Apple's iTunes has hundreds if not thousands of university lectures available for download from such top schools as MIT, Harvard, UC Berkeley, and Stanford. Last Spring, I came across a wonderful survey course called Quantitative Aspects of Global Environmental Problems taught by Professor John Harte at UC Berkeley in the Spring 2009 semester. The videos are available through the Berkeley Webcasts website as well as iTunes.

In his last lecture of the course (#32), Dr. Harte presented his Eight-Fold Path to Personal, Professional, and Environmental Happiness. One point, which I found particularly relevant in this day in which climate change research has reached what one friend of mine called "bubble" proportions, is what Dr. Harte calls The Tyranny of the Most Important Problem. It's recommended listening for anyone who has wondered if their research is "important enough" in the face of the next great global calamity. It could be the one lecture that saves you from ditching your favorite area of belly button research in favor of running climate models for the next ten years--that is, of course, until the next Most Important Problem comes around. I transcribed a part of his discussion here, which occurs 43 minutes into the video.

Continue reading "The Tyranny of the Most Important Problem" »

The largest gathering of geophysicists and earth scientists in the world is happening this week in San Francisco at the Fall 2009 American Geophysical Union conference. The conference will be hosting three live webcasts, which you can also view in archive mode.

• Monday, December 14: An Earthquake in an Ancient City: The April 2009 L'Aquila (Central Italy) Seismic Sequence I
• Tuesday, December 15: Geo-Visualization with Virtual Globes II
• Wednesday, December 16: Consequences of an Unusually Long and Deep Solar Minimum I

Over the decades scientists in quantitative research fields have often experienced a tug-of-war between the desire for large (and expensive) shared computing environments and smaller but powerful workstations that a single scientist could procure for their own lab. The trade-off typically is between the cost of managing one's own system versus the control that one gives up with a large shared resource. Sometimes you need a lot of computing power to answer a research question, but you don't need it every day nor for very long. This is where cloud computing steps in. Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), for example, is a commercial web service commonly used by technology startups who want to be able to scale quickly without committing to large upfront costs. Last month, Argonne National Laboratory announced that they have been awarded $32 million in ARRA (American Recovery and Reinvestment Act) funds from the Department of Energy (DOE) to study cloud computing "as a cost-effective and energy-efficient computing paradigm for scientists to accelerate discoveries in a variety of disciplines." The idea is to eventually make cloud computing resources available to scientists to study problems in climate, biology, chemistry, and more.

Ben Shneiderman, Professor of Computer Science at the University of Maryland, gave a talk for the Stanford University Human Computer Interaction Seminar on his ideas around the concept of Science 2.0, which is generally comprised of collaborative internet applications such as blogs, wikis, and online social networks. In the video, Prof. Shneiderman discusses how the collaborative web can be harnessed to support citizens in times of crisis and natural disasters.

Continue reading "Video Friday: Science 2.0: The Design Science of Collaboration" »

Teach Yourself How to Code: How many times have you picked up a programming book only to get bored and drop it by about the third chapter? Lifehacker's Gina Trapani has a great post on how to find your programming niche and teach yourself to learn languages and build applications or websites. Add speed to your efforts with these tips from Nettuts.

Universities with the Best Free Online Courses: If you don't have the time, money, or SAT scores to go to a top university, don't let that stop you from getting an education. Education-Portal posted a list of their top ten universities with online courses, including MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, and Carnegie Mellon. You can find more free online university courses in our directory.

How to Schedule Your Writing Like a Professional Writer: Study Hacks has a lot of great tips that are particularly suitable to academics and researchers. If you only take one tip away from the whole article, try this one on: write early in the morning when your brain is fresh and before distractions set in.

Are you looking for an easy way to collaborate with research colleagues online without getting bogged down with software bells and whistles? A wiki might be the solution for you. Here we review five wiki platforms that range from free, open source solutions to more expensive, hosted solutions. The trade off comes mainly from the development time involved in setting up and managing your wiki.

Wikispaces: Wikispaces is an easy to use collaboration system that can be used privately for a fee or open to the public for free (as long as you don't mind seeing Google text ads on the side). All it takes is a simple username, password, email address and wikiname to get started with a free account. Universities can enjoy unlimited users for a flat rate. Columbia University created Wikischolars on the Wikispaces platform for its university faculty and research scientists.

PBworks: PBworks (formerly known as PBwiki) offers a free wiki with the option of creating a private collaboration space, which isn't available in the Wikispaces free edition. New wikis come with sample pages that you can use as best practice samples for setting up pages such as a document repository, a meeting minutes page, a project tracker, and more. Cal Newport at Study Hacks has a helpful and detailed post on How to Build a Paper Research Wiki using PBworks.

Continue reading "Five Wikis for Scientific Research" »

Digital data management, preservation, and access are posing growing challenges for scientists, research institutions, and national science funding agencies. This past week's issue of Nature has a special report on the cultural and technical challenges of scientific data sharing, encompassing both data preservation and open access. The report mentions promising initiatives such as GenBank and the UK Joint Information Systems Committee, but points to NSF's DataNet program, which launched a request for proposals in 2007 that led to the funding of the DataONE program, as evidence that efforts by the US are lagging behind. (An example of an established US model of data preservation and access may be the Electronic Records Archives program of the US National Archives.) Who is ultimately responsible for preserving digital data and making it openly available, and who is going to pay for it? The special section covers these issues and more. Unlike most Nature articles, these are available online without a subscription.

• Special Section: Data Sharing
• Editorial: Data's Shameful Neglect

Are you finding that Google Earth is not filling your needs while professional geographic software packages are out of reach? Below are a few free open source GIS packages just added to the Element List database. For an exhaustive listing of free GIS software products, see also FreeGIS.org.

If you are looking for information on the floods in Fargo or other high risk areas around the U.S., check out the National Weather Service river observation and forecasts maps and the NOAAWatch Floods Monitor. NOAAWatch is more user-friendly and has updates on the Red River floods.

Who has time to go to class anymore? Especially if you have a full-time job and a family. Maybe you want to get a Master's degree but can't take time off during business hours to attend class or don't live close to a major university. Luckily for you, Columbia University offers a wide range of online graduate degrees in engineering through the Columbia Video Network (CVN), which posts video recorded lectures online within hours of the lecture presented on the Columbia University campus. According to the Columbia website,

"CVN students take the same classes, have the same homework assignments, and take the same exams as their on-campus counterparts. The only difference is in location. CVN students can earn the same degree as on-campus students: a Master of Science (MS) or Professional Degree (PD) from Columbia University's School of Engineering and Applied Science."

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The publisher of The Journal of Cell Biology has released an application for sharing biological image data associated with published research called the JCB DataViewer. The viewer not only permits sharing of original image files, but also allows viewers to perform simple analyses of the images. The video above shows how users can analyze the images online. The application was created through a collaboration between The Journal of Cell Biology, Xpresstrack, and Glencoe Software using open source technology developed by the Open Microscopy Environment.

The possibility that someone could make a living on scientific research grants outside of an academic or government lab seems almost unthinkable. But Robert Gaskell, a retired planet-mapping expert formerly of NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab, has managed to make it happen. As explained in today's New York Times, Dr. Gaskell works from home making digital topographic maps of Mercury, Saturn's moons, the asteroid Eros, and more. Gaskell might even be in need of an assistant.

Continue reading "Robert W. Gaskell: Freelance Scientist" »