Bench Press

Singapore is a fascinating country – despite the lack of what most in the West would recognize as democratic freedom, it consistently ranks well in terms of lack of corruption and high and growing standard of living for its people.

It is also one of the boldest when it comes to instituting policies and reforms: they were the first to implement a congestion tax to help manage traffic. Unlike most countries, Singapore is open to competition and investment from foreigners in strategic areas like telecommunications, power generation, and financial services. Singapore has also been extremely active in attempting to build up its capabilities as a center for life sciences excellence.

So it shouldn’t surprise me that they are among the first countries to actively utilize social media applications like Facebook and Twitter to help deal with a public health risk like Dengue Fever (from The Jakarta Globe):

The city-state’s National Environment Agency (NEA) plans to roll out … providing information on the latest dengue clusters or areas that have been earmarked as high-risk – on these new media platforms within the next three months … Through Facebook and Twitter, the public will also be able to post feedback or provide tip-offs. For example, if Singaporeans notice an increase in the number of mosquitoes in your neighbourhood or find potential breeding sites, they can alert NEA officers by posting on the agency’s Facebook page or tweeting the NEA account. “We need to put more information out in the public space, so more people can be informed and take action,” said Derek Ho, director of the environmental health department at NEA. “Leveraging on new media channels such as Facebook and Twitter is a good way to do that.”

A refreshing understanding of the uses of social media by a government agency – more interesting than that, though, is the work Singapore’s NEA is doing to build image recognition capabilities into smartphone apps like the NEA’s iPhone app to help field workers (and potentially the public) track and identify mosquitos and mosquito larvae!

The NEA is also in the process of developing a mosquito-recognition program that can identify the species of mosquito from a photograph of its pupae or larvae. With such software, and with the help of a mini microscope that attaches to the camera on a personal digital assistant or cellphone, NEA officers will be able to take photographs of larvae or pupae found in mosquito-breeding sites and instantly find out if they belong to the Aedes species, which spreads dengue … When it is ready, the agency hopes to be able to integrate it with the NEA iPhone application, so that the public or grassroots members conducting checks around the neighbourhood can use the technology as well.
Early identification will allow the NEA to act more swiftly to curb the spread of dengue in potential high-risk zones.

Very cool demonstration of the power of smartphones and of a government that is motivated to try out new technologies to tackle serious problems.

Here at Bench Press we’re always interested in new initiatives that harness the advantages of the internet. We’ve covered various powerful distributive computing initiatives as well as breakthrough collaborative endeavors in scientific research. So I was intrigued when I saw buzz on Twitter about the Obama administration’s attempt to crowd source suggestions for scientific policy.

Through the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and associated non-profit Expert Labs, the Obama administration wants to hear what grand challenges scientists envision taking on.

Expert Labs has a nice video explaining the reasoning behind this grand experiment in policy crowd sourcing.

After a quick search on Twitter I’m a bit curious as to how Expert Labs plans to parse all the data they’re going to get from this call to arms, but I’m optimistic that some interesting insights can be gleaned as to the opinions of Americans on the directions science should be headed in. More data never hurt right? If you’re interested in submitting an idea follow the directions here, you’ve got until April 15th!

We’ve previously covered the computer modeling solutions being used to model and track the paths of near-earth asteroids (especially those which might treat Earth like a dartboard), but for those of you not content to just sit at home while NASA scientists do all the tracking, the asteroid trackers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory have made it now easier to follow what’s going on in the world of near-earth asteroids from the comfort of your own home.

The first little gadget they’ve developed is a computer widget (pictured on the left) which is compatible with the Mac OS and Yahoo widget engines.

What it will show is a list of the next five near-earth asteroid approaches (within ~20x the distance of the moon) and an estimate of their size (including a pictogram depiction of what that size means) as well as their distance. The widget will also make it easy to find more information about the particular asteroids it is identifying (an example is linked here) which will show off a dynamic Java applet map of the asteroid’s orbit through the inner solar system (which you can manipulate so you can see how the orbit looks in 3D) as well as a wide range of data on the asteroid such as the eccentricity of an asteroid’s orbit (in layman’s terms, how oval-like versus how circular), the orbital period (the time it takes for an asteroid to complete one rotation around the sun).

The second thing the brains at NASA’s JPL have put together for researchers and amateur astronomers is a Twitter account (@AsteroidWatch), which accompanies NASA JPL’s main Asteroid Watch site. The feed went live on July 29, 2009 and, although not written in the cutesy voice of the MarsPhoenix twitter account (which followed the exploits of the Phoenix Mars probe NASA launched a while back), the AsteroidWatch feed so far has reported on near-earth asteroids and new reports and articles issued by NASA’s official asteroid tracking team.

You can follow the BenchPress team on Twitter! You can follow us at Anthony (@AnthonyPhan), Ben (@BenjaminTseng), Eric (@EricSuh), and Kevin (@Kevin_Tseng).

The most amazing thing about social media services like Twitter and Friendfeed is how rapidly you can find interesting articles and links. One of my good friends on Twitter, Charles Ju, recently pointed me to a picture which he only described as “this picture blows my mind”.

And sure enough, it completely blew my mind. I re-shared it on my own FriendFeed (garnering a couple of comments/responses from my own Twitter followers and Friendfeed friends) If you didn’t understand the scale of the universe before, this will put it all into perspective:

A big wow for:

1. How powerful social media services like Twitter and Friendfeed are for disseminating cool information/factoids/images
2. How vast the universe is
3. The capability of the Hubble Space Telescope to amass information about our universe

PS: If you’d like to follow the Bench Press authors on Friendfeed/Twitter you can follow me at http://www.friendfeed.com/benjamintseng, Kevin at http://friendfeed.com/ktseng, and Anthony at http://friendfeed.com/atphan.