Citizen Science

Citizens vs. geniuses

noreply@blogger.com (Bstarn) — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 14:09:00 +0000

Citizens vs. geniuses
http://www.isgtw.org/feature/citizens-vs-geniuses

It is a characteristic of our culture that we glorify scientific genius. Galileo Galilei, Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman and Stephen Hawking are just a few of the illustrious names from the canon of physics saints. Other disciplines have their own haloed ones. The role of the amateur scientist, in comparison with these greats, seems to vanish into insignificance.

The power of citizen cyberscience
Figuratively, citizen cyberscience today is primarily about harnessing the power of dray horses. Not just a hundred, but - thanks to Web - sometimes a hundred thousand, to tackle a problem that involves a lot of intellectual hauling.

Of course there are many examples of volunteer computing, such as the recently released LHC@Home 2.0 project, but I'm thinking here in particular of that strain of citizen cyberscience, volunteer thinking, represented by projects such as Stardust@Home, GalaxyZoo or FoldIt, where it is human brainpower that is being aggregated, and not just processor power on volunteer PCs.

But citizen cyberscience can be a lot more than this. Because the whole premise that there are only steeds and drays, brilliant professional scientists and ordinary citizens, and a factor of a hundred or more between them in intellectual capacity, is fundamentally flawed.

Fast drays and blinkered steeds
We live in a world where a staggering amount of people have studied science at a very high level, many even obtain a PhD, without becoming professional scientists.

And we live in a world where, due to specialization, professional scientists can only filter a fraction of the information that might be relevant to their research. In other words, a world where many drays can gallop fast, and most steeds are blinkered.

The famous American hat-throwing celebration of graduation. Today, there are many people who are highly educated in science, some may even hold a PhD, without being a scientist or actively engaged in research. Nevertheless, they are specialists who could contribute to their field. Image courtesy Wikimedia.
We can add to that the many steeds that have been put out to pasture - retired scientists with time on their hands and years of experience, who still have much to contribute. And then there are those passionate amateurs who spend all their free time practicing the science they love, the growing ranks of autodidact drays.

The long tail of talent
The whole point of this rather labored equine analogy is just this: the difference between professional scientists and amateurs is blurring.

This is happening for myriad reasons. Thanks to the Internet, but also to radical changes in education opportunities and life expectancies in the developed and much of the developing world. The net result is that there is not a binary world of geniuses and ordinary mortals, but rather – to use an Internet analogy – a long tail of talent.

This long tail ranges from the many volunteers who can do things such as catalogue galaxy images, the task set by the project GalaxyZoo, to the very few who might be able to spontaneously team up and develop completely new strategies for folding proteins, as scientists behind the computer game FoldIt documented, to their own surprise. (See "Citizen cyberscience: the new age of the amateur" in the CERN Courier for more examples).

The audience joins the show
What will this mean for citizen cyberscience? The most insightful analogy for understanding the implications of this gradual blurring between professional and amateur scientist is not horses, I would argue, but journalists.

The world of journalism has been turned upside-down in recent years by social media technologies which allow a much wider range of people to take part in gathering, filtering and distributing news. Though some professional journalists at first resisted this trend, most now appreciate the likes of Facebook, Twitter and myriad blogs in expanding the sources of news and opinion and accelerating dissemination: the audience has become part of the show.

Could the Internet one day wreak the same sort of social change on the world of science, breaking down the distinction between amateur and professional? In my view, it is not a question of whether, but of when.

A prediction for the future of science
I'm going to venture a guess. By 2020, we will see a significant amount of real, breakthrough science being carried out by online communities - similar to the open source communities that develop complex software packages.

By far the largest fraction of the work will be done by amateurs. Not only that, the amateurs will have the biggest say in exactly what questions are tackled by the community. They will actively help to define the research agenda.

Professional scientists will still play a role, as professional journalists do today, of going into the field - or rather into the lab - in search of new data. This is something that cannot easily be distributed, especially for research that involves expensive experimental equipment.

Scientists will still play a role in vetting results, as journalists and their editors do today, when dealing with information that has been crowdsourced. Scientists will still play a role in shaping the research agenda, much as the benign dictators in open source projects do. But they will have to compromise with the aspirations of the rest of the community in order to get results.

In science as in journalism
That this will happen, I am in little doubt. Even the Royal Society, a pillar of the traditional scientific establishment, has been promoting a major policy discussion on the role of science as a public enterprise, which touches on the issue of citizen participation in science.

