Summer Projects Update

08. June 2009 · Write a comment · Categories: collaborative science, research ideas · Tags: , , , ,

I posted some initial ideas for projects for our summer students awhile back. I’m pleased to say that the students have been making great progress in the last few weeks (despite, or perhaps because of, the fact that I haven’t been around much). Here’s what they’ve been up to:

Sarah Strong and Ainsley Lawson have been exploring how to take the ideas on visualizing the social network of a software development team (as embodied in tools such as Tesseract), and applying them as simple extensions to code browsers / version control tools. The aim is to see if we can add some value in the form of better awareness of who is working on related code, but without asking the scientists to adopt entirely new tools. Our initial target users are the climate scientists at the UK Met Office Hadley Centre, who currently use SVN/Trac as their code management environment.

Brent Mombourquette has been working on a Firefox extension that will capture the browsing history as a graph (pages and traversed links), which can then be visualized, saved, annotated, and shared with others. The main idea is to support the way in which scientists search/browse for resources (e.g. published papers on a particular topic), and to allow them to recall their exploration path to remember the context in which they obtained these resources. I should mention the key idea goes all the way back to the Vannevar Bush’s memex.

Maria Yancheva has been exploring the whole idea of electronic lab notebooks. She has been exploring the workflows used by the climate scientists when they configure and run their simulation models, and considering how a more structured form of wiki might help them. She has selected OpenWetWare as a good starting point, and is exploring how to add extensions to MediaWiki to make OWW more suitable for computational science, especially to keep track of model runs.

Samar Sabie has also been looking at MediaWiki extensions, specifically to find a way to add visualizations into wiki pages and blogs as simply as possible. The problem is that currently, adding something as simple as a table of data to a page requires extensive work with the markup language. The long term aim is to make the insertion of dynamic visualizations (such as those at ManyEyes), but the starting point is to try to make it as ridiculously simple as possible to insert a data table, link it to a graph, and select appropriate parameters to make the graph look good, with the idea that users can subsequently change the appearance in useful ways (which means cut and paste from Excel Spreadsheets won’t be good enough).

Oh, and they’ve all been regularly blogging their progress, so we’re practicing the whole open notebook science thingy.

Climate Visualizations

21. May 2009 · Write a comment · Categories: research ideas · Tags: , , , , , ,

As a fan of Edward Tufte’s books on the power of beautiful visualizations of qualitative and quantitative data, I’m keen on the idea of exploring new ways of visualizing the climate change challenge. In part because many key policymakers are not likely to ever read the detailed reports on the science, but a few simple, compelling graphics might capture their attention.

I like the visualizations of collected by the UNEP, especially their summary of climate processes and effects, their strategic options curve, the map of political choices, summary of emissions by sector, a guide to emissions assessment, trends in sea level rise, CO2 emissions per capita. I should also point out that the IPCC reports are full of great graphics too, but there’s no easy visual index – you have to read the reports.

Now these are all very nice, and (presumably) the work of professional graphic artists. But they’re all static. The scientist in me wants to play with them. I want to play around with different scales on the axes. I want to select from among different data series. And I want to do this in a web-brower that’s directly linked to the data sources, so that I don’t have to mess around with the data directly, nor worry about how the data is formatted.

What I have in mind is something like Gap Minder. This allows you to play with the data, create new views, and share them with others. Many Eyes is similar, but goes one step further in allowing a community to create entirely new kinds of visualization, and enhance each other’s, in a social networking style. Now, if i can connect up some of these to the climate data sets collected by the IPCC, all sorts of interesting things might happen. Except that the IPCC data sets don’t have enough descriptive metadata for non-experts to make sense of it. But fixing that’s another project.

Oh, and the periodic table of visualization methods is pretty neat as a guide to what’s possible.

Update: (via Shelly): Worldmapper is an interesting way of visualizing international comparisons.

