GeoLog

Did you miss a particular film during the GeoCinema at the European Geosciences Union General Assembly 2011? Here’s the second post containing where to see films that are available online. A film’s inclusion in the Geocinema does not mean that EGU endorses any opinions expressed in the film.

Royal NIOZ, Fathoming the Sea, 10 mins [Online]
Once again a prominent scientific institute called Zcenes help in making science accessible for all who are fascinated by marine sciences. “After NWO, Utrecht University, European Science Foundation and NSF/IODP (USA), NIOZ, the Royal Dutch Maritime Research Centre, has asked us to produce a film focusing on how oceans work, global climate history, the dynamics of the coastal Waddenzee and the significance of Dutch maritime research”.

Drill Bits, 20 mins in total 5 mins for each section [Online, listed by geographical location]
Drilling into Lake Peten Itza (Guatemala) for paleoclimate studies on drill core. Scientific drilling into Lake Malawi (Malawi) for paleoclimate studies. Drilling through the San Andreas Fault at seismogenic depths. Scientific Drilling at Hawaii to investigate Hot Spot volcanism.

Deep Sea Observatories: Internet in the Ocean, 9 mins [Online, with other similar movies]

ESONET movie to show observatories preparation and deployment on ESONET sites.

Ocean Under Observation, 9 mins [Online, with other similar movies]
This movie explain why now we have to go a step forward in the earth and Sea observation by developing and implementing deep sea observatories that are able to provide real time or near real time data continuously, with a high sampling frequency and on long term, (more than 10 years).

Signs of Life on Mars, 5 mins [Online]
A musical video to inspire the next generation of explorers.

Did you miss a particular film during the GeoCinema at the European Geosciences Union General Assembly 2011? Quite a few of the films are available online. In this series of posts the descriptions and online locations of these films will be discussed. A film’s inclusion in the Geocinema does not mean that EGU endorses any opinions expressed in the film.

River Trip with Family, 5 mins [Online]
Water is life! A family experiences the element “water” in a series of different settings during a boat cruise on a river. The film gives an overview of the benefits hydrology provides to society in the context of the so-called State’s provision of general public services. It was produced by the German Federal Institute of Hydrology (BfG), on behalf of the Federal Ministry of Transport, Building and Urban Affairs (BMVBS) to commemorate the anniversary “200 Years of Hydrology in Germany”.

Stefano Mancuso: The roots of plant intelligence, 14 mins [Online]
Plants behave in some oddly intelligent ways: fighting predators, maximizing food opportunities … But can we think of them as actually having a form of intelligence of their own? Italian botanist Stefano Mancuso presents intriguing evidence.

Greg Stone: Saving the ocean one island at a time, 17 mins [Online]
Aboard Mission Blue, scientist Greg Stone tells the story of how he helped the Republic of Kiribati create an enormous protected area in the middle of the Pacific — protecting fish, sealife and the island nation itself.

Lee Hotz: Inside an Antarctic time machine, 10 mins [Online]
Science columnist Lee Hotz describes a remarkable project at WAIS Divide, Antarctica, where a hardy team are drilling into ten-thousand-year-old ice to extract vital data on our changing climate. Talk from TED.com, distributed under a Creative Commons License.

Rob Dunbar: Discovering ancient climates in oceans and ice, 18 mins [Online]
Rob Dunbar hunts for data on our climate from 12,000 years ago, finding clues inside ancient seabeds and corals and inside ice sheets. His work is vital in setting baselines for fixing our current climate — and in tracking the rise of deadly ocean acidification.

Michael Specter: The danger of science denial, 17 mins [Online]
Vaccine-autism claims, “Frankenfood” bans, the herbal cure craze: All point to the public’s growing fear (and, often, outright denial) of science and reason, says Michael Specter. He warns the trend spells disaster for human progress. Talk from TED.com, distributed under a Creative Commons License.

IODP 318 Wilkes Land Expedition, 20 mins [Online]
From January to March 2010, the JOIDES Resolution sailed on IODP Expedition 318 to the Antarctic coastline of Wilkes Land. During this two-month voyage a team of top international scientists explored the history of Antarctic climate changes over the past 53 million years. By drilling for unprecedented sediment cores from the bottom of the Southern Ocean, scientists can begin to understand the process behind the transition from the greenhouse world into the present icehouse world and it’s impact on global climate. This 20 minute documentary tells their story; the adventures at sea, the scientific operations and life on board.