How this will impact the scientific establishment in the long run, however, is another question entirely. Judging by the major upheavals that the world of print journalism is going through, I expect the impact to be enormous. And yes, it may not all be nice. A lot of scientists - especially expensive ones in industrialized countries - may find themselves out of work, in the same way that the livelihoods of many journalists have become more precarious in the Web 2.0 era.

I am not saying Galileo's elitist view is wrong - it accurately describes the past. Nor am I suggesting that in future, individual geniuses will become superfluous. Many scientific problems will no doubt remain easier for a gifted individual or a small team of professionals to tackle, in much the same way as there will probably always be problems that supercomputers can better tackle than networks of ordinary computers. Horses for courses.

But in the next 10 years, I contend, the scope for citizen contributions to real science is going to expand radically. And in many cases human genius - embodied in the individual brains of exceptional people such as Galileo - will be supplanted by the genius of interconnected humans. In science as in journalism, the audience will become part of the show.

This opinion is based on a recent entry on François Grey'sblog, www.billionbrainblog.com.

Average:

Citizen Science: Climatology for Everyone

noreply@blogger.com (Bstarn) — Sun, 17 Jul 2011 20:48:00 +0000

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’.

Citizen science projects date back hundreds of years, with many of the first projects involving citizens keeping track of wildlife populations. The Audubon Christmas Bird Count is perhaps the most famous in the United States and dates back to 1900. With help from the internet, and a growing recognition of the value that citizens are capable of contributing, citizen science projects have been rapidly growing.

The range of subjects that are covered by citizen science projects is vast. Here are just a few of them, which directly relate to climate change:
Computational projects
The majority of activities that we use our computers for actually require less than 1% of our computer’s available processing power. Using one of today's new computers to browse the internet is like using a forklift to hang a potted plant. Why not get the most out of that expensive hardware under the hood, by putting it to work to help the planet?

Climateprediction.net – Using the popular BOINC grid computing software, allows you to harness unused processing power to run global climate models on your home computer. Several scientific papers have already been published based on results from the project.

The Clean Energy Project – Part of IBM’s World Community Grid, and also running on the BOINC platform, it uses the powerful Q-Chem® quantum chemistry software to explore new molecular structures for use in potential low-cost “organic” solar panels.

Hydrogen@home – A new project, similar to the Clean Energy Project, but seeks new ways to create and store hydrogen as part of a clean fuel economy.

The projects listed above may be considered 'passive' citizen science, in that they don't require any real effort to carry out. Once you download and get the software running to your preferences, you can essentially ‘set it and forget it’. The software is fully customizable with respect to how much of your processor/memory you want to allocate to the projects, when the computations run, and which projects you would like to contribute to (if climate science isn't your greatest passion, there are several other projects out there ranging from the search for aliens to discovering new protein folding techniques.)

Active Participation
For those who are motivated to do a bit more, there are many 'active' participation projects out there. Some of these can be quite involved, but typically don't require any minimum time commitment--work as often as you like and as hard as you like.

Old Weather – Read old navy logbooks and digitize their historic weather information, in order to gain a better understanding of past weather and climate patterns and enhance the accuracy of modern day predictions. A talent for reading handwriting is required.

Data rescue at home – Similar to Old Weather but with a wider range of sources, involves digitizing handwritten atmospheric conditions for computational analysis. Currently working on German radiosonde data from WWII.

CoCoRaHS (USA) —Measuring precipitation in “your backyard”, with the goal of creating an ongoing, ultra-high resolution data set of precipitation events, which will contribute to scientific understanding of weather and climate patterns.

Opal Climate Survey (England) – Requests that citizens observe and report several climate factors, such as aircraft contrails and wind speed. Related surveys such as air quality and biodiversity are also featured.
Students’ Cloud Observations On-Line – A NASA program, geared towards kids but with the very important purpose of cross-checking satellite cloud measurements. Students visually classify clouds by altitude, type, cover percentage, and opacity.

Surfacestations.org (USA) – Seeks volunteers to photographically document the status of official temperature stations throughout the United States.

