Internet News Inside AdsenseThe National Science Foundation and the journal Science announce the winners of last year’s contest for the best visualizations in science and engineering.
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Google has announced the second annual Google Science Fair, an online science competition opened to students aged 13-18 from anywhere in the world. Google touts this as “the largest online science competition in the world,” and it touts CERN, The LEGO Group, National Geographic and Scientific American as partners.
Participants can have up to three partners. They pose a question, develop a hypothesis, test it with an experiment and submit the findings online. Last year’s winners became scientific superheroes, meeting the president, speaking at TEDx Women, just generally kicking butt. There are also prizes, including a $50,000 college scholarship, a 10-day trip to the Galapagos Islands with National Geographic or an internship at Google or any of the partner organizations.
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This year, the contest is open to even more participants, accepting submissions in 13 languages (Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, English, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Spanish and Russian). 90 finalists around the world will be selected, and the top 15 will be flown to Mountain View, Calif. for the final event.
There’s also a new category this year, the Scientific American Science in Action award, for a project that addresses a social, environmental or health need. The winner will get $50,000 and a year-long mentorship to help implement the project.
The Google Science Fair is now open for submissions until Sunday, April 1 at 11:59 p.m. GMT (that’s 6:59 p.m. Eastern/3:59 p.m. Pacific in the U.S.). Submit your projects at google.com/sciencefair.
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On the one year anniversary of the Haiti earthquake, journalist Peter Aldhous created a data visualization that shows how the Carribean country’s relatively low seismic earthquake had as many fatalities as all but one earthquake over a time span of almost 40 years.
The data visualization is striking but also a study in how journalists are increasingly telling stories that leverage datasets that are freely available to the public.
Peter Aldhous, San Francisco Bureau Chief for New Scientist magazine, created the interactive graphics. We asked him to explain how he created the visualizations which compare seismic activity to fatalities caused by earthquakes over the span of four decades.
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Aldhous posted the data visualizations on his Web site with the following explanation:
The earthquake that struck near the Haitian capital, Port-au-Prince, on 12 January 2010, was unremarkable in seismic terms — barely making the year’s top 20 most powerful quakes. But it was one of the most deadly seismic events in the past four decades, serving as a reminder that the scope of these disasters is defined not by the scale of the Earth’s unleashed fury, but by overcrowding in poor urban areas and lax or poorly enforced building codes.
The deadliest earthquake occurred in 1975 when a 7.5 earthquake killed more than 250,000 people. Only the tsunami in 2004 off the coast of Sumatra had more fatalities. That 9.1 earthquake killed more than 225,000 people.
The bar graph marks fatalities. Notice how some of the largest earthquakes had minimal casualties.
In an e-mail interview, Aldhous explained how he created the data visualizations. He said it started with downloading freely available data about earthquakes and fatalities:
“The raw data was downloaded from searches at the U.S. Geological Survey for quake magnitudes and locations and The International Disaster Database for earthquake fatality data. I manipulated the downloaded data in Excel and Access to get it in the format I needed to make the graphics – e.g. running some SQL queries in Access to get the numbers of quakes of different magnitude classes in each year for the stacked area chart drawn from the historical data.”
He then created the individual frames:
To make the individual frames for the animation of all quakes greater than magnitude 6 in 2010 I needed a world shapefile for the basemap, and shapefiles defining the locations for the earthquakes on each day, which I generated using the CSV to Shapefile Converter plugin in MapWindow GIS from the downloaded USGS data.
He then imported the files into R, a free software program for statistical computing and graphics. He used the rgadal package, and generated an image in a postscript file for each day of the year.
Here’s the R code Aldhous used:
#import the basemap
basemap = readOGR("world.shp", "world")
#set the color palette for the points (the darker color for the Chile quake, in a class of its own, was added later, in Adobe Illustrator)
palette = c("red4","red3","red1")
#then iterations of the following:
#import the data for each day
Jan1shape=readOGR("1Jan.shp", "1Jan")
Jan1data=read.csv("1Jan.csv", header=T)
#create a vector graphic for each day
postscript (file="1.ps")
plot (basemap, border="gray")
plot (Jan1shape, pch=19, cex=(Jan1data$IconScale), col=palette[Jan1data$Class], add=T)
dev.off()
In the above code, Class is an ordinal variable that matches quakes to the categories given in the legend. IconScale is a transformation of earthquake magnitude used to size the bubbles for each quake, chosen merely to make it clear that magnitude is not a linear scale, and to give the graphic a pleasing aesthetic – it doesn’t reflect any physical reality such as the energy of each quake. If you scaled according to energy, the magnitude 8.8 Chile quake would dominate the entire map.