The European Geosciences Union (EGU)
is seeking to appoint a
MEDIA AND COMMUNICATIONS OFFICER

The EGU is Europe’s premier geosciences union, dedicated to the pursuit of excellence in the geosciences and the planetary and space sciences for the benefit of humanity, worldwide. The EGU has a General Assembly which attracts over 10,000 scientists each year, a diverse portfolio of 15 scientific journals which use an innovative “open access” format, a number of thematic meetings, and education and outreach activities.

The Media and Communications officer will coordinate media-related and science information communications between the EGU and its membership, the working media, and the public at large. Responsibilities include the set up and operation of a press office, development of a progressive communications plan for relevant scientific information display and dissemination, editorship of the EGU newsletter, and onward development and management of the EGU website and social media tools. Activities can involve the use of classic as well as new methods of disseminating media and interacting with the various stakeholders.

The successful applicant will have the following: an academic degree (e.g., MA, MSc, PhD), preferably in communication science, journalism, or the geosciences; professional experience in science journalism; evidence of ability to build a dynamic network of contacts within the EGU scientific community as well as in the working media; expert command of English.

The Media and Communications Officer will work under direction of the EGU Executive Secretary and the EGU Council. Work will take place in the EGU Office in Munich, Germany, with support of a computer programmer and a web developer. The position will be for three years initially, with a probation period of one year, and will be renewable for consecutive periods of three years. Remuneration is according to the German public service pay scale and can be up to E13 TV-L, depending on expertise and experience.

Applications should include

• CV including a summary of relevant experience and expertise.
• Letter of motivation and statement of vision for EGU Media and Communications (maximum two pages).
• Contact details of three referees.

Informal enquiries can be made to Dr Philippe Courtial (email: executive-secretary@egu.eu).

Applications should be submitted by email in a single file to Dr Philippe Courtial.

Review of applications will begin 1 June 2011 and will continue until the position is filled.

A start date will be negotiated with the successful candidate and the position will preferably start within 3 months after interview.

Contact:
Dr Philippe Courtial
EGU Executive Office
Luisenstr. 37
80333 Munich (Germany)
executive-secretary@egu.eu
Phone: +49 (0)89 2180-6549

A pdf of the vacancy details (as above) is also available.

This year on the EGU General Assembly blog there will be guest posts from participants about their research and their impressions of sessions. These are personal points of view not EGU corporate views. If you would like to contribute a research or session viewpoint, please email us.

This perspective from the European Geosciences Union General Asembly 2011 is from Thomas Smith about how to maximise your poster presentation. Thomas’ research was presented in NH7.2/AS4.14/BG2.17 Fire in the Earth System: Impacts and Feedbacks.

iPosters

In a world of multi-touch interfaces, e-readers, and televisions the size of cinema screens, it is not hard to imagine the day when the poster boards at the EGU general assembly are replaced by large, interactive devices, automatically downloading their designated poster for each day from “the cloud”. In the mean time, I decided that I would compliment my paper poster with an online interactive poster (iPoster!).

With three days until my poster presentation in the session on ‘Fire in the Earth System: Impacts and Feedbacks’, I was offered the opportunity to present my poster as a summary in the oral programme of the session. Whilst struggling to summarise my poster in four Powerpoint slides, it occurred to me that it would be much better to simply exhibit the poster as a Prezi, a navigable, zoomable, interactive poster, complete with photo and video galleries. Not only did this go down well in the poster summary, but it also proved useful when describing my research in the poster session itself. If you have a poster presentation, but feel that animations or videos are important to communicate your research, this is a very good way of integrating the audiovisuals with your poster.

No doubt, many of you savvy EGU blog readers are familiar with ‘Prezi’, one of the rising stars in alternatives to the linear presentation style prescribed by the likes of Powerpoint. If not, then you should at least take a look (Prezi Homepage). Prezi is difficult to describe without demonstration, although I shall try. Imagine a Google Earth for your presentation slides; you can begin with an overview contained in the field of view of your audience, before moving into sections, but always within the context of the initial overview; Prezi allows you to customise a route through your text, images and videos, using flashy animation (like moving from location to location in Google Earth) to navigate and zoom around the information you wish to disseminate. As with all developing web-based tools, there are a few issues, particularly with the narrow range of supported video formats, limited text formatting tools and some issues with image scaling (it’s best to convert your images to pdfs). Prezi is free for educational use, however, and the reaction from your audience will be worth that exploratory effort.