ClimateWatch (Australia) – Track populations of an insect, animal or plant species through time within a certain region, to better understand how the biosphere reacts to climate change and other long term trends.
ClimateWatch is similar in nature to the earliest type of citizen science project discussed above, that of keeping track of species number and behavior in their natural environment (formally known as phenology). While most do not officially take tracking climate change to be their primary goal, there is no doubt that this data will be helpful in tracking how the biosphere is reacting in response to regional or global climate forcings. Knowing how the natural world will react to a rapid climate shift lists among the biggest and most important uncertainties still plaguing climate predictions, and lack of data is a limiting factor. Imagine how much more informed our policy actions could be if we knew exactly how populations and behaviors of all of the key species on earth were trending.

There are hundreds of similar projects involving tracking the natural world; it is almost certain you will be able to find one involving whichever plant, animal, or insect species you may especially hold dear. Many of these projects can be found at the excellent database for citizen science projectsscienceforcitizens.net. There are even iPhone apps to let you participate on the go.

So why not start giving scientists a hand? Virtually anyone, including kids, can get involved in these projects and know they are making a real difference. Many feature some kind of participation-based points system for fun and to encourage some friendly competition. And they can also be a great way to meet people—whether your passion lies in developing clean energy to save the world, or simply the intricacies of the swallowtail’s mating cycle, there is no shortage of passionate citizens out there working hard to improve our scientific understanding of the natural world.

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Green Internet Consultant. Practical solutions to reducing GHG emissions such as free broadband and electric highways. http://green-broadband.blogspot.com/
email: Bill.St.Arnaud@gmail.com
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How collaboration works or does not work on the Internet - Open Science

noreply@blogger.com (Bstarn) — Mon, 04 Jul 2011 11:47:00 +0000

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?
http://www.kqed.org/quest/blog/2011/06/21/open-source-science-on-the-internet/

The internet has heralded a new level of openness and data sharing since its inception. While this revolution of information has swept across our society, openly sharing information in the scientific arena has yet to see a boon in activity. With scientists remaining extremely protective over their discoveries, we have to ask if this behavior is hampering future scientific discoveries.
That is the question Dr Michael Nielsen, whose forthcoming book about Open Science “Reinventing Discovery", attempts to explain and fix.
If we want to socialize science among the world of social media and more broadly across the Internet, we must ask why scientists continue to "horde" data. How can we influence the world of scientific academia so that scientists feel more willing to share their best ideas and problems?
Nielson will be sharing his discoveries about how to build a Open Science revolution at the Public Library of Science on June 29th in San Francisco. As the PLoS site states:
"The net is transforming many aspects of our society, from finance to friendship. And yet scientists, who helped create the net, are extremely conservative in how they use it. Although the net has great potential to transform science, most scientists remain stuck in a centuries-old system for the construction of knowledge.
Michael will describe some leading-edge projects that show how online tools can radically change and improve science (using projects in Mathematics and Citizen Science as examples), and he will then go on to discuss why these tools haven’t spread to all corners of science, and how we can change that."
If you'd like to hear more about the Open Science movement and Nielsen's talk, visit PLoS or watch his TED Talk about Open Science:

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Green Internet Consultant. Practical solutions to reducing GHG emissions such as free broadband and electric highways. http://green-broadband.blogspot.com/

email: Bill.St.Arnaud@gmail.com
twitter: BillStArnaud
blog: http://billstarnaud.blogspot.com/
skype: Pocketpro

Open science: a future shaped by shared experience

noreply@blogger.com (Bstarn) — Fri, 27 May 2011 15:51:00 +0000

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

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2011/may/22/open-science-shared-research-internet?CMP=twt_gu

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BioCurious: Joseph Jackson at his community lab in Menlo Park, California. Photograph: Robert Yager for the Observer
On the surface, it looked as if there was nothing in mathematics that Timothy Gowers couldn't achieve. He held a prestigious professorship at Cambridge. He had been a recipient of the Fields Medal, the highest honour in mathematics. He had even acted as a scientific consultant on Hollywood movies. Yet there were a few complex mathematical problems that he had struggled to solve. "In most cases, I just ran out of steam," he explains.

So one day he took one of these – finding a mathematical proof about the properties of multidimensional objects – and put his thoughts on his blog. How would other people go about solving this conundrum? Would somebody else have any useful insights? Would mathematicians, notoriously competitive, be prepared to collaborate? "It was an experiment," he admits. "I thought it would be interesting to try."

He called it the Polymath Project and it rapidly took on a life of its own. Within days, readers, including high-ranking academics, had chipped in vital pieces of information or new ideas. In just a few weeks, the number of contributors had reached more than 40 and a result was on the horizon. Since then, the joint effort has led to several papers published in journals under the collective pseudonym DHJ Polymath. It was an astonishing and unexpected result.

