Content about Education

Link of the Week - A new twist on summer camp: computing classes in the wild

Image courtesy Carlos Jaime-Barrios Hernandez

We’ve all heard of summer camp.But SuperComputing Camp (or SSCAMP, as it is known by its acronym in Spanish) is a little different.
Starting on the 15th of August, 46 undergraduates and masters students will learn about high performance computing, grid computing, volunteer computing and cloud computing — while staying in a hacienda near Panachi National Wildlife Park, just outside the small town of Piedecuesta, Colombia.The organizer, Carlos Jaime-Barrios Hernandez, says the idea is for students to learn in a natural environment, where they can explore and enjoy the great outdoors while having access to fully up-to-date facilities, including digital resources, projectors and live-video feeds to keynote speeches and online lectures. They will remotely connect to the grid infrastructure via the web. Hernandez — a research scient

Announcement - GridKa School registration now open

The participants in GridKa School 2010 pose for a group picture. Image courtesy of GridKa School.

Established in 2003, the International GridKa School is one of the leading summer schools for grid computing and e-science. This year's event is scheduled for 6-10 September in Karlsruhe, Germany.
The school cooperates with the Helmholtz Alliance 'Physics on the Terascale'. In addition, it is associated with EGI/NGI. GridKa School offers a broad range of topics, which are chosen from the realm of these projects and beyond.
Because of its parallel hands-on sessions, GridKa School targets different groups of people involved in grid computing:

grid novices, advanced users and administrators,
scientists and other users of grid,
graduate students, PhD students and post-docs involved in grid computing.

The advanced talks and presentations give an up-to-date overview on important and interesting grid and cloud computing subjects. About h

Announcement - “Why Science is Cool” video contest, 15 July deadline

Photo courtesy Why Science is Cool

The USA Science & Engineering Festival’s Kavli Science Video Contest is looking for videos that are creative, surprising, and can be used to share students’ love of science with other kids, from kindergarten through grade 12. Videos can be linked to current curriculum, a science fair project or can be whatever students decide works for them.
Winners will receive cash prizes for their school, electronics prizes, tickets to meet the MythBusters and possibly even a trip to the Expo in Washington, DC. The top videos will be featured during the Expo and at other Festival events. Submission Deadline: July 15, 2010. Learn more here.
The “Why Science is Cool” National K-12 Video Contest is being run in partnership with The Kavli Foundation and SciVee.

Announcement - CI Summer Institute for Geoscientists accepting applications, 6 June deadline

The 7th Cyberinfrastructure Summer Institute for Geoscientists is now accepting applications.
The event will take place 9-13 August at the San Diego Supercomputer Center on the University of California, San Diego campus.
The broad theme for CSIG’10 will be emergent geoinformatic approaches to 3D and 4D integration of geoscience data. Given the diverse interests of past CSIG participants, and based on feedback that they have provided, CSIG’10 will feature two “tracks” of instruction:

Build Track: technologies related to building geoinformatics systems; and
Education Track: use of geoinformatics resources in education

Interested applicants at all levels are encouraged to apply, including graduate students, postdocs, faculty, and professionals in earth science and related disciplines. Applicants will have the option to choose the track of interest at the time of applica

CLARIN: A project that speaks to you

Wee-Ta-Ra-Sha-Ro, Head Chief of the Wichita. Painted by George Catlin in 1834. Image courtesy Indigenouspeople.net

The creation story of the Wichita people tells of a creator, “Man-never-known-on-Earth,” who formed the world, land, water and the first man and woman: “Man-with-the-Power-to-Carry-Light” and “Bright-Shining-Woman.” This couple brought to the Earth light, corn-growing, deer-hunting, game-playing and prayer, before becoming the morning star and the moon. While the story itself is preserved in literature for antiquity (e.g., in George Dorsey’s 1904 book The Mythology of the Wichita), fewer than 10 people today can tell the story in the Wichita language, nearly all of whom are elders living on tribal lands in Oklahoma, USA. It’s a pattern repeated around the world; many languages are endangered or dying. Preserving these languages is vital for groups seeking to revitalize and maintain their

Announcement - Internet2 Issues Call for 2010 Richard Rose Award Nominees

Internet2 is now accepting nominations for the 2010 Richard Rose Award. The annual award, established in 2009, recognizes outstanding individual efforts aimed at extending the benefits of advanced networking to the broadest education community. The award will be presented at the Internet2 Spring 2010 Member Meeting in Arlington, Virginia to be held 26-28 April 2010. Nominations will be accepted until 15 March 2010.
The Rose Award celebrates educators or technologists who have had a demonstrable impact on the K20 community through the bringing together of diverse communities around common goals and projects, and have accumulated a record of community accomplishments. The award also presents an important opportunity to recognize the achievements of leaders across all educational sectors who are working hard to ensure that students of all ages and locations have access to the most advanced networking resources available.

