Content about humanities

  Feature - The path more travelled by: grids help track human migration Nicolas Ray uses Approximate Bayesian Computation—developed in 2002—to track the migration of humans through the centuries.Images courtesy of Rakesh Rampertab Today, families interested in an intercontinental move will probably go by plane, train or automobile. Several thousand years ago, adventurers had a harder time of it. Thanks to the plucky, pioneering efforts of early families, humans have managed to explore and settle every habitable region of the globe. Surviving the “bottlenecks” Two ancient migrations have particularly affected the shape of future generations: the “Out of Africa” event and the North to South colonization of the Americas. These migrations left traces in our genes still observable today. Described as “bottlenecks”—events where only a few individuals get through—the migrations may have caused a drastic reduction in population size and a corresponding drop

  Feature - Electing for transparency: politics, grid computing and partisan gerrymandering Ternary plot of Bush versus Gore as run in the precincts constituting Texas Congressional District 24 in 2000.  Larger dots indicate more populous precincts; brighter shades indicate a greater Gore share of the two-party vote.  If one drops an imaginary vertical line from the Hispanic vertex to the bisector of the triangle’s bottom leg, one sees that, generally, most non-Hispanic voters in predominantly Hispanic districts were white voters.  If white voters in predominantly Hispanic precincts voted more Democratic than white voters in predominantly white precincts, aggregation bias could affect the estimates of the preferences of Hispanic voters, who turned out in low percentages.Image courtesy of Crimson Grid A few months after arriving at Harvard Law School, Assistant Professor Jim Greiner turned to computer scientists at the nearby School of Engineering and Applied Sciences for some legal power—of a sort. H

  Opinion - Beyond books: grid technologies for arts and humanities research The Virtual Vellum project investigates technologies that facilitate the retrieval, manipulation and annotation/hotspotting of very high resolution image datasets.Image © Bibliothèque d’Etude et de Conservation, Besançon, and Scriptura Ltd Tobias Blanke of the UK’s Arts and Humanities e-Science Support Centre reflects on the growing popularity of grid technology for arts and humanities research.Who could resist the idea of joining resources from across the world to form global virtual spaces of computing resources, libraries or observatories?I started working for the UK’s Arts and Humanities e-Science Support Centre almost two years ago, and since that time I have been fascinated by grid computing and e-science, and what they could mean for arts and humanities. Experimenting with the newly possible Digital resources in such disciplines have mushroomed over the past decade: The Arts and Humanities Research

  Feature - Kiwis just love being the BeST Maori language is just one of more than a thousand languages making up the Austronesian language family, currently being documented with the help of BeSTGRID.Stock image from sxc.hc Anyone who has ever been on the wrong end of an All Black rugby scrum can tell you: Kiwis don’t like to play second best. A nation of innovators, New Zealand has a proud history of scientific excellence, perhaps beginning way back in 1908 when Kiwi physicist Ernest Lord Rutherford won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry. Over the last ten years, the amount of research and development carried out in New Zealand has nearly doubled; the number of scientific positions has increased by 60%. New Zealand is ramping up its already productive R&D sector. Paul Bonnington, director of New Zealand’s BeSTGRID and of eResearch at the University of Auckland, says now is also the time for New Zealand to tackle e-science.“A great deal of scientific research is now computational,” he says, “invo

Feature - Grids in the BlogosphereStock image from www.sxc.hu Unknown a few years ago, keeping a blog (short for Weblog) is now a major trend, particularly in the technology and IT sectors. The grid domain is no exception. People from many aspects of the grid technology are blogging on their area of work, wider grid-related interests and whatever else strikes their fancy. Ian Foster, often cited as the father of grid computing, is an active blogger. His blog covers events and news around the Globus project, which he is heavily involved with, as well as broader posts on grid computing and a range of interesting topics, such as his recent musings on an old Joni Mitchell album. Foster’s colleague, Tim Freeman writes the Virtualization and Grid Computing  blog, which he describes as “On distributed computing, VMs, Web Services, Globus, Xen, Virtual Workspaces, and more.” Also in the U.S. academic grid field, TeraGrid director Charlie Catlett’s blog, the TeraGrid Whiteboard, covers issues in the tech sec

Feature: Bringing Arts and Humanities into the Grid Image from a virtual gallery created with the CITRIS Collaborative Gallery Builder, a project associated with HASTAC. Image courtesy CITRIS and the University of California Since 2003, the HASTAC consortium has worked toward the novel objective of developing software and hardware solutions for the worlds of the arts and humanities. HASTAC — which stands for Humanities, Arts, Science and Technology Advanced Collaboratory — also advocates the inclusion of thought on the social, ethical and access issues of technology in parallel with its creation. “The idea was for humanities professors to look at ways to incorporate technologies like grid computing into their research,” says HASTAC Project Leader Jonathan Tarr. “They needed to save humanities from becoming a group of scholars who only work on physical text and weren’t going a