"If you set out to solve a problem, there's no guarantee you will succeed," says Gowers. "But different people have different aptitudes and they know different tricks… it turned out their combined efforts can be much quicker."

This ability to collaborate quickly and transparently online is just one facet of a growing movement in research known as open science.

There are many interpretations of what open science means, with different motivations across different disciplines. Some are driven by the backlash against corporate-funded science, with its profit-driven research agenda. Others are internet radicals who take the "information wants to be free" slogan literally. Others want to make important discoveries more likely to happen. But for all their differences, the ambition remains roughly the same: to try and revolutionise the way research is performed by unlocking it and making it more public.

"What we try to do is get people to organise differently," says Joseph Jackson, the organiser of the Open Science Summit, a meeting of advocates that was held for the first time last summer at the University of California, Berkeley.

Jackson is a young bioscientist who, like many others, has discovered that the technologies used in genetics and molecular biology, once the preserve of only the most well-funded labs, are now cheap enough to allow experimental work to take place in their garages. For many, this means that they can conduct genetic experiments in a new way, adopting the so-called "hacker ethic" – the desire to tinker, deconstruct, rebuild.

The rise of this group is entertainingly documented in a new book by science writer Marcus Wohlsen, Biopunk (Current £18.99), which describes the parallels between today's generation of biological innovators and the rise of computer software pioneers of the 1980s and 1990s. Indeed, Bill Gates has said that if he were a teenager today, he would be working on biotechnology, not computer software.

Spurred on by the new-found ability to work outside the system, these rebel biologists believe that the traditional way of doing science is not the most efficient and could even be holding back important developments.

"Institutions, typically, are the slowest and have the most amount of inertia lagging behind the technology," says Jackson. "We have a lot of things that made sense once, or never made sense, that are clogging up the works."

Those sound like fighting words to a traditional scientist. After all, ask any lab director and they'll tell you the same thing – doing real science is tough. It takes time, energy and money to conduct serious research. Institutes manage vast budgets, operate huge, hi-tech labs and call upon armies of graduate students to sift for evidence in great oceans of data. Real science is a slow, expensive process that has been hewn into shape over centuries of experimentation, false starts and the occasional success.

But open scientists suggest that it doesn't have to be that way. Their arguments are propelled by a number of different factors that are making transparency more viable than ever.

The first and most powerful change has been the use of the web to connect people and collect information. The internet, now an indelible part of our lives, allows like-minded individuals to seek one another out and share vast amounts of raw data. Researchers can lay claim to an idea not by publishing first in a journal (a process that can take many months) but by sharing their work online in an instant.

And while the rapidly decreasing cost of previously expensive technical procedures has opened up new directions for research, there is also increasing pressure for researchers to cut costs and deliver results. The economic crisis left many budgets in tatters and governments around the world are cutting back on investment in science as they try to balance the books. Open science can, sometimes, make the process faster and cheaper, showing what one advocate, Cameron Neylon, calls "an obligation and responsibility to the public purse".

At the same time, moves are afoot to disrupt the closed world of academic journals and make high-level teaching materials available to the public. The Public Library of Science, based in San Francisco, is working to make journals more freely accessible, while the Massachusetts Institute of Technology currently boasts that material for almost 2,000 courses is now available on the web.

"The litmus test of openness is whether you can have access to the data," says Dr Rufus Pollock, a co-founder of the Open Knowledge Foundation, a group that promotes broader access to information and data. "If you have access to the data, then anyone can get it, use it, reuse it and redistribute it… we've always built on the work of others, stood on the shoulders of giants and learned from those who have gone before."

In the seven years since he started the organisation, Pollock, now in his early 30s, has helped build communities and tools around everything from economics data to Shakespeare's sonnets. He says that it is increasingly vital for many scientists to adopt an open approach.

"We have found ourselves in a weird dead end," he says – where publicly funded science does not produce publicly accessible information. That leads to all kinds of problems, not least controversies such as the leaked climate change emails from the University of East Anglia, which led to claims of bias among the research team.

But it's more than just politics at stake – it's also a fundamental right to share knowledge, rather than hide it. The best example of open science in action, he suggests, is the Human Genome Project, which successfully mapped our DNA and then made the data public. In doing so, it outflanked J Craig Venter's proprietary attempt to patent the human genome, opening up the very essence of human life for science, rather than handing our biological information over to corporate interests.

