Watching Nemo

According to an article on 20 new ideas in science, it has been identified that: "covering 70 per cent of the planet, with an average depth of 4km, the ocean is the largest habitat on earth, and it is largely virgin territory. Whenever researchers go into the deep, they almost always discover new species. The oceans are also throwing up new geology, and surprising us about the conditions under which life can thrive, redefining what we think of as habitable zones". Monitoring the oceans has become an obsession for many in the Earthquake and environmental monitoring communities. Being able to detect changes in how the Earth vibrates, underwater, and linking this to the behaviour of fish and other marine animals provides important clues about potential sciesmic activity, and how our oceans change over time. In her thesis, Gayathari Nadarajan (Edinburgh University) and her supervisor Dr Jessica-Chen Burger automatically analyse video feeds from the Eco-Grid project in Taiwan. Gayathri indicates that "such data is valuable for long term monitoring and research especially for marine biologists. Studies on fish behaviour, suitable underwater conditions for marine life presence and activity, and population of particular species at a given time provide valuable information to scientists". In the Eco-Grid project, data is acquired using geographically distributed sensors in various protected sites such as Fu-Shan forest, Yuan-Yang lake, Ken-Ting national park and Nan-Jen-Shan site. Gayathri uses automated workflow construction (using planning techniques) to analyse video feeds and determine frames of interest to a marine biologist, or to count fish, level of algae etc.

Whereas the Eco-Grid uses underwater cameras with video feeds that can be externally recorded, NASA, US Navy and the Scripps Institute of Oceanography have demonstrated robotic underwater vehicle to be powered entirely by natural, renewable, ocean thermal energy -- as part of the SOLO-TREC project. "Most of Earth is covered by ocean, yet we know less about the ocean than we do about the surface of some planets," said Yi Chao, a JPL principal scientist and SOLO-TREC principal investigator. "This technology to harvest energy from the ocean will have huge implications for how we can measure and monitor the ocean and its influence on climate." Additionally, the multi-million dollar Cyberinfrastructure Ocean Observatories project at the Scripps Institute provides a collection of messaging middleware for supporting data capture, recording and storage of ocean data.

Perhaps, it is useful to better understand how such ocean monitoring projects -- which themselves embed sensors (fixed or mobile) into the ocean perturb the ocean themselves (and the associated marine life). An interesting anecdote was that the heat generated around cameras that monitor the ocean lead to new marine ecosystems around the observation site -- thereby leading to new behaviour not known before.

Collaborative Science

One of the leading scientific publishers -- the Nature Publishing Group -- has realized the importance of social networks to promote science research and education. According to Vikram Savkar (SVP and Publishing Director) at Nature, "... science education needs to become interactive and social". According to him, "... kids and young adults learn from people, not from static words in a textbook". A new Web site called Scitable has been launched to enable teachers, researchers, and students to collaborate and share work. Instuctors can create a classroom using content management systems such as Blackboard and Desire2Learn. It is interesting to see a major publisher realizing the importance of learning through people, rather than just learning from content. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Scitable is it's business model -- essentially where business provides "social value advertising", rather than specific product placement or paid content placement. Rather than provide large banners highlighting particular products, sponsors are able to directly add content (such as job openings) on certain pages.

A new book entitled Bursts -- The Hidden Pattern Behind Everything We Do by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi (of Northeastern University, in Boston) has used a "social" experiment in it's launch. The complete text of the book is available on-line, but each word is covered by a rectangle. Each user can 'adopt' a word, and at that moment all words adopted by others will become visible to that individual. Once 84,000 individuals have each adopted a word, roughly the number of words in the book, the whole book will become visible to the adopters. Additionally, to make the process more interesting (!), any user can unlock the whole book within days by guessing a sufficient number of covered words, as each successful guess offers additional points that helps the user reveal further content.

Both of these social network-based approaches to collaborative learning indicate the importance of involving people in the learning process. Proving texts on-line is only the beginning to a learning journey that could utilize on-line resource in a much more effective way. As educators, perhaps, we all need to take note and adapt to the possibilities and enormous potential opportunities.

Dr Sue Black from the University of Westminster delivered a very interesting lecture about her use of Twitter to spread the Save Bletchley Park campaign (part of the BCS Women Lovelace Colloquium, Cardiff, April 8, 2010). She indicated how Twitter brought together a diverse set of individuals who wanted to "contribute something back" to the history of computing by fund raising for this campaign -- and contributing their own skills. Her talk provided an interesting insight into how Twitter and social media provided the foundation for raising public and political awareness about a cause. After producing a publication about her experiences in using Twitter in the Bletchley Park campaigh, Dr Black was able to raise over 2000 UK pounds through the JustGiving Web site -- to present the paper at a conference in the US.

On the other hand, in the current heat towards the next UK election, a Labour party candidate (standing for the East Scotland seat of Moray) was removed from the party after describing old people as `coffin dodgers' on Twitter. According to a story in the Independent newspaper (April 10, 2010), he was also found to make "an ill-advised quip about bananas", writing: `God this fair-trade, organic banana is shit. Can I have a slave-`grown, chemically enhanced, genetically modified one please?' According to the same story, the Labour party now has it's very own "Twitter tsar", who mentioned that "most MPs were still too cautious in their tweets, rather than too forward". She mentioned that "... the greater problem is getting MPs to engage and communicate with the public on the site, rather than simply tweeting that they are out campaigning."

Both of these stories indicate an interesting new trend in on-line now being the published word. Perhaps, what we generate on-line (even though it may not have a persistent publication identifier), can now generate equivalent, or more, impact than the printed word. Dr Black's effort in making very effective use of social media, and the Labour candidate's ineffective use of it, shows how important size-limited, context sensitive twitter feeds have become in changing public perception, debate and fund raising.

Picture taken by Omer Rana @ BCS Colloqium in Cardiff, April 8, 2010

Survival Telecom

Communication is one of the major social needs of human beings -- and something that becomes even more important at a time of a natural disaster. Although significant emphasis is placed on supporting basic human needs -- such as shelter and food (and rightly so) -- by organizations such as Disasters Emergency Committee (an umbrella organization covering various charities) -- the need for individuals in diaster stricken countries to communicate with the outside world -- on a personal basis -- is equally important. An individual, able to communicate with his relatives, friends or close colleagues can convey a much greater need for help than charities that appeal on the behalf of a nation or a group of individuals. The work undertaken by Telecoms Sans Frontieres (TSF) provides an example of a charity that helps establish telecom infrastructure after a natural disaster. TSF has undertaken remarkable work in Haiti, for instance, enabling "10,500 families (more than 60,000 people) to reach their relatives". TSF works to establish telecom infrastructure across the disaster stricken country/region, in addition to enabling communication with the outside world (sharing such infrastructure with media organizations and other charities). A wonderful example of using the internet and telecomms infrastructure to save lives.