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The EUAsiaGrid project had its All Hands Meeting on the 12th and 13th of December in Taipei, Taiwan. Delegates from the 15 project partners came together to discuss, amongst other topics, requirements for a coordinated Grid infrastructure in the Asia-Pacific region as well as status, plans and requirements for implementation in the partner countries. Also, we reviewed applications available on EGEE and the scope for widening their uptake in the partner countries. The application areas currently being worked on are high energy physics, computational chemistry, biomedical research, mitigation of natural disasters and, last not least, social sciences.

The session on e-Social Science highlighted a common interest in research on neglected and emerging diseases that spans biomedical research, epidemiology, social science research and disaster mitigation. This area of research would touch on issues such as access to data, data integration and social simulation. Another area that seems to be a common interest for a number of partners is urban planning and especially transport.

We used some time before the All Hands Meeting to further existing contacts with the Center for Survey Research (CSR) at Academia Sinica to discuss the potential for social simulation approaches in Taiwan and the availability of datasets for this purpose. Technical work has already been progressed in collaboration with the W-GRASS team from the University of Westminster and Academia Sinica Grid Computing. We are porting population reconstruction code developed by the MoSeS node to the EGEE infrastructure. Through the EUAsiaGrid VO, we now have access to clusters in Taiwan and Thailand. Over the coming months, other partners will bring EGEE resources online and start supporting the EUAsiaGrid VO, opening up the possibility of using social simulation approaches in a number of different countries and for different social science applications.

On a day when all academics are talking about university league tables based on the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise results publised this morning (http://www.rae.ac.uk/news/2008/results.asp), the Guardian has published a different league table - the top 100 most useful websites (http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2006/dec/21/newmedia.media).  Like all league tables, the ranking - or in this case the choice of websites - is contestable.  Are your favourites missing? Are you puzzled why some sites have been included? Let us know by commenting on this post.

The Guardian’s websites league table raises another issue too: to what extent can the tools and services listed be used or adapted to support social science research?  Should NCeSS be recommending them to social scientists via its own website, perhaps with examples of how they can be used to support research? Should NCeSS be incorporating some of them into workflows that embrace parts of the social research life-cycle? What is your view?

Stephen Downes has posted a link to the new Sakai 3 vision document:

Michael Feldstein links to an interesting Sakai 3 Vision Document which offers a system somewhat beyond the traditional site-based learning management system.

Stephen says the document is a step in the right direction for Sakai.

NCeSS use Sakai for our portal (which you, too, can use)

http://portal.ncess.ac.uk

The JISC/CURL funded Source-to-Output Repositories (StORe) project started with the vision of helping researchers from various disciplines in connecting data archives (data they used or which is relevant to their research) with repositories of research publications (their publications and outputs). It developed into a promising, complex portal which supports self-curation and sharing of data in a project space with an up-to-date authentification model.

NCeSS was involved in this endeavor in providing two summative evaluation reports, focussing on the system-in-use. Now the second report is available.

We’re still getting thousands of hits per week on our Congestion Charge Mood Map [plug: you can vote here], and the Yes and No campaigns are in full swing, with much of the bus stops plastered in yes posters and no posters popping up elsewhere.  A couple of things which I have noticed about the campaigns: Read the rest of this entry »

As part of the NCeSS Seminar Series, Farzana has been videoing most of the speakers and we are looking for sites where we can upload the video and powerpoints synched together in two screens for people who could not make it to the physical seminars.

I’ve been looking around the web for a while at sites which let you share video and data combined. I’ll sumarise the the sites which I have found:

Read the rest of this entry »

The NCeSS Jamboree is in full swing with lots of talking going on.  Any one got any comments on it?

The Royal Statistical Society recently hosted an interesting meeting on text mining, with one of the talks focusing on assessing an organisation’s Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) by looking at on-line media coverage. The concept has a wide appeal for organisations wanting to perform business intelligence and monitor what is being said about their brand (what their brand is being associated with, which –if any- or the core messages projected in an advertising campaign are getting out, whether a brand is associated more or less frequently with negative stories than their competitors and so). Read the rest of this entry »

Google has pulled the plug on it’s lively service.  For those of you not in the know, and lets face it, that was most of us, Lively was Google’s attempt to bring virtual worlds to a website.  Coupled with this have been ‘major‘ price rises at the hirterto darling of the eLearning community, Second Life (AKA Sadville).  What does this mean for the effort educators have put into these systems?  Well.. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve just attended the latest in the NCeSS Semiar series.  So far we have had ethics, R, and now webmetrics.  Mike Thelwall gave an excellent talk on blogs, links and ******g swearing. Read the rest of this entry »