Facebook of the Planet Science

David Kramer, MSU Hannah Distinguished Professor in Photosynthesis and Bioenergetics, has created the Facebook of plant science. Courtesy of MSU

By building PhotosynQ – a handheld device with sensors and an online data-sharing and analysis platform – a team of Michigan State University researchers is creating the plant-science equivalent of Facebook.

Following the trail blazed by successful social media networks, the team is giving away patentable devices at a nominal fee, building an active global community of plant science enthusiasts and sharing all data collected from around the world.

The goal is to allow even citizen scientists to make research-quality measurements, said David Kramer, MSU Hannah Distinguished Professor in Photosynthesis and Bioenergetics.

“We’ve built a platform that everyone can access through their cell phones,” he said. “We want to create a community that sees a 12-year-old student in China ask a question about a drought-resistant plant. Then we hope that hundreds of people answer, and not only the student in China is able to grow sustainable crops, but also a farmer in Africa could benefit from those insights.”

One component of PhotosynQ is a handheld device that costs about $100, scans plants and collects a handful of key data points. Via a smartphone running Android, the data is transferred from the device to the researcher’s project page on the PhotosynQ platform.

Currently, there are about 20 research projects on the burgeoning network. As new data is collected, community members can observe the projects’ progression.

Projects range from one measuring the robustness and productivity of beans, to another monitoring the efficiency of photosynthesis. Collecting data on how well plants convert sunlight to energy can be derived from satellite images in a very limited way. To improve the data, it’s best to get on-the-ground observations as well. The more handheld devices used in the field to gather the data, the better.

PhotosynQ will enable local scientists, plant breeders and citizens to improve the productivity and security of crops in communities around the world. This low-cost approach of collecting samples from global sites could change how science has traditionally been conducted, said Greg Austic, who is leading the development in the Kramer lab.

“It’s critical that PhotosynQ stays open source,” he said. “We’re changing the model of moving new technology from academia to the world. We’re maximizing the data and building a community rather than maximizing profits.”

If only two people use the network, it’s worthless. If 2 million people join in, it’s priceless. It will be a snapshot of what’s happening in the plant world at this very moment. Successful breeding efforts, rapidly spreading diseases and other trends can be identified quicker, he added.

This nontraditional approach is indicative of Kramer’s unique lab. Soldering irons and circuit boards outnumber plants and petri dishes. Shelves are lined with electronic prototypes. The buzzing hive of nearly 40 students is a blend of biologists, programmers and engineers.

“Many times one of our biology students will come up with an idea and bounces it off some of the other students,” Kramer said. “The computer specialists write a program, and the electronics students build a prototype and a new technique is developed and used – sometimes in a single day.”

His lab is a microcosm of what he hopes he can create on a global scale; empower people with data and easy-to-use scientific instruments, and people will look at their world differently, he said.

Kramer is a professor in the College of Natural Science and the MSU-DOE Plant Research Laboratory. His research is funded in part by MSU AgBioResearch.

Source: MSU

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‘Love, Rock and Revolution’ features legendary music photographer Jim Marshall’s work

Never-before-seen 1960s photographic work by legendary San Francisco rock and roll

photographer Jim Marshall (1936-2010) will be featured in “The Haight: Love, Rock and Revolution,” an exhibit opening Friday, Feb. 6, in the halls of UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism.

JimMarshallExhibit-410aThe show will run through May at the school’s Reva and David Logan Gallery of Documentary Photography at North Gate Hall, located on campus near the intersection of Hearst and Euclid avenues. It is free and open to the public.

The Center for Photography at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism has joined with Marshall’s estate to launch the Jim Marshall Fellowships in Photography, with a goal of raising $500,000 to $1 million to  support the visual arts at the journalism school.

Marshall was widely known for his documentary photos of big-name musicians from the Beatles and Bob Dylan to Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Santana and the Rolling Stones, as well as Johnny Cash’s groundbreaking live concerts at Folsom and San Quentin prisons. His work appeared on more than 500 album covers and in magazines such as Rolling Stone.

Marshall’s photos also captured street life in San Francisco and New York, a Kentucky coal mining town’s despair and Mississippi civil rights demonstrations. He received an honorary Grammy lifetime achievement award posthumously in 2014, the only photographer to ever receive such an honor.

At the opening reception on Feb. 6, longtime San Francisco music critic and Marshall friend Joel Selvin and Amelia Davis, a photographer and Marshall assistant, will be on hand to discuss Marshall’s work.

The 6:30-8:30 p.m. event also will feature a psychedelic light show, in keeping with the popular rock programming of the 1960s and 1970s. In addition, free psychedelic posters resembling those made famous during that era by the Fillmore music hall in San Francisco will be given away at the reception, while they last.

The exhibit was curated by Ken Light, the Reva and David Logan Chair in Photojournalism.

The Center for Photography at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, founded in 1996, offers courses in hands-on photojournalism and social documentary photography. The center routinely exhibits world-class photographers and hosts programs with distinguished photojournalists.