"It was a very large project in one of the most organised and information-rich areas of science, but it faced genuine competition from a closed model," says Dr Pollock. "It is basically an extraordinary example and it could have gone in a very different way."

Unsurprisingly, the rise of open science does not please everyone. Critics have argued that while it benefits those at either end of the scientific chain – the well-established at the top of the academic tree or the outsiders who have nothing to lose – it hurts those in the middle. Most professional scientists rely on the current system for funding and reputation. Others suggest it is throwing out some of the most important elements of science and making deep, long-term research more difficult.

Open science proponents say that they do not want to make the current system a thing of the past, but that it shouldn't be seen as immutable either. In fact, they say, the way most people conceive of science – as a highly specialised academic discipline conducted by white-coated professionals in universities or commercial laboratories – is a very modern construction.

It is only over the last century that scientific disciplines became industrialised and compartmentalised. Some of history's most influential scientists and polymaths – people such as Robert Hooke, Charles Darwin and Benjamin Franklin – started as gentleman scholars and helped pioneer the foundations for modern inquiry at a time when the line between citizen and scientist was blurred.

In attempting to recapture some of this feeling, open scientists say they don't want to throw scientists to the wolves: they just want to help answer questions that, in many cases, are seen as insurmountable. This means breaking down barriers by using the tools at our disposal – whether it's abundant biological data, inexpensive lab equipment or the internet. It might not be the way we think of science, but it is still science.

"Some people are naturally sympathetic to this sort of idea," says Professor Gowers. "Some people, very straightforwardly, said that they didn't like the idea because it undermined the concept of the romantic, lone genius." Even the most dedicated open scientists understand that appeal. "I do plan to keep going at them," he says of collaborative projects. "But I haven't given up on solitary thinking about problems entirely."

In favour of spreading the word

Melanie Swan

"As a society, we don't understand biology yet," says Melanie Swan, a genomics researcher and principle at MS Futures Group in Palo Alto, California. As she sees it, there are all sorts of problems with the way we conduct biological research en masse. Individuals can gain huge amounts of information about their own genetic makeup, yet new drugs and treatments are developed very slowly because, in part, they have to be adapted for general use.

As a non-traditional scientist — she studied French, economics and finance before heading into the world of genes — Swan has decided to take a non-traditional approach. The answer, she suggests, is to push forward with studies where self-elected individuals who have already got their genomic data join in, acting as both subjects and participants. It allows those taking part, including Swan herself, to understand and monitor exactly what is happening, and massively reduces time and cost.

Swan's projects have started small, with a seven-person pilot to explore the effects of vitamin B on the MTHFR gene, which has been linked to cancer and vascular diseases. But she has more than 40 possible studies outlined. "The traditional model is very slow: every different private research organisation builds its own data store of samples and it's painstaking and expensive. It takes years and they don't share it with each other or with the public. How can we move forward in a 2.0 kind of way?"

Joseph Jackson

Describing himself as a "philosopher, entrepreneur and activist", 28-year-old Joseph Jackson is one of the leading figures in a precocious movement of DIY biologists. He's co-founder of BioCurious, a community lab based in the San Francisco Bay area, and organiser of the annual Open Science Summit. But while he envisions a world where amateurs and self-educated scientists co-exist and help one another improve, he understands that there's going to be resistance along the way.

"I think that it's already coming to a head, and that conflict is going to intensify," he explains. "It's going to be a challenge to integrate the effort of amateurs and the professional canon," he explains. "We've seen these conflicts already — whether Wikipedia can be treated as authoritative – but with a carefully chosen set of experiments, we can bridge the gap."

Although there is plenty of pain today, he suggests that in hindsight we may see the breaking down of boundaries between public and academe was inevitable. "It's obvious where the trends are going and I hope we'll look back 20 years from now and say that this was a turning point."

Cameron Neylon

For biophysicist Cameron Neylon, the conversion to open science came when he was working at the University of Southampton. He started publishing his lab notebook online, a radical step, considering most researchers keep their work under lock and key.

"Once you see how the web connects people and makes them more effective, it's a given," he says. "We can make research more efficient by making parts of the process more public."

Neylon recognises this approach isn't for everyone and that it won't have the same sort of impact in every field. But the more pressing issue is trying to work this way in a professional system that is weighted towards secrecy.

