Bench Press

What can you do with a 110 foot wide, nine story tall radio telescope that weighs almost a million pounds? Not a question the average person or even educational institution asks themselves. Yet, this was a question Lewis Center founder Rick Piercy contemplated when he convinced NASA to donate a radio telescope being decommissioned that had once been used to communicate with Apollo spacecraft.

Thanks to Rick Piercy’s efforts K-12 students around the world have access to the Goldstone Apple Valley Radio Telescope through the Lewis Center’s GAVRT program which is a partnership with NASA offering a variety of programs exposing students to radio astronomy and cutting edge scientific work. Teachers from all institutions are welcome to join the program and are given a training seminar and visit to the telescope in order to familiarize themselves with the curriculum currently designed around the GAVRT as well as learn how to control the telescope via the internet.

In one of the ongoing projects students have been giving NASA scientists a helping hand track the Lunar CRater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) spacecraft with the GAVRT. The LCROSS mission is ongoing and the satellite is scheduled to make impact with the moon in order to look for water on October 9, 2009. One of the beauties of this program is that not only is this a unique learning opportunity for the students, but they also help provide additional data gathering time for NASA scientists as explained by Brian Day of the NASA Ames Research Center,

Because LCROSS has a very steeply inclined orbit, we have only a 2-hour window once every 3 days when we can check out the spacecraft using the Deep Space Network. So we decided to ask GAVRT for help. These kids help us get extra listening time for our spacecraft, and they get an incredible educational experience in return.

Thanks to the internet and some enterprising individuals some lucky students will have a front row seat to some exciting scientific exploration of our nearest celestial neighbor. I look forward to hearing about the results of the LCROSS mission. Congratulations guys!

Read more about GAVRT and the LCROSS mission.

Previously, Ben wrote a post about innovative use of the virtual world Second Life for simulating N-body problems. One of the groups behind the impressive OpenSim mod, the Meta Institute of Computational Astrophysics (MICA), is incredibly unique in that the organization itself is an exploration into the utility of emerging virtual world (VW) technologies (e.g. SecondLife) for scientific and academic work.

A group of scientists from the California Institute of Technology, Princeton, Drexel University, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology founded MICA in the spring of 2008 in order to explore and take advantage of what they saw as a new frontier in collaboration and information dissemination. MICA’s goals are¹:

• Exploration, development and promotion of VWs and VR technologies for professional research in astronomy and related fields.
• To provide and develop novel social networking venues and mechanisms for scientific collaboration and communications, including professional meetings, effective telepresence, etc.
• Use of VWs and VR technologies for education and public outreach.
• To act as a forum for exchange of ideas and joint efforts with other scientific disciplines in promoting these goals for science and scholarship in general.

In addition to the collaborative research we’ve written about before MICA also “conducts weekly professional seminars, bi-weekly popular lectures, and many other regularly scheduled and occasional professional discussions and public outreach events, all of them in [SecondLife].” A screenshot of one of their astrophysics seminars can been seen below. MICA has also begun experimenting with various teaching formats for undergraduate and graduate level courses.

MICA members attending a weekly astrophysics seminar by Dr. M. Trenti, given in the StellaNova sim in SecondLife.

What really impresses me about MICA however is their belief in the platform.

[W]e wish to lead by example, and demonstrate the utility of VWs and immersive VR environments generally for scientific research in fields other than humanities and social sciences (where we believe the case is already strong). In that process, we hope to define the “best practices” and optimal use of VR tools in research and education, including scholarly communications. This is the kind of activity that we expect will engage a much broader segment of the academic community in exploration and use of VR technologies. Second, we hope to develop new research tools and techniques, and help lay the foundations of the informational environments for the next generation of VR-enabled Web.

Hopefully MICA’s innovative use of SecondLife will prompt other scientists to follow. I definitely want to check out one of the lectures one of these days.

(Exploring Use of Virtual Worlds as a Scientific Research Platform: The Meta-Institute for Computational Astrophysics)

The heartbeat of the news.

