Thursday, October 26, 2006

Digital Science: exploring new technologies in science education

Went to the Digital Science Event at the London Science Learning Centre on 17th Oct. Picked up some links to stuff that might be interesting:

Science Across the World "Exploring science locally - sharing science globally".

Science Supremo "is an ‘edu-game’ that offers young people studying GCSE Science an opportunity to get a feel for what it means to be a scientist and to understand the interplay between science and society. It is mapped to the new GCSE curricula". More... Made by desq "e-learning and learning games that blend the best of new media with education, entertainment, learning and play."

beep Nicely designed site leading to resources and fairly open-ended activities "to support the teaching and learning of bioethics."

National Academy for Gifted and Talented

Sodarace - design and race animated robots online. "Sodarace is the online olympics pitting human creativity against machine learning in a competition to design robots that race over 2D terrains using the Sodaconstructor virtual construction kit. AI researchers in London and Austria are racing the first machine-optimised models, and winning! The race above shows the London team's artificially evolved amoeba beating similar models made by humans. Follow their progress... see if human model makers make a comeback!"

Public Engagement with Science

Some possible funding opportunities for public engagement work:

Welcome Trust - Society Awards
These awards (above £50 000) are available to support larger scale activities that aim to make a significant impact - ideally of nationwide importance - on public engagement with science and its related issues.
We have picked out a number of new themes that we would particularly like to see explored ...
What is science? How is it carried out? What do scientists do? What can science do and what are its limits? How is scientific knowledge used?
How can we get scientists, the community and groups such as policy makers together, so they can share thoughts and ideas, and learn from one another? How can we enable lay people to feed into decision making or influence what research is carried out?
And how can we actually get people directly involved in research projects?
For more...

EPSRC Partnerships for Public Engagement
Are you worried that the public ignore research? Or concerned that not enough young people pursue research careers paths? Aims: to communicate the excitement of fundamental and applied research in science and engineering to the public. This includes issues such as sustainable energy, nanotechnologies, information and communications technologies, and engineering that relates to today’s society.
See the Good Practice Guide

Wednesday, October 25, 2006

Learning about the Grid

Grid Cafe
The place for everyone to learn about the Grid.

The Grid for Kids
Animated introduction to Grid Computing for children.

World Community Grid
A place to join community grid projects, download software to use spare cpu time to solve problems;e.g. FightAIDS@Home, Help Defeat Cancer, etc...

Open Grid Forum
The Open Grid Forum (OGF) is a community of users, developers, and vendors leading the global standardization effort for grid computing.

UK National Grid Service
Mission: To provide coherent electronic access for UK researchers to all computational and data based resources and facilities required to carry out their research, independent of resource or researcher location...

UK e-Science Training and Outreach Calendar

Tuesday, October 24, 2006

Science Grid This Week

"Science Grid This Week works to inform the grid community and interested public about the people and projects involved in U.S. grid computing and the science that relies on it through articles, graphics, links, statistics, and calendar items. SGTW is produced at Fermilab, edited by Katie Yurkewicz and jointly funded by the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy’s Office of Science."

It's had some interesting articles, Grids in Class and at the Museum.

UK e-Science All Hands Meeting 2006

Links to some papers I thought looked interesting from AHM2006

Types of grid users and the Customer-Service Provider relationship: a future picture of grid use, Mark Norman
Abstract: Who will be the grid users of tomorrow? We propose a categorisation of ‘future grid’ users... This paper outlines the possible characteristics of these ‘types’ of users.

The RealityGrid PDA and Smartphone Clients: Developing effective handheld user interfaces for e-Science , Ian R. Holmes and Roy S. Kalawsky
Abstract: In this paper the authors present the RealityGrid PDA and Smartphone Clients: two novel and highly effective handheld user interface applications, which have been created purposefully to deliver (as a convenience tool) flexible and readily available ‘around the clock’ user access to scientific applications running on the Grid...

The National Centre for e-Social Science, Rob Procter et al.
Abstract: This paper outlines the work of the UK National Centre for e-Social Science and its plans for facilitating the take-up of Grid infrastructure and tools within the social science research community. It describes the kinds of social science research challenges to which Grid technologies and tools have been applied, the contribution that NCeSS can make to support the wider take-up of e-Science and, finally, its plans for future work.

Monday, October 23, 2006

PPARC Science and Society Programme

The Science and Society programme forms part of PPARC's overall communications strategy, involving public engagement and public accountability.

The programme's role is to inform and inspire audiences by capitalising on the excitement of new developments and discoveries in current astronomy, space and particle physics. We also aim to demonstrate the resulting benefits to the nation of the work arising, for example, from our partnerships with the high-tech UK industry. We also account to Parliament, Government and taxpayers on the important and exciting work carried out through Government funding.


PPARC Science and Society Programme

Monday, October 16, 2006

Resource Aware Visualization Environment - RAVE

A potentially useful piece of software?

"The Resource Aware Visualization Environment (RAVE). A distributed collaborative visualization environment that utilises Grid technology enable distirbuted users to simultaneoulsy act with a shared dataset, supports handhelds to PCs, enables teachers to ‘fly’ around a dataset, followed by students, who attach to the teacher’s avatar to form a guided tour for distributed learning."

See the RAVE website