For more information about the event, contact Julie Hirano at juliehirano@berkeley.edu.

For more details about the Jim Marshall Fellowships in Photography, contact Marlena Telvick at marlenatelvick@berkeley.edu.

Source: UC Berkeley

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The Power of the Past

If you grow up in the working class, neither love nor money can trump your blue-collar roots, a Duke sociologist has found.

Her study of couples from different social classes suggests that those who “marry up” still make life decisions based on their upbringing.

                             Cover of Streib book by Eric Ferreri, Duke News & Communications
                          Sociologist Jessi Streib’s book “The Past” is about class structure in marriages.

“Your social class never goes away,” says Jessi Streib, an assistant professor of sociology whose findings are revealed in her new book: The Power of the Past: Understanding Cross-Class Marriages. “It stays with you in terms of how you live your life. The class you’re born into sticks with you and shapes you, even when you marry into more money and a far more financially secure life.”

Streib’s findings derive from interviews she conducted with white, heterosexual Midwestern couples. She interviewed 32 couples in which one spouse came from a working class background, the other from the middle class. For comparison, she also interviewed 10 couples in which both spouses grew up in the middle class.

Streib defines working class as people raised by parents with high school educations; the middle class subjects were raised by college-educated parents.

Her findings run contrary to the notion held by many scholars that strivers can outrun a difficult childhood by getting a college degree and good-paying middle-class job.

While the findings suggest that a middle class upbringing isn’t required to excel in the American workplace, those upwardly mobile people from working class roots may still miss out on opportunities if they can’t or don’t subscribe to the unspoken norms of middle class culture, Streib notes.

Streib found that couples from different classes held onto their own, firmly-rooted beliefs regarding money and parenting, often negotiating fervently with each other over the proper amount of career planning and nurturing of children. Should children be left to grow and discover on their own, or should goals and schedules be set for them?

“Those are the sorts of tiny battles cross-class couples have all the time,” Streib said. “These are not insurmountable obstacles, but they are certainly common and consistent.”

Source: Duke Univesity

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Through the Google Glass

WFU Instruction librarian Amanda Foster adjusts Google Glass for a student. Credit: WFU/Ken Bennett

In a class called Accessing Information in the 21st Century, instruction librarian Amanda Foster is using a new technology tool to do just that.

It's Google Glass or just Glass, as the techno giant likes to call it. While it's been widely covered in the media, chances are most people have yet to see it first hand. Foster is interested in examining the possibilities of how Glass or related technologies could be used in the future, particularly in the educational setting for teaching, learning and research.

Glass is a type of wearable computer headset, similar to a pair of sleek glasses and displays information on a mini screen in the upper right corner of the wearer's field of vision. Wearers can communicate with Glass via voice commands to search the Internet, take pictures and video, play games and more.

"We are very curious to see how it's going to work in the classroom. We don't know yet how it's going to impact education, and we don't know if it's even a good thing or what kind of contributions it can make," said Foster, whose class is designed to teach students how to conduct research in the library. "It's kind of an interesting case study in and of itself. But librarians are also really interested in informational literacy -- how we access information in the 21st century and what the future of that is going to look like."

The idea for Foster's class is to have students use Glass as a catalyst to research, discuss, explore and reflect on information-related themes, such as privacy, social responsibility and the future implications of technologies in medicine, business, education and gaming.

"Google Glass brings about a lot of interesting questions related to privacy and our social interactions with other people," she said.

Foster got the green light and funds to experiment with Google Glass from Lynn Sutton, vice provost and ZSR Library dean.

So she jumped in, bought the device and taught herself how to use it. "It was definitely a trial and error process and that's what the classroom experience was like at first, too," she said.

Foster purchased one device because of the expense and had to come up with creative ways for a class of 15 to 20 students to use it. She planned projects for them to work together in small groups of four. They conducted scavenger hunts in the library, taking pictures with Glass to prove their success and used the video function to make tutorials on how to use library databases. Another project had them conduct research on a topic specific to Glass such as privacy and related laws and social interactions. One of the most enjoyable assignments was performing skits about the do's and don'ts of using Google Glass -- demonstrating what is appropriate behavior in public when you're wearing the device, Foster said. "The students are really interested in the social aspect of it, of wearing this thing on your face and how that might enhance or impede social interactions. That is something we've been able to explore."

A student's perspective

Freshman Chris Schafer said he took every opportunity to wear Glass that he could because he wanted to test its capabilities.

"I absolutely loved Glass, mainly because it's so new and rare to the market," he said, adding that he would likely purchase his own device if the price came down.

Schafer was even able to show Foster something new about Glass. "I was able to discover the wink feature for taking a picture that Ms. Foster could not even figure out," he said, "so I had the Glass programmed to my wink only, and as long as I winked hard enough, a picture would be taken."

So far, Foster is the only instructor on campus trying Google Glass though she is aware of university professors elsewhere who are using it and blogging about it.

"ZSR is known across campus as well as in the academic library community for encouraging innovation and taking risks," said Sutton. "I was happy to support Amanda with her creative proposal. Where better to investigate the intersection of technology and privacy than a library classroom with Wake Forest students?"