Modeling challenge (part 2)

09. April 2009 · Write a comment · Categories: books, reducing emissions, research ideas · Tags: , , , , , , , ,

Okay, here’s a slightly different modeling challenge. It might be more of a visualization challenge. Whatever. In part 1, I suggested we use requirements analysis techniques to identify stakeholders, and stakeholder goals, and link them to the various suggested “wedges“.

Here, I want to suggest something different. There are several excellent books that attempt to address the “how will we do it?” challenge. They each set out a set of suggested solutions, add up the contribution of each solution to reducing emissions, assess the feasibility of each solution, add up all the numbers, and attempt to make some strategic recommendations. But each book makes different input assumptions, focusses on slightly different kinds of solutions, and ends up with different recommendations (but they also agree on many things).

Here are the four books:

Cover image for Monbiots Heat
George Monbiot, Heat: How to Stop the Planet from Burning. This is probably the best book I have ever read on global warming. It’s brilliantly researched, passionate, and doesn’t pull it’s punches. Plus it’s furiously upbeat – Monbiot takes on the challenge of how we get to 90% emissions reduction, and shows that it is possible (although you kind of have to imagine a world in which politicians are willing to do the right thing).

Joseph Romm, Hell and High Water: Global Warming–the Solution and the Politics–and What We Should Do. While lacking Monbiot’s compelling writing style, Romm makes up by being an insider – he was an energy policy wonk in the Clinton administration. The other contrast is Monbiot is British, and focusses mainly on British examples, Romm is American and focusses on US example. The cultural contrasts are interesting.

David MacKay, Sustainable Energy – Without the Hot Air. Okay, so I haven’t read this one yet, but it got a glowing write-up on Boing Boing . Oh, and it’s available as a free download.

Lester Brown, Plan B 3.0L Mobilizing to Save Civilization. This one’s been on my reading list for a while, will read it soon. It has a much broader remit than the others: Brown wants to solve world poverty, cure disease, feed the world, and solve the climate crisis. I’m looking forward to this one. And it’s also available as a free download.

Okay, so what’s the challenge? Model the set of solutions in each of these books so that it’s possible to compare and contrast their solutions, compare their assumptions, and easily identify areas of agreement and disagreement. I’ve no idea yet how to do this, but a related challenge would be to come up with compelling visualizations that explain to a much broader audience what these solutions look like, and why it’s perfectly feasible. Something like this (my current favourite graphic):

Graph of cost/benefit of climate mitigation strategies

Graph of cost/benefit of climate mitigation strategies

Collective Intelligence for Global Change

03. April 2009 · Write a comment · Categories: collaborative science, research ideas · Tags: , , , , ,

I just spent the last two hours chewing the fat with Mark Klein at MIT and Mark Tovey at Carleton, talking about all sorts of ideas, but loosely focussed on how distributed collaborative modeling efforts can help address global change issues (e.g. climate, peak oil, sustainability).

MK has a project, Climate Interactive,[update: Mark tells me I got the wrong project – it should be The Climate Collaboratorium. Climate Interactive is from a different group at MIT] which is exploring how climate simulation tools can be hooked up to discussions around decision making, which is one of the ideas we kicked around in our brainstorming sessions here.

MT has been exploring how you take ideas from distributed cognition and scale them up to much larger teams of people. He has put together a wonderful one-pager that summarized many interesting ideas on how mass collaboration can be applied in this space.

This conversation is going to keep me going for days on stuff to explore and blog about:

And lots of interesting ideas for new projects…

Tools for collaborative sense-making

16. March 2009 · Write a comment · Categories: collaborative science, research ideas · Tags: ,

Okay, some of the tools produced by the Essence project are pretty cool:

http://globalsensemaking.wik.is/ESSENCE/Tools

I especially like Debategraph, but mainly for its aesthetic properties when you pull the graph around, and the ability to zoom in to nodes by clicking, rather than how it’s actually being used (mapping debates about whether climate change is happening? That’s so last century). Could we use a tool like this for playing with i* models?