Ever since June 25, 2009, Michael Jackson’s death has been the talk of the nation, his face plastered over web articles, newspapers, and television stations. His death broke the record for the number of users on Yahoo news at any one point in time, topping even President Barack Obama’s inauguration, and even Google believed its servers were under attack due to the sudden spike in web searches for the moon-walking legend. However, have you ever wondered why the news of the King of Pop’s untimely death has stayed in the media for so long, while other news topics, such as the death of another cultural icon, Farrah Fawcett, quickly died out?

Jon Kleinberg, Jure Leskovec, and Lars Backstroma, from the computer science department at Cornell, sought to answer these types of questions by tracking the life-cycle of news articles for a three month period during 2008. Their research included 20,000 mainstream media sites and over 90 million articles. Using a complex algorithm which could identify certain phrases in different news articles such that the computer could mark them as being of the same subject (a task that has proven to be very difficult time and time again), the team tracked the movement of news using across blogs and news sites across the Internet. Armed with an extensive pool of data to sift through and analyze, the three researchers discovered an astounding pattern that was shared throughout most news topics.

They found a consistent rhythm as stories rose into prominence and then fell off over just a few days, with a “heartbeat” pattern of handoffs between blogs and mainstream media. In mainstream media, they found, a story rises to prominence slowly then dies quickly; in the blogosphere, stories rise in popularity very quickly but then stay around longer, as discussion goes back and forth. Eventually though, almost every story is pushed aside by something newer.

Before research like this was done, many editors and journalists perceived something they described to be a “news cycle.” However, with no quantifiable data, there was no way to be confident whether this was just their perceptions or an actual phenomenon. With the information collected by these Cornell researchers, they believe the latter to be the case and have started to create mathematical models which would accurately describe the life-cycle of news.

The slow rise of a new story in the mainstream, the researchers suggest, results from imitation – as more sites carried a story, other sites were more likely to pick it up. But the life of a story is limited, as new stories quickly push out the old. A mathematical model based on the interaction of imitation and recency predicted the pattern fairly well, the researchers said, while predictions based on either imitation or recency alone couldn’t come close.

This type of news excites me because it shows how technology and the Internet have produced a tangible result (in this case, a physical model to the life cycle of a news article) to a question that would have been unsolvable 20 years ago. Truly the capabilities of technology to solve even the most abstract problems are limitless.

(Image Credit)

Sorry for the late post everyone between lab and March Madness (UCLA ftw!) it’s been a hectic couple days. Despite all that I wanted to write a quick post about a news feature on science journalism over at Nature by Geoff Brumfiel. Brumfiel’s article discusses the rapid decline of science journalism and questions whether science blogging can step in to fill the role.

It’s very well written and brings up several interesting points which are already being discussed all over the blogosphere. One idea in Brumfiel’s article really caught my attention and that is that since science journalism is atrocious to begin with, we’re better off without it. Larry Moran’s comment that “[m]ost of what passes for science journalism is so bad we will be better off without it” is sentiment that’s apparently shared by many bloggers and while I don’t disagree that a lot of what passes as science journalism is poor (thanks to a variety of issues e.g. dwindling budgets, lack of writers with legitimate science backgrounds) I can’t agree with the sentiment that society would be better off without some form of mainstream science journalism. Regardless of their failures, mainstream science journalism at it’s worst raises awareness of scientific endeavors within the general public and at it’s best ought to serve as a legitimate watchdog for scientific misconduct.

Even if hype and marketability play a major role in the presentation of science news stories, the exposure, discussion, and potential inspiration from scientific breakthroughs presented in the mainstream media outweigh much of the typical issues (e.g. inaccuracies, oversimplification, and generalizations) that scientists have with scientific journalism. I became curious about science by getting a taste from mainstream scientific journalism as a young student and I’d hate to see that possibility disappear.

