Group items tagged

Humanities, arts, science, and technology advanced collaboratory

Croquet is a powerful open source software technology that, in the form of the Croquet Software Developer's Kit (Croquet SDK), can be used by experienced software developers to create and deploy deeply collaborative multi-user online vitual world applications on and across multiple operating systems and devices. Derived from Squeak, the Croquet system features a peer-based messaging protocol that dramatically reduces the need for server infrastructures to support virtual world deployment and makes it easy for software developers to create deeply collaborative applications. Cobalt is a National Science Foundation-sponsored effort to develop an open source virtual world browser and authoring toolkit application based on the Croquet technology.

On the occasion of the celebration of the International Year of Planet Earth in (2008), the Department of Geography of the University of the Aegean in Lesvos, Greece, is organizing the international conference "Studying, Modeling and Sense Making of Planet Earth". The UNESCO Natural Sciences Sector has granted support to the conference.

CollabRx applies collaborative science to slash the time, cost and risk of therapy development. CollabRx builds and operates Virtual Biotechs for foundations and patients who urgently seek cures for their diseases. Working with these foundations and research institutions, CollabRx * builds teams of top researchers * facilitates planning of a strategic road map * brings best practices to therapy development * manages the execution of the plan The CollabRx research platform connects researchers to one another and to a network of scientific services, providing unprecedented opportunities for knowledge sharing and economies of scale.

Theory Garden™ MindDraw™ is the brainchild of Professor Richard J. Boland, Jr. and Dr. Tanvir Y. Goraya, Ph.D.It grows form reserach funded from 1991 to 1994 by the National Science Foundation Porgram on coordination Theory and Collaborative Technology. That award was supplemented by a grant form Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) and included development of a software tool named Spider. Publications describing the Spider project are listed below.

For my colleagues in wildlife biology and ecology ... The Ecology Plexus For my colleagues concerned with the nature of knowledge and their apostolic science ... The Knowledge Plexus And for friends who ponder the nature of nature ... The Arts Plexus

Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning* HORST W. J. RITTEL Professor of the Science of Design, University of California, Berkeley MELVIN M. WEBBER Professor of City Planning, University of California, Berkeley

Six weeks ago, the Gonzo Scientist challenged researchers around the world to interpret their Ph.D. research in dance form, film the dance, and share it with the world on YouTube (Science, 10 October, p. 186). By the 11 p.m. deadline this past Sunday, 36 dances--including solo ballet and circus spectacle--had been submitted online.

The key phrase is "forced browsing". Scientific discovery is often a story of serendipity, of stumbling on an idea that has been neglected or discarded (it's one of those remote Google search results that you don't bother to click on). The question is whether putting science on the internet makes such unexpected encounters less likely.

Primarily, we want to create a new tool that uses the unique features of virtual environments to facilitate education, collaboration, and understanding. The output of many supercomputing applications - from astronomical simulations to medical models - is complex and often highly visual. Creating a persistent, standardized environment where these models can reside will make it easier to share and explore these data sets with other researchers. Also, for educators, ScienceSim will provide an interactive 3-D environment that can be used to explain complex concepts such as gravity [see video below] in a highly intuitive manner.

Researchers in the School of Computer Science at the University's Malaysia Campus are exploring 'granular computing' - a computer paradigm that looks at groups or sets of information, called information granules, rather than the high level of detail at which data is currently processed. By looking at data in this way, new patterns and relationships emerge - which could potentially give us access to new types of computer modelling in a range of fields, including process control and optimisation, resource scheduling and bioinformatics.

Statistical and applied probabilistic knowledge is the core of knowledge; statistics is what tells you if something is true, false, or merely anecdotal; it is the "logic of science"; it is the instrument of risk-taking; it is the applied tools of epistemology; you can't be a modern intellectual and not think probabilistically-but... let's not be suckers. The problem is much more complicated than it seems to the casual, mechanistic user who picked it up in graduate school. Statistics can fool you. In fact it is fooling your government right now. It can even bankrupt the system (let's face it: use of probabilistic methods for the estimation of risks did just blow up the banking system).

ESSENCE: E-Science/Sensemaking/Climate Change is an immersive internet experiment, culminating in a face-face conference. We want to build a collective intelligence resource on the climate change debate. This is analogous to Wikipedia, but decidely not enforcing a "neutral point of view". We are going to put through their paces tools tuned for mapping the key issues, options, arguments and evidence on the different dillemmas - and reflect on how effective the current tools are.

ESSENCE is an immersive internet experiment, and a face-face conference. It invites human-centred technologists, climate scientists, policymakers, and any other stakeholder with a view on some part of the climate change debate, to experience and reflect on a new generation of software tools. Build, structure, summarise and navigate the science and policy arguments underpinning climate challenge. Think of it as a visual Wikipedia, a collective intelligence, to organise the key issues, options and arguments.

Theory Garden™ Seed™ is the brainchild of Professor Richard J. Boland, Jr. and Dr. Tanvir Y. Goraya. It grows from research funded from by the National Science Foundation Program on Coordination Theory and Collaborative Technology. That award was supplemented by a grant from Digital Equipment Corporation and resulted in the development of a software tool named Spider. Publications describing the Spider project are listed below.

there is a different way of thinking about this problem that takes advantage of exciting new developments in molecular biology, evolutionary developmental biology, morphology, neurobiology, and linguistics. In a nutshell, for the first time we have a science that enables us to understand the actual, the possible and the unimaginable, a landscape that will forever change our understanding of what it means to be human, including how we arrived at our current point in evolutionary theory, and where might end up in ten or ten million years.

"Snowden and Boone have formed a new perspective on leadership and decision making that's based on complexity science. The result is the Cynefin framework, which helps executives sort issues into five contexts."

Still my favorite Snowden article. Unfortunately not free, but try to Google the title...

'"A Science of Non-Classical Dynamics Based on the Progressive Evolution of the Larger Whole" In this paper, I am trying to lay out a new form of computation, which focuses on the harmony reached in a system. This type of computation in some way resembles certain recent results in chaos theory and complexity theory. However, the orientation of harmony-seeking computation is toward a kind of computation which finds harmonious configurations, and so helps to create things, above all, in real world situations: buildings, towns, agriculture, and ecology. I try to show that this way of thinking about computation is closer to intuition and personal feeling than the processes we typically describe as "computations." It is also more useful, potentially, in a great variety of tasks we face in building and taking care of the surface of the Earth, and quite different in character since it is value-oriented, not value-free. Examples are taken from art, architecture, biology, physics, astrophysics, drawing, crystallography, meteorology, dynamics of living systems, and ecology'

A sixty-six page think piece

The mission of Sputnik Observatory is to be the world's foremost institute dedicated to the study of contemporary culture. Sputnik Observatory manifests this commitment by documenting, archiving and disseminating the ideas that are shaping the arts, sciences and technology. Central to Sputnik Observatory's mission is the encouragement of an ever deeper understanding and enjoyment of life-long learning that aims to support the advancement of modern thought in society.

This wiki collects information about tools and resources that can help scholars (particularly in the humanities and social sciences) conduct research more efficiently or creatively. Whether you need software to help you manage citations, author a multimedia work, or analyze texts, Digital Research Tools will help you find what you're looking for. We provide a directory of tools organized by research activity, as well as reviews of select tools in which we not only describe the tool's features, but also explore how it might be employed most effectively by researchers.