"Some people are worried they'll be scooped if they put their research into the open," he points out. "The bottom line is that the reward structures we have don't really reward anything apart from getting a peer-reviewed paper published in a high-ranking journal.

"The sooner we can get to a point where people are rewarded for making more public their ideas, concepts, materials and data, the better off we'll be."

Citizens are playing an increasing important role in cyber-science

noreply@blogger.com (Bstarn) — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 18:00:00 +0000

[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

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email: Bill.St.Arnaud@gmail.com
twitter: BillStArnaud
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Dis-intermediation of the university via open courseware -- NYTimes: An Open Mind

noreply@blogger.com (Bstarn) — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 18:36:00 +0000

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

Cool new Middleware from Twitter for distributed data

noreply@blogger.com (Bstarn) — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 16:14:00 +0000

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:"
[...]

Human Computing - Distributed Thinking - new age of Citizen Science

noreply@blogger.com (Bstarn) — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 16:39:00 +0000

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

Tom Friedman on innovation and National Lab Day

noreply@blogger.com (Bstarn) — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 15:33:00 +0000

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/

Anthony Doesburg: Idle time put to work, all in the cause of science

noreply@blogger.com (Bstarn) — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 15:01:00 +0000

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.

[...]

Community Remote Sensing and Citizen Science

noreply@blogger.com (Bstarn) — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 18:17:00 +0000

[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.

CERN launches citzen cyber-infrastructure project

noreply@blogger.com (Bstarn) — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 07:50:00 +0000

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.

The age of Citizen cyber-infrastructure

noreply@blogger.com (Bstarn) — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 18:53:00 +0000

[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.

Free storage in the cloud for scientific datasets

noreply@blogger.com (Bstarn) — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 18:07:00 +0000

[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.

Citizen Science - how you can make a contribution to study of climate change

noreply@blogger.com (Bstarn) — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 17:34:00 +0000

[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.

Science 2.0: New online tools may revolutionize research

noreply@blogger.com (Bstarn) — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 16:07:00 +0000

[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/

e-science, virtual organisations, data curation

noreply@blogger.com (Bstarn) — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 18:32:00 +0000

[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]

Web 2.0 and social networking for scientists

noreply@blogger.com (Bstarn) — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 19:34:00 +0000

[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

Many eyes

noreply@blogger.com (Bstarn) — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 13:43:00 +0000

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:

Impact of Citizen Science on academic research

noreply@blogger.com (Bstarn) — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 18:37:00 +0000

[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.

Armchair Astronomer - Galaxy Zoo

noreply@blogger.com (Bstarn) — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 12:49:00 +0000

[Extracts from the Economist magazine article -- BSA]

http://www.economist.com/science/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11614176&fsrc=RSS

An armchair astronomer discovers something very odd

THE task of peering into the cosmos and discovering strange new galaxies sounds like a job for astronomers armed with big and very expensive telescopes. But almost a year ago that all changed when a group of stargazers decided to ask the public to help in a project to explore the northern sky.

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey had been looking in this part of space for 16 years, producing so much information that astronomers assumed they would never get through it. So the public was let loose, to help sort what they had found. The scheme is called the Galaxy Zoo project.

...within a month of the opening, Hanny van Arkel, a physics teacher from the Netherlands, posted a message on the zoo’s forum about some strange blue stuff she had spotted and asked what it might be.

By January the zoo’s professional keepers had started to pay attention to what the teacher had called a voorwerp, the Dutch word for object. Now it is becoming famous.

What this object might be was a complete mystery at first. It was initially thought to be a distant galaxy, says Chris Lintott, an Oxford University astronomer involved in the project. But after further study astronomers realised that there were no stars in it, and so it must be a cloud of gas. But why the gas was so hot (about 15,000ºC) was a mystery, because there seemed to be no stars to heat it up.

The weird blob could become immortalised as Hanny’s Voorwerp, the name given to the object in a paper Dr Lintott and his colleagues are submitting to the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. And towards the end of the year, if the mission to service the Hubble telescope goes as planned, a high-quality image of the voorwerp could emerge.

Earlier projects in distributed computing, such as SETI@home, which searched for extraterrestrial life, have used the power of millions of home computers. But more recently, scientists have begun to realise that distributed human brain power itself can be a useful commodity, as in working out the shape of proteins. Dr Szalay says that the voorwerp episode has shown how immensely valuable the public can be.