The mainstream media’s science coverage is definitely flawed but that does not provide a necessary and sufficient justification for getting rid of mainstream science journalism in it’s entirety. Improvements can and should be made, however as discussed by Brumfiel’s article this will ultimately require a give and take between journalists and scientists. The editorial introduction to Brumfiel’s article puts it best:

[I]n today’s overstressed media market, scientists must change these attitudes if they want to stay in the public eye. They must recognize the contributions of bloggers and others, and they should encourage any and all experiments that could help science better penetrate the news cycle. Even if they are reluctant to talk to the press themselves, they should encourage colleagues who do so responsibly. Scientists are poised to reach more people than ever, but only if they can embrace the very technology that they have developed.

In the end as Bora Zivkovic astutely states “[s]omebody has to actually be paid to write about things as they come out”. There will always be a need for a “professional” science journalist of some sort and I think scientists can play a large role in helping these journalists be science journalists. The decline of mainstream journalism in it’s current incarnation provides a grand opportunity for scientists to help fix the problems that we currently see. The movement of bloggers into print media and John Timmer’s work at Ars Technica are just two examples of how scientists can begin making an impact on the scientific journalism establishment. Participation in the discussion and providing new ideas will ultimately help more than happily dancing on the grave of that drivvle most scientists view scientific journalism as.

Like many of you reading this blog I’m continually impressed with the Web 2.0 revolution. Wikis, blogging, and social networks are reshaping media and communication by creating new norms about content (creation and consumption) and participation. With the usefulness of these technologies on display everyday adapting them for use in science is a logical step to many scientists. This has set off a rush of experimentation and discussion on the potential of Science 2.0. As is common in the scientific world the acceptance of new methodology for doing pretty much anything can be hotly debated and the adoption of Science 2.0 is no exception.

Being a tech geek and a young scientist I find it easy to see the promise presented in adapting internet technologies to science. The community empowering nature of Web 2.0 technologies seems to me a perfect fit for scientific work and is what drew me to start taking the plunge into Science 2.0. As I started to delve into the tools and communities that are currently present a few things thoroughly impressed me:

• Integration of tools – Citeulike and Friendfeed are an awesome integration of two separate services. Allyson over @ The Mind Wobbles (I hope that title sticks ) has a great post detailing the power and general experience of Citeulike and Friendfeed.
• Availability - Despite the somewhat fledgling status of Science 2.0 it’s easy to google for several different science social networks, find science focused groups on places like Friendfeed, or find various lab notebook replacements (e.g. OpenWetWare).
• Great community – The Web 2.0 movement would be nothing without the people that generate and participate in the various communities. This holds just as true for Science 2.0 and the quality of the science community is put on display each and everyday through amazing blog posts (just pick any of the blogs on the right), online discussions, and development of new tools.

While my dip into science on the web has been very positive, there are a few things that I think could be done to help push Science 2.0 further:

• Consolidation of some communities – I know I talked about the easy availability of a variety of services as something that impressed me, but duplication of sites (wow there are a lot of social network sites for science) also produces an unintended consequence of diluting the community. While I love the fact that you get really used to seeing the same people participating in discussions on say Friendfeed, I’d be more than willing to exchange a bit of familiarity for larger membership in a few central communities.
• Social Networks – I’ve really only had a chance to look at Labroots in any real detail so far but from first impressions and from commentary I’ve seen I think it holds true that the scientist specific social networks still leave a lot to be desired. They are mostly me-too services with few if any compelling/differentiating factors that can draw a critical mass of users. If anyone has found one in particular that stands out above the others feel free to drop me a line I’d definitely be interested in checking it out.
• Spread the word – Ultimately the best thing we can do as a community is continue to talk about science on the web to our colleagues, mentors, and bosses. Helping to grow the community one member at a time is something we can all do.

Overall everything I’ve seen and been able to use so far makes me very optimistic about the direction Science 2.0 is headed. As 2008 ends I look forward to seeing what 2009 will bring (hopefully not lightsaber wielding raptors…).