So whilst we are stuck with our temperamental printers, unruly paper, and comical dancing acts in front of our poster boards for now, at least it is possible to point to an animated version of the poster on a laptop or tablet screen. How long will it be before iPosters take that step from sidekick on the pedestal to the main board?

My interactive poster can be viewed online.

All the webstreamed events at the European Geosciences Union General Assembly are available online still. Please share with those you think will find them useful.

Webstreaming Page.

The events from the EGU GA 2011 that are available are:
US1 A Planet Under Pressure
US2 The Future of Water Cycle Earth Observing Systems
US3 How Science Can Aid Society in Tackling Emerging Risks
US4 The 22 February 2011 Christchurch Earthquake
US5 The 11 March 2011 Tohoku (Sendai) Earthquake and Tsunami
GDG1 How will Europe face the raw materials crisis?
UMC1 What are the unresolved questions and future perspectives for palaeoclimate research? An EGU Masterclass by André Berger and Wolfgang H. Berger
ML1 Alfred Wegener Medal Lecture – Understanding the drivers of environmental changes in West Africa from sedimentary deep-sea records by Gerold Wefer
ML2 Arthur Holmes Medal Lecture – Three grand challenges in geomorphology: rock, climate, and life by William E. Dietrich
ML3 Jean Dominique Cassini Medal Lecture – Highlights of ESA’s Planetary Sciences Programme Achievements and a Glimpse into the Future by Jean-Pierre Lebreton
US0 EGU Award Ceremony

Also the press conferences are available;
Press Conference 1 A new science plan for ocean drilling – The Future of the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program
Press Conference 2 Polar Ozone – What’s going on in the Arctic?
Press Conference 3 What can we do about Europe’s raw materials crisis?
Press Conference 4 Unlocking climate and sea level secrets since the Last Glacial Maximum – Results from the IODP Great Barrier Reef Environmental Changes Expedition
Press Conference 5 Geothermal energy versus CO2-storage: can we use the underground more than once?
Press Conference 6 GOCE & GRACE: global impacts of the ever changing surface of the Earth, recent mission results
Press Conference 7 Emerging risks and natural hazards: a multi-stakeholder approach to understanding and managing extremes
Press Conference 8 Oxygen Depletion – Triple Trouble
Press Conference 9 The 22 February 2011 Christchurch Earthquake
Press Conference 10 Tsunami impact and Tsunami Early Warning Systems

This year on the EGU General Assembly blog there will be guest posts from participants about their research and their impressions of sessions. These are personal points of view not EGU corporate views. If you would like to contribute a research viewpoint, please email us.

This post comes from Aidan Slingsby of City University, London, who looks at how we make sense of large datasets using visualisations .

My research is about designing visualisation methods to help make sense of large datasets. I’m based at the giCentre at City University London and our group’s research focuses on design, implementation, user-engagement and user-evaluation. We primarily deal with data with a geographical component, but not exclusively so. I’m part of the Willis Research Network, through which I apply these techniques to some of the needs of the insurance industry.

I believe that well-designed, fast and responsive visual interfaces to data have an important role, particularly in the early stages of data analysis. Such interfaces increasingly incorporate some (though usually limited) analytical capabilities, such as comparisons to models of expectation. Providing the flexibility to query large datasets on-demand to pursue research questions is conducive to insight discovery. Hypotheses generated through this initial data exploration can be subsequently verified.

Key to success here is appropriate design. This is tricky. There are many facets to design, many of which are context dependent – the nature of the data, the experience of the users, the users’ level of engagement with the data. Some designs have widespread appeal, but do not offer much new insight into data. Some designs offer sophisticated comparison and analytical capability, but are impossible for the target users to use. Some designs simple don’t show that aspects of the data that the user is interested in. With so many factors that affect whether designs are “good”, designing usually is not straightforward.

Our group designs for a range of users and research questions and our membership of the Willis Research Network helps provide a context within which we can work.

This year, we are reporting our work in two posters. The first “Browsing large natural hazard event sets” (NH9.1/EG8) is work with the National Centre for Atmospheric Science at Reading University here we are using interactive visualisation to browse through 150 years of simulated storms and the associated atmospheric conditions. We taking a user-centred approach, trying to produce designs that can help allow such a large dataset to be interactively browsed and help answer specific types of research question. We’ll be in attendance at the poster between 1730 and 1900 on Thursday and will be pleased to show you this work. This is based on some work we did last year that is written up here.