Image of the week

A day in the life. Photo courtesy Fiami

How do you explain how our understanding of the world changed from that of a flat, motionless object at the center of all creation to a spinning globe located on the outer spiral arm of the Milky Way — itself one of billions of galaxies in an expanding universe?
By putting it in comic book form, of course.
Switzerland’s Fiami is a graphic artist with a love of the history of science, who tackles these and other questions in his Lives of Galileo, the official comic strip marking the International Year of Astronomy, and the subject of a lecture that Fiami gave in CERN’s Globe last week, marking the start of the Fête de la Science, a week-long event held in conjunction with neighboring France to bring science closer to the public.
The Lives of Galileo is being shown in a special exhibition at the Musée d’Histoire des Sciences in Geneva, and was also part of a educational series broadcast o

Answering a truly big question: how did dinosaurs move?

Dinosaurs such as this therapod (“beast-foot”) are  believed to be the ancestors of modern birds. Image courtesy LDAustinArt.com

In a memorable scene from Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park, a Tyrannosaurus rex gallops behind a jeep, close to overtaking it, lunging to take a bite out of Jeff Goldblum — to the horrorified delight of millions of thrill-seeking movie-goers. 
Assuming dinosaurs could be resurrected, how realistic would this situation be?
Not very, according to Karl Bates, a researcher in dinosaur locomotion. In fact, our scrawny-armed, prehistoric friend would probably have trouble outrunning a bicyclist. Depending on how fast you run, you may or may not be in trouble if you were on foot.
How does Bates know this?
Because he is a member of the Animal Simulation Laboratory at the University of Manchester, UK, which for over five years has made computer models of prehistoric an

PEGrid gets down to business

This image depicts a simulation of the water saturation changes in a quarter of a homogeneous oil reservoir over time, as water is injected. The water increases the pressure in the reservoir, pushing the oil to the surface. Because the reservoir is symmetrical, researchers were able to save time by simulating only one quarter of the reservoir.
The colors indicates the water saturation, with purple being highly saturated and red being least saturated. Each of the six slices represents a snapshot in time.Image courtesy of Shameem Siddiqui.

Although Petroleum Engineering Grid officially started up in late 2009, it is already a classic example of how research projects can have unexpected benefits.
PEGrid came into existence using techniques and tools created by TIGRE (Texas Internet Grid for Research and Education), a state-funded project based on the use of federally funded middleware such as Open Science Grid’s Virtual Data Toolkit.
When TIGRE ende

Feature - HSVO connects the dots A screen capture of HSVO's patient simulator user interface. This mock-up of the patient simulator used videos from a training scenario in which students had to save the life of a teenager severely injured during a basketball game. An advanced mannequin stands in for the teenager. During this particular scenario, the students and mannequin were located in Montreal, the mannequin operator and a tutor were in Ottawa, and another tutor was located in Sudbury, Ontario. Image courtesy of McGill University and HSVO. Don’t let the name of Health Services Virtual Organization fool you. If HSVO is a success, it will be proof of concept for generic middleware that enables cloud-based workflows to access any number of services. And that could have implications for any scientific field. Web portals that give researchers access to data, services, applications and computational resources are becoming increasingly common. Researchers can access a variety of servi

Announcement - Register for the 7th International GridKa School

A presentation at last year's GridKa School

Attendees engage in some leisure time at GridKa School 2008

A group photo of the "graduates" of GridKa School 2008

This summer, researchers and administrators of all levels have the opportunity to learn more about grid computing and e-Science at the seventh annual GridKa School.
The one-week event, which takes place 31 August through 4 September, is organized by the Steinbuch Centre for Computing at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, together with the project "Sustainable Grid Infrastructure" (a part of the D-Grid initiative), the HGF Alliance "Physics at the Terascale," and the project 'Enabling Grids for E-Science.' Participants will have the chance to learn about the sponsoring projects, among others.
About half of the school consists of hands-on tutorials and workshops, giving participants the opportunity to gain actual exp