Aldhous then polished up the work using Adobe Illustrator and imported the work into Adobe Flash where he made the animations.
The results are a clear and telling story about how data visualizations are created. Aldhous used freely available data to make his point. The use of the R programming language provide the spatial characteristics to display the size of the earthquakes in the data visualization. It’s a combination that shows the way journalists with some programming skills can tell stories in a visual narrative.
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For many of us, science fairs may conjure an image of the school gym, full of students showcasing their science projects – their hypotheses, their experiments, their data. But in part due to the financial constraints of both schools and families, these sorts of events are on the decline. The Google Science Fair, however, doesn’t require poster boards and it doesn’t require travel. It is, in fact, the first ever online global science fair. And any student (age 13 to 18) anywhere – as long as they have a computer, a browser and Internet access – can participate.
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The Google Science Fair takes the traditional science fair and moves it to the Web. Participating students both build and submit their projects online – using Google Docs, Sites, and YouTube, for example – for all aspects of their research projects – from the data collection to the final presentation. Students from all over the world are encouraged to participate – from Paris, Texas to Paris, France, from Venice, Italy to Venice Beach.
To run this science fair, Google is teaming up with some of the most well-known names in science, technology, and education: CERN, LEGO, National Geographic, and Scientific American. And the judges for the event are just as prestigious, including the founder of the FIRST robotics competition Dean Kamen, the leader of National Geographic’s Genographic Project Spencer Wells, Nobel prize winner Kary Mullis, and the “father of the Internet” Vint Cerf.
The prizes (oh, the prizes) include some once-in-a-lifetime opportunities: a trip to the Galapagos Islands with a National Geographic Explorer, a trip to Switzerland to visit CERN and the Large Hadron Collider, a chance to work on the development of a new LEGO robotics project.
The Google Science Fair is an effort to help encourage students’ interest in science and technology. “Google’s origins are in scientific experimentation,” Google’s Tom Oliveri told ReadWriteWeb, noting that it was a hypothesis of two young computer science students back in 1996 that the information on the web could cataloged and searched.
To enter, you can register online and create your project as a Google Site. Registration is open through April 4, and the announcement of the semi-finalists will happen in early May. Oregon high school student Tesca has created a great sample site so you can see what an online science fair project might look like.
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The Data Sciences Summer Institute is a six week summer program for students interested in data science. It will be held at the University of Illinois Department of Computer Science and include: a class on the mathematical foundations of data science, advanced tutorials, expert speakers and collaborative research projects. Why go? Well, data science is shaping up to be a smart career choice for the 21st century, and this looks like an excellent way for computer science majors to more acquainted with the field.
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Here are the subjects the summer program covers:
- Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, and Information Extraction
- Computer Vision
- Information Retrieval and Web Information Access
- Knowledge Discovery in Social & Information Networks
Compare that with the top three college majors Microsoft recommends:
- Data Mining/Machine Learning/AI/Natural Language Processing
- Business Intelligence/Competitive Intelligence
- Analytics/Statistics – specifically Web Analytics, A/B Testing and statistical analysis
As our own Audrey Watters put it:
If The Graduate were remade today, the advice to young Benjamin Braddock might be “just one word… statistics.”
The application requirements are as follows:
- College Junior or Senior Computer Science students (majors or minors) and beginning Graduate students.
- Students should show strong academic performance and must have sufficient mathematical and programming experience.
- Applicants must currently be living in the United States as citizens, residents or Visa holders.
Here’s an introduction video from University of Illinois:
For more information on what data scientists do, check out some of our previous articles on the subject:
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Major joint conference on the science of sound
( American Institute of Physics ) What is research telling us about the noise levels to which soldiers in the field and sailors on the deck of aircraft carriers are exposed? What sounds do humpback whales make when they congregate in the summer? How can science help us understand how to achieve improved acoustics in the classroom and elsewhere in our schools? Can sound in a city trigger strong …
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Science students take top positions
2009 Class XII examinations 29 January, 2010 – Science students have taken the top three positions of the 2009 class XII Bhutan Higher Secondary Education Certificate (BHSEC) examinations, the results of which will be formally out on the education and druknet website this afternoon.
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