When the data were put online Dr Szalay thought it was only a matter of time before someone made a big discovery. “It just happened much faster than we thought.” In the past year 40m classifications of galaxies have been submitted on 1m galactic objects in the Galaxy Zoo. Dr Lintott says that the project has proved that the public en masse is as good as professional astronomers at classifying galaxies.

The next step is to ask people to do more complicated things, such as keeping an eye out for weird objects, which is bound to appeal to armchair astronomers. Hanny’s object had been there for decades, unnoticed in the astronomical archives. The idea now is for the public to explore strange new galaxies; to seek out new voorwerps and to boldly go where no amateur has gone before.

Distributed Computing for Eartquake Monitoring

noreply@blogger.com (Bstarn) — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 12:16:00 +0000

[Here are too cool distributed computing applications (similar in operation
to SETI@Home.

http://www.dailytech.com/Distributing+Computing+Project+For+Earthquake+Monit
oring+Coming+Soon/article11276.htm

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~_/) ~~

Science
Distributing Computing Project For Earthquake Monitoring Coming Soon Levi Beckerson (Blog) - April 3, 2008 9:23 AM

UC Riverside researcher's earthquake monitoring system via distributed computing will soon be a reality.

Many computer enthusiasts as well as casual users are familiar with the various distributed computing projects such as Folding@home and SETI@home. And if there weren't enough familiarity for PC users, Sony's PlayStation 3 can also run Folding@home and does so very well thanks to its Cell Broadband Engine.
[..]
The magic behind distributed computing is in using all those unused processing cycles where computers lie semi-inert, simply passing time by spinning cooling fans. The various clients utilize unused cycles by crunching numbers for a given project.
[..]

The Quake-Catcher Network will use spare processing power as well as already installed accelerometers in laptops to monitor for seismic activity.

The accelerometers in modern laptops are used to help protect hard disk drives from suffering mechanical failure due to sudden impacts. As they are designed to measure vibration, they are a perfect fit for the Quake-Catcher Network's monitoring system.

Unlike the underground seismic sensors that dot southern California, which,after the data is transferred to one of several universities, takes 15 to 20 seconds to analyze, the network's seismic monitoring would happen in
real-time thanks to the way distributed networking works. The monitoring network could be used as an early warning system to give people in neighboring towns 10 to 15 seconds to prepare for the shock waves.

The data gathered by a dense network of monitoring stations could also be used to map the seismic data from the event, giving scientists a time line as well as information about material density and distance. The gathered
results will be freely available to the public and researchers.
[..]

Join the hunt to feed the world's hungry through broadband Internet

noreply@blogger.com (Bstarn) — Thu, 22 May 2008 14:36:00 +0000

[Another good example of citizen science. Excerpts from NY Times article -- BSA]

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/05/14/join-the-hunt-for-super-rice/?ref=technology

Join the Hunt for Super-Rice

There is no quick fix to the world food crisis, but a project getting underway Wednesday could make a difference in the long run. Rice

A team of researchers at the University of Washington are putting a genomics project on the World Community Grid in the computational search for strains of rice that have traits like higher yields, disease resistance and a wider range of nutrients.

The purpose is to hasten the pace of modern rice genetics, which since the 1960s has delivered a series of new strains, starting with higher-yielding semidwarf varieties, a breakthrough that was hailed as the Green Revolution.

But the demand — all those mouths to feed — keeps rising. Rice is the main staple food for more than half the world’s population. In Asia alone, more than two billion people get up to 70 percent of their dietary energy from rice.

The World Community Grid, begun in 2004, gives selected humanitarian scientific projects access to massive computing resources. It taps the unused computing cycles of nearly one million computers around the world — much like SETI@home, the best-known distributed computing effort, which claims it has harnessed more than 3 million PCs in the search for extraterrestrial life.

The World Community Grid places a small piece of software on your PC that taps your unused computing cycles and combines them with others to create a virtual supercomputer. Its equivalent computing power would make it the world’s third-largest supercomputer, according to I.B.M., which has donated the hardware, software and technical expertise for the project.

The grid will run a three-dimensional modeling program created by the computational biologists at the University of Washington to study the structures of the proteins that make up the building blocks of rice. Understanding the structures provides clues to their functions, interactions between the molecular parts and how certain desired traits are expressed.

.