(Image Credit: Visualization of the relationships of over 700,000 scientific papers published between 2001 and 2005)

Because many science bloggers are practicing scientists or experts in their field, they can provide a unique educational bridge between academia and the public and distill important experimental findings into an accessible, interactive format. Yet academic institutions have been slow to appreciate blogs as valuable mediums for facilitating scholarly discussion, illustrated by the lack of institutional blogs or blogs by established academics. It is true that few quality-control or vetting mechanisms exist to help readers evaluate a blog, which typically earns its reputation based on the blogger’s credentials and reader feedback. Yet both academic institutions and blogs aim to engage and educate the public and advance scientific knowledge and discussion. By combining the credibility of institutions—trusted gate-keepers for scientific truth—with the immediacy and networking infrastructure of blogs, we believe that these shared goals can be better served with benefits to both partners.

An excerpt from a nice paper by Shelley Batts, Nick Anthis, and Tara C. Smith over at PLoS Biology discussing blogging’s potential in academia.

The Internet is not the first thing people think of when they think of a technological improvement that has dramatically changed science. This is because most people think of the ‘net in terms of the services that it provides (e.g. “I found a cool science video on YouTube” or “I found my soulmate on MySpace”), the true impact of the Internet on science is a lot deeper than that, for two reasons:

1. The Internet lets scientists access information from anywhere quickly and cheaply. Before the ‘net, you would have to make expensive long-distance phone calls/faxes or wait ridiculously long times for “snail mail” to get access to the latest scientific findings or to engage in a meaningful scientific discussion with your peers. Today, pretty much everyone has access to Google and Wikipedia (among other resources), letting scientists from all over the world quickly (and cheaply) draw upon the thinking of other scientists, regardless of their location.
2. The Internet lets more people drive scientific discussion. With the Internet, the core of intellectual discussion no longer need be in the printed letters sections of Science or Nature, not when every scientist can have his or her own blog, Twitter account, and/or Facebook profile. Can’t find people to discuss an obscure article from Blood? Blog about it! Find the scientist who published the journal and write a comment on his Facebook wall or his blog, follow his Twitter feed, or, if you’re more old-fashioned, write him or her an email.

But, despite the great potential of the Internet for radically shifting and improving the way scientific discourse is done, many scientists are choosing not to actively participate in #2, whether it be because of a lack of familiarity with these new technologies or because of a fear of being scooped. And that is a shame. The Internet is a uniquely collaborative and social tool — meaning that it’s value comes from people being willing to both use and contribute.

Chances are if you’re reading this blog, you already understand and embrace the power of the Internet for changing how science is done and discussed. This post (and this blog) is preaching to the choir to those of you guys and gals. But, even so, we all have to endeavor to:

• encourage scientists to blog, whether it be to help educate the public about things like vaccine safety, evolution, and global warming or to help drive discussion about exciting or informative research (e.g. with ResearchBlogging.org)
• leave meaningful comments on science blogs — blogging when nobody seems to care is painful and not inspiring. Blogging when the only people who seem to care leave flames or spam is even more painful. Leave smart comments that push the discussion forward. It’s more interesting for the blogger, for you, and for the legions of people too shy to comment.
• teach your fellow scientists about Twitter and social networking, because nothing helps foster a real sense of community then using tools designed to link people with one another
• develop a Wiki for your lab — it’s easy, helps to spread information within your lab (something I’m sure your PI would love to see more of), and is a good jumping off point for demonstrating why the Internet is a powerful tool which is made only more powerful by collaboration
• reach out to new science bloggers and Tweet-ers; it’s always difficult to try something new, and it’s even harder if you’re trying something and everyone is immediately hostile or unfriendly
• use the power of the social Web — drink the Kool-Aid; use the blogosphere to help yourself find potential collaborators, new insights, or even new sources of information. Use Twitter to meet up with scientists with similar interests (and they don’t even have to be scientific interests — they could just be hobbies!)

My hope is that as the power of the Web becomes further developed and better established in the minds of the scientific establishment, the Internet will grow into something which dramatically improves the quality of scientific discussion and thinking rather than be relegated to the realm of those scientists who just happen to be tech geeks.

edit: per Ander’s comment, replaced “more and more” with “many”  (brain fart)