Foster said the most successful aspect of using Glass in class is how students were really engaged with the content. "While there's room for improvement, I think it has potential to be really successful in higher education," she said. "It's been a wonderful way to bring about discussion on these interesting information-related issues that are at the heart of how we access information and what the future of that is going to look like."

Source: Wake Forest University

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The economy of bitcoins: New ways to study social action on markets

ETH's researchers decipher the dynamics behind the cryptocurrency Bitcoin.
Credit: © ulchik74 / Fotolia

Anyone who strolls around the Kreuzberg district of Berlin, can't help but notice them -- the small signs on the doors of shops and cafes "Bitcoins accepted." Customers pay for their shirt or their cappuccino with their Smartphone instead of with bank notes or credit cards. The digital currency Bitcoin makes all this possible.

"The image of Bitcoin has changed fundamentally," explains David Garcia, a post-doctoral researcher with the Chair of Systems Design held by Professor Frank Schweitzer. "Bitcoins used to be the reserve of hackers and computer nerds. Today, hipsters pay for drinks with them and they are accepted in the online shops of large companies." Garcia, together with his colleagues Claudio Tessone, Pavlin Mavrodiev and Nicolas Perony, has just published a study on the social dynamics of the Bitcoin economy in the Journal of the Royal Society: Interface.

Internet activity determines exchange rates

For research the success of the digital currency (see box) is a stroke of luck as all data on every transaction carried out in Bitcoin are available in anonymised form on the Internet. Consequently, Garcia and his colleagues are able to study the Bitcoin economy using corresponding algorithms. This idea saw the light of day when they noticed that the 50,000-fold market value increase in the digital currency in just three and a half years went hand in hand with a 10,000 percent increase in Google searches for Bitcoin. The researchers hypothesise that the increase in the value of Bitcoins is markedly accelerated by activities on the Internet, in particular the search for information and interaction in the social media.

To test their hypothesis the researchers examined four different socio-economic parameters: the development of the Bitcoin user base, the price developments of the currency over time, the search for information about Bitcoin on Google and in Wikipedia (more than six million inquiries) and the exchange of information about Bitcoin on Twitter (almost seven million Tweets). In fact, over the past three the researchers established years major correlations between price developments, the number of new Bitcoin users, searches on the Internet and Tweets.

At the same time, they discovered two positive feedback loops which basically reproduced the laws of the "analogous" economy. The growing popularity of Bitcoins on the Internet leads to growing demand which, in turn, encourages activity in the social media. This all results in a higher price for Bitcoins. The second feedback concerns the user base: the more users become part of the Bitcoin transaction network, the higher the price because Bitcoins are not issued in line with demand but in an automated fashion at regular intervals. This means it is possible to calculate the available amount at any time. One negative feedback is, however, surprising. Prior to a major slump in the price of the currency, there was a dramatic increase in Bitcoin activity on the Internet. "Big changes in Internet and social media activities lead to substantial price fluctuations," comments Nicolas Perony, co-author of the article.

Understanding markets and social dynamics

Perony is convinced that the quantitative analysis of social phenomena on the Internet has major potential. "With digital currencies we can observe aspects of the economy that we didn't have access to with cash. This gives us greater understanding of how markets actually function." According to the authors, the methodology described in the article could be applied to other areas in society, too. The Bitcoin mining network, which issues the currency, already harnesses computing power today which is three hundred times bigger than that of the 500 most powerful supercomputers together. "The big question is how such a high-performance system could be used for collaborative activities which go beyond the production of money," comments Perony. One possibility would be, for instance, collaborative research in a global network or the decentralised ownership of specific goods managed by a global network. Bitcoms do not belong to anyone. Buyers merely acquire the right to use a specific amount of them. This study already outlines today the tools for accurately quantifying and analysing the social dynamics of collaborative systems of this kind in the future.

The meteoric rise of Bitcoin

The Bitcoin success story began in 2008 with an article about an alternative, digital currency published under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto. In July 2010 Bitcoins were traded for the first time on the Internet exchange Mt. Gox at a rate of US$ 0.06 for 1 Bitcoin. The total value of all Bitcoins was US$ 277,000. By the end of 2013 the market value of all issued Bitcoins had climbed to more than US$ 14 billion whereby during spikes more than US$ 1,000 were paid for one Bitcoin. Today, over four million people use the digital currency. 

Bitcoins are traded in euros, dollars and in Chinese renminbi. Unlike conventional currencies there is no central bank for Bitcoins which has a monopoly for printing money. New Bitcoins are generated by what is known as mining via a global computer network -- currently at a rate of 25 Bitcoins every ten minutes. Transactions are likewise verified and carried out on this network. Even the bankruptcy of important Bitcoin trading exchanges and negative headlines about money laundering and drug purchases on the Internet were not able to undermine confidence in the currency. A few days ago the PC giant Dell announced that it will henceforth accept Bitcoins as payment for products in its online shop.

Source: ETH Zurich

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