Researchers Launch Online Protein Folding Game

noreply@blogger.com (Bstarn) — Fri, 09 May 2008 11:44:00 +0000

[Another great example of the potential of Citizen Science. Extracts from Slashdot and original article--BSA

Researchers Launch Online Protein Folding Game http://www.hhmi.org/news/foldit20080508.html

Multiplayer online gaming brings to mind fabulously successful titles, such as “World of Warcraft” and “Ultima.” On May 8, Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) researchers at the University of Washington are bringing the arcane world of protein folding to the online gaming arena with the launch of “Foldit,” a free game in which players around the world compete to design proteins. The real world benefit: Scientists will test proteins designed by the game's players to see if they make viable candidate compounds for new drugs.

Users can access the game via the web at www.fold.it

The development of the online game is a natural extension of HHMI investigator David Baker's quest to understand how proteins - the building blocks of cells — fold into unique three-dimensional shapes. Over the past decade, Baker and his colleagues have made steady progress in developing computer algorithms to predict how a linear string of amino acids will fold into a given protein's characteristic shape. A detailed understanding of a protein's structure can offer scientists a wealth of information — revealing intricacies about the protein's biological function and suggesting new ideas for drug design.

Predicting the shapes that natural proteins will take is one of the preeminent challenges in biology, and modeling even a small protein requires making trillions of calculations. Over the last three years, volunteers around the globe — now numbering about 200,000— have donated their computer down-time to performing those calculations in a distributed network called Rosetta@home. The computing logic behind the network is an algorithm called Rosetta that uses the Monte Carlo technique to find the best “fit” for all of the parts of a given protein.

But as the Rosetta volunteers watched their computers blindly trying to work out a solution by methodically testing every possible combination and shape to find the best fit, they began to think that a little human intervention might speed things up. “People were writing in, saying, `Hey! The computer is doing silly things! It would be great if we could help guide it,'” remembers Baker, who is based at the University of Washington (UW) where he developed the Rosetta algorithm and network.

Baker didn't know how he could make that happen until about 18 months ago, when he went hiking on Mt. Rainier with his neighbor David Salesin, a University of Washington computer scientist who also runs a research laboratory at nearby Adobe Systems. Baker and Salesin began discussing ways to make Rosetta more interactive. With the inherent fun of competition, Salesin thought a multiplayer online game was the way to go. By the time they got back to the car, they had settled on that idea. Salesin provided Baker with the names of three colleagues, led by UW computer scientist Zoran Popović, who could help Baker create the game.

Over the next several months, Popović, and his students Adrien Treuille and Seth Cooper, created the program, and the team tested it in small venues. One match between teams from the University of California and the University of Illinois aroused unexpected fervor and cheering among spectators. “30 or 40 people participated,” says Baker. “The competition was very intense.”

“Foldit” takes players through a series of practice levels designed to teach the basics of protein folding, before turning them loose on real proteins from nature. “Our main goal was to make sure that anyone could do it, even if they didn't know what biochemistry or protein folding was,” says Popović. At the moment, the game only uses proteins whose three-dimensional structures have been solved by researchers. But, says Popović, “soon we'll be introducing puzzles for which we don't know the solution.”

Baker has high hopes that the game will speed up the sometimes tedious business of structure prediction. But the part of the game that excites him most is scheduled to debut this fall, when gamers will be able to design all-new proteins. Novel proteins could find use in any number of applications, from pharmaceuticals to industrial chemicals, to pollution clean up. With the ability for any person with a computer and an internet hookup to start building proteins, Baker thinks the pace of discovery could skyrocket. “My dream is that a 12-year-old in Indonesia will turn out to be a prodigy, and build a cure for HIV,” he says.

http://games.slashdot.org/games/08/05/08/2112208.shtml

writes "Tired of justifying your gaming addiction? Now you can really help accomplish something while you play... thanks to Howard Hughes Medical Institute researcher David Baker at the University of Washington." In collaboration with others, Baker has designed a game, called "Foldit," with a practical outcome: players manipulate on-screen images of protein chains and attempt to predict their folding patterns. From the article: "'Our main goal was to make sure that anyone could do it, even if they didn't know what biochemistry or protein folding was,' says [co-creator Zoran] Popovic. At the moment, the game only uses proteins whose three-dimensional structures have been solved by researchers. But, says Popovic, 'soon we'll be introducing puzzles for which we don't know the solution.'"