The other poster “Sharing insights on the impact of natural disasters on Twitter” (EGU2011-9171) is work that tries out an idea of ours – can we better engage people with datasets by giving them the visualisation tools they need to produce useful views of the data and then share these insights with others. To try this idea out, we provided users of earthquake-report.com a copy of some software called HiDE and a dataset (that we knew they were interested in) of some of the impacts of natural catastrophes over the past 30 years worldwide. We them asked them to construct some graphics that told them something meaningful about the data and encouraged them to share it through Twitter using our software. Details are here.

This experiment was not a success, in the sense that there was very low participation (although many page views) and no one completed our questionnaire about their experiences and thoughts. Although it was rather a speculative experiment and it would have difficult to draw too many conclusions from what we found, this evidently did not capture people’s imagination in the way we’d hope. There are many possible reasons for this, including many of the points I’ve already made. It may have been too difficult to use, the graphics may have not been unhelpful, people may not have been interested in the dataset enough to want to spend time exploring it, people may have been too busy to take part, people may have considered it not a good use of their time, people may not have had Twitter accounts. Some/many aspects of the design of this experiment was/were wrong. Feel free to have a go yourselves and let me know how you get on!

I’m happy to hear your views of anything I’ve said – just find me at EGU on Thursday or email me.

The Great Debate at the European Geosciences Union General Assembly 2011 considered How will Europe face the raw materials crisis?, you can watch the debate online and the session details are here.

Someone in the audience (around 70′) at the Great Debate questioned using the model of increasing consumption driving increasing metal use and advocated a sustainable development model. None of the panel accepted the idea, what do you think?

Please respond in the comments, do you think a sustainable development model is possible? will increasing consumption still drive to increasing metal use? are there other alternatives?

N.B Please consider that comments are moderated, so there may be a delay in your comment appearing.

A new issue (issue 34) of EGGS was published recently, its available on the EGGS website.

EGGS is also available as an app for some smart phones: Android and iPhone platforms.

This year on the EGU General Assembly blog there will be guest posts from participants about their research and their impressions of sessions. These are personal points of view not EGU corporate views. If you would like to contribute a research viewpoint, please email us.

This viewpoint is from Catherine O’Riordan, Vice President of Physics Resources Center, American Institute of Physics, reflects on the use of news media programs (TV and Internet) to communicate Natural Hazard risk to the public. This work is presented as “Communicating Natural Hazard Risks to the Public through TV and Internet News Programs” in session NH9.3/EOS10 Natural Hazards Education, Communications and Science-Policy-Practice Interface on Monday TB4 (oral summaries of posters and discussion) and TB5 (poster authors in attendance).

Communicating Natural Hazard Risks to the Public through TV and Internet News Programs

By Catherine O’Riordan, Vice President of Physics Resources Center, American Institute of Physics, coriordan@aip.org

The scientific community has a real opportunity to reach the general public with messages about natural hazard risks by using media outlets. According to the U.S. National Science Foundation’s Science (NSF) and Engineering Indicators for 2010, the general public in the USA relies on local television news more than any other medium for their science and technology news and information — with the internet coming in as a fast-rising second. In response to the need to communicate accurate information about natural hazards and other scientific topics as well as the opportunity to reach a broad sector of the general public, the American Institute of Physics (AIP) has created two news products. The first one targets television audiences and is called Discoveries and Breakthroughs Inside Science (DBIS) . DBIS is a syndicated science news service that provides accurate and reliable scientific information in the form of twelve 90-second news segments distributed to local television stations throughout the USA and internationally each month. The newly launched second product targets internet audiences and is called Inside Science News Service (ISNS) . ISNS provides fully reported articles, graphics, and videos to provide major web news outlets and newspapers with accurate scientific reporting about natural hazards and other topics. NSF-sponsored research on DBIS revealed that there is a statistically significant difference in television viewers support for science in cities where DBIS segments are broadcasted compared to cities where they are not. 78% of focus group members reported that they liked watching news programs that featured science segments compared to a broadcast without them. AIP plans to continue to study ways to communicate natural hazards and other topics to the general public.

This year on the EGU General Assembly blog there will be guest posts from participants about their research and their impressions of sessions. These are personal points of view not EGU corporate views. If you would like to contribute a research viewpoint, please email us.