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Commentators suggest that Wikipedia and other collaborative network-driven projects, such as the Linux computer operating system, could be an emerging socioeconomic paradigm no less radical and disruptive than the Industrial Revolution.

Wikipedia is meant to be a new way of doing things in a world of ubiquitous electronic information and social networks, one that may be changing the conduct of everything from scientific research to political campaigns.

Sociological commentary and predictions aside, however, do Wikipedia and other “crowd-sourced” efforts really function so differently? Purdue communications researcher Sorin Adam Matei and his team are testing the concept by analyzing Wikipedia articles and revisions produced between 2001 and 2008 – a computationally demanding task. They’re finding that Wikipedia may have more in common with an old-fashioned factory floor than we think.

In theory, the collaborative online encyclopedia’s entries are created, edited and maintained with little in the way of traditional, hierarchical organizational and leadership structures. The production of Wikipedia has been characterized as an emergent system, like an ant colony, resulting from collective actions of individual participants with the “wisdom of the crowd” yielding a viable outcome.

New computing tools could save graduate students from thousands of hours spent visually inspecting historical maps, quilts, medieval art, and manuscripts.

Humanities researchers use laborious visual inspection of historical materials to determine authorship and artistic lineage for manuscripts, maps, and quilts. A typical research project could take the time of several graduate students two or more years.

“We are interested in understanding how to support these domain scientists so they are more efficient,” said Peter Bajcsy, principal investigator for the Digging into Image Data to Answer Authorship-Related Questions (DID-ARQ) project at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. He added, “We are giving them tools that will automate the visual inspection process.”

Those tools are the product of extensive collaboration between humanities researchers and Bajcsy’s team. To create them, the computer experts engaged in lengthy discussions to determine what questions the humanities researchers seek to answer, and exactly how they would answer them using traditional methods. Their inquiries sought out details such as which image features researchers use – consciously or unconsciously – to identify the author or artist. Then the computer scientists developed algorithms that could rapidly identify those features automatically.

Some kids can make anything cute, and these ones are no exception.

Feature - Life at the extreme at the Pierre Auger Observatory The Pierre Auger Observatory has a detection area of 3,000 km², so large that it is best seen by airplane. A space-based sucessor with a detection area hundreds of times greater is already being planned: the JEM-EUSO will be attached to the International Space Station in 2013. It will use large volumes of the earth’s atmosphere to detect and observe particles colliding with planet’s magnetic field. All images courtesy Pierre Auger Observatory Some people enjoy living life at the edge, such as participants in extreme sports. At the other extreme are those who relish watching rare events.Among the latter are astronomers at the Pierre Auger Observatory, a multi-national collaboration to detect the 'light-signature' given off as these cosmic rays hit particles in our atmosphere. Based in Argentina, the observatory monitors ultra-high energy cosmic rays —  spectacular examples of some of nature

Image of the Week - Elegance of darkness When galaxies collide. Original courtesy Argonne National Laboratory What you see is the collision of two galaxies over billions of years, albeit virtually. As physicists at CERN investigate the smallest particles in the universe, US scientists are studying the behavior of the largest cosmic structures in existence. A team at the University of Chicago Flash Center and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics used an Argonne National Laboratory Supercomputer to identify elusive dark matter. The researchers simulated the motion and collision of galactic clusters — some of the largest structures in the universe — to infer dark matter’s influence, as it cannot be observed directly. Dark matter greatly influences gas and galaxies over trillions of light years.  Furthermore, these collisions more accurately predict the interaction of both normal and dark matter (it is thought dark matter constitu

Announcement - Cybera Summit videos available

Attendees network at Cybera Summit 2010. Photo courtesy Joni Evans.

Thank you to everyone who joined us in Banff for our annual fall event, Cybera Summit 2010: Driving Alberta's Digital Evolution, which brought a diverse group of innovation enthusiasts and trailblazers to explore emerging technologies and R&D initiatives in three hot-topic tracks:

Bridging the Digital Divide
Setting R&D Priorities
Building Collaborative Networks

 
For a quick Summit recap and impressions from those who took part in the event, videos of the event's keynote speakers, and slides of speaker presentations, click here.

Feature - LHC open to all

An actual recorded event from the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment—this event shows radiation and charged particles spilling into the detector from the beam colliding with material in the beam pipe.
Image courtesy Carl Lundstedt

Occasionally, iSGTW runs across stories in other publications related to the fields we cover. Below is an excerpt from Linux Journal, containing one person’s view of the whole process.
One of the items at the heart of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiments is open-source software. The following will provide a glimpse into how scientific computing embraces open-source software and its open-source philosophy.
The LHC at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland, is nearly 100 meters underground and produces the highest-energy subatomic particle beams on Earth. The Compact Muon Solenoid experiment is one of the many collider experiments within the LHC. One of its goals is to give physicists a window into the universe fractions

Announcement - UP 2010 Cloud Computing Conference

Photo courtesy UP2010

Feature - Theorists find dark matter evidence in open data

A visualization of the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope.
Image courtesy of NASA and General Dynamics.

Dan Hooper and Lisa Goodenough are not part of the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope collaboration. But by using FGST’s publicly released data, they were able to find clues to some of the universe’s juiciest secrets at the center of the Milky Way.
In their analysis, Hooper, a Fermilab theorist, and Goodenough, a graduate student at New York University, report that very-high-energy gamma rays coming from the center of the Milky Way originate from dark-matter collisions.
“We went out of our way to consider all causes of backgrounds that mimic the signal, and we found no other plausible astrophysics sources or mechanics that can produce a signal like this,” Hooper said.
A recent paper, published on the pre-print server arXiv, outlines their findings.
Astrophysicists have long postulated a wide range of

Announcement - CERN Latin-American School of High Energy Physics, Natal, Brazil, 23-25 April 2011

Photo courtesy CERN

The CERN Latin-American School of High-Energy Physics is encouraging experimental high-energy physics students, who are also in the final years of their PhDs, to apply. Masters and post-doctoral students are also welcome to the course. There are a limited number of places so an early application is advisable. Please be aware that prior knowledge of high-energy physics is required in order to fully benefit from the programme.
The school is being organized jointly by the European Laboratory for Particle Physics (CERN), Geneva, Switzerland; CIEMAT, Research Organization of the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science and a team of local organizers from institutes in Brazil.
Successful applicants will be housed in the Hotel Porto do Mar, which provides conference facilities for lectures and discussion sessions. The hotel also has sports and leisure facilities that will be

Feature - Astronomical computing
Supporting the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope means thinking big

A visualization of the LSST.
Image credit: Todd Mason, Mason Productions Inc./LSST Corporation

The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope to be constructed in Chile will incorporate the world’s largest digital camera, capable of recording highly detailed data more quickly than any other telescope of comparable resolution.
For the scientists working on the project, that all amounts to an exciting opportunity to learn more about moving objects (including monitoring asteroids near the Earth), transients such as the brief conflagrations of supernovae, dark energy, and the structure of the galaxy.
For computing specialists, it means more data. A lot more data.
The LSST will take between 1000 and 2000 panoramic 3.2 gigapixel images per night, covering its hemisphere of the sky twice weekly. Along with daytime calibration images, this will amount to 20 terabytes of data stored every 2