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 Science Fair Goes Online

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.

Encouraging the Next Generation of Scientists

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:

• Closer Look: Rise of the Data Scientist
• Secrets of the LinkedIn Data Scientists
• Foursquare Searching for Data Scientist – A Sign of Things to Come?.

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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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Webmasters from all across the globe know the value of high search engine rankings, the only thing most are not very sure of is how to achieve them. Webmaster communities have come together to debate and discuss this issue which represents the difference between zero visibility and extreme search engine popularity.

This is where the famous terms SEO and SEM comes into consideration. SEO simply stands for “search engine optimization” and SEM for “search engine marketing”; a balanced and passive-aggressive implementation of both strategies can certainly sky-rocket a webmaster’s advertising or affiliate income.

Besides search engine placement, webmasters gather in a certain community or discussion board to discuss several other topics such as advertising networks, on-page as well as off-page optimization, services, etc.

There are millions of web pages available on the web but only a low percentage makes it to the top of the search engines such as Google or Yahoo for a specific term, and this is often one concept which confuses new webmasters. Ranking high in a search engine in particular doesn’t mean ranking for every single imaginable keyword in a niche. It simply means that due to well done on-page and off-page optimization a site or a page within the site, could rank high for a single term. Depending on the marketing strategy and link diversity method used the web source will acquire relevant backlinks which use a specific anchor text needed to climb on the SERP (search engine result pages).

Besides optimization, every webmaster also deals with time management issues, content generation difficulties and design. The later causes many controversies because some great designers create incredibly looking sites which hurt on-page optimization, for instance, a great site created in Photoshop can display amazing graphics but each image has its own size/weight and when loaded from an average dial up connection (56K) it would take several minutes to load in the user’s browser, and we all know that if a site doesn’t load within 3-10 seconds people tend to leave the site quickly.

Link building and link baiting strategies are important to build high quality and relevant one way links, but it is also misunderstood the effects of obtaining many backlinks in a short period of time. Some link networks offer reciprocal link trading to improve search engine placement and relevancy, the only problem is that all of the links are acquired in a matter of days or a week, all anchor texts are similar if not the same, and the linking network can easily be identified. This particular practice will only hurt a web site because to Google it would seem that the webmaster is trying to manipulate the SERP through aggressive linking methods, and so the sand box effect takes over.

The best way to avoid all of these pitfalls is to constantly read webmaster forums and high quality blogs which provide up to the minute information such as Digital Point, Webmaster World, Matt Cutts, Joe Hayes, Search Engine Watch, etc. The best SEO strategies are keeping up the ever changing technology, test, test some more and then test again.