 19th century, it was amateurs - often, but not always, from the
aristocracy - who made scientific discoveries, writing to each other to
share knowledge through informal societies like "the Invisible College,"
which later became the Royal Society.
But by the 1800s, universities and their increasingly specialized graduates
were jealous of the competition posed by amateurs, and started to shut them
out - successfully, until recently, when amateurs in fields ranging from
organic chemistry to investigative journalism could once again fairly
compete with the pros.
.
In science, an Italian homemaker with a heretofore unused organic chemistry
degree can put her talents to use after she puts her kids to bed, helping
companies like Procter and Gamble solve problems their own scientists
couldn't solve through a venture called InnoCentive. Participating companies
pay successful problem-solvers tens of thousands of dollars for their
breakthroughs. Video-renter Netflix has a $1 million reward on offer for
anyone who can increase a component of its customer-service software by 10
percent.
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