CircleCount helps you better understand Google+

2013-05-18 13:07:38 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

2013-05-17 18:26:13 (1 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

Sometimes I think I'm working on the wrong problems ;-)

2013-05-17 11:34:14 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

I missed this one yesterday (relevant because I worked on the data so it must be interesting :-)

2013-05-16 20:01:01 (0 comments, 1 reshares, 3 +1s)

2013-05-14 14:23:41 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

2013-05-14 13:55:47 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

With the explosion of remote and nano sensors, mapping different conditions can occur at a much higher level of detail. This is demonstrated in this graph showing an Urban heat island map for Harford County, MD.

http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.703135

Surface tempatures were obtained from Landsat satellite imagery acquired in July of 2011 and summarized at the Census block group level.

The author Jarlath O'Neil-Dunne has a few more cool images like this on his +figshare profile here: http://figshare.com/authors/Jarlath_O_Neil_Dunne/412031

#environmental   #science   #geography  

2013-05-13 17:33:49 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

Happy to announce that the +figshare Mac and Linux Desktop Uploaders have been released: 

http://figshare.com/blog/figshare_Mac_and_Linux_Desktop_Uploaders_released/83

#openscience #opendata #openaccess

2013-05-13 14:58:41 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

The summer American Astronomical Society Meeting wants you to pop over and have a look at things. That is, if you can make it to Indianapolis next month.

2013-05-03 13:27:11 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

Use your phone (android, haven't checked to see if there's support for any other system) to see just how much light pollution we create.

If you haven't had the chance, I strongly recommend going out somewhere (safe and) dark one night and spending an hour looking at the night sky.

2013-05-02 17:34:44 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

Sand is the new black.

2013-04-25 20:23:01 (0 comments, 1 reshares, 1 +1s)

Here. There. Everywhere.
http://hte.si.edu/atoms.html

In this collection we show how our knowledge of familiar processes can be applied to help us understand similar behavior on grander scales, and in very different environments.

2013-04-25 13:42:00 (0 comments, 1 reshares, 0 +1s)

Understand stars, interstellar and intergalactic emission, with different versions depending on your knowledge of Astronomy.

2013-04-23 14:22:23 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 4 +1s)

What happens with the NSF grant/publication data that our awesome librarians at the CFA have collected.

2013-04-19 14:26:32 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 2 +1s)

2013-04-18 13:00:06 (2 comments, 2 reshares, 6 +1s)

A new image from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory. The remains of a star that was seen to explode over 1000 years ago. For more details see:
http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2013/sn1006/

2013-04-04 23:51:36 (2 comments, 1 reshares, 1 +1s)

2013-03-31 17:50:28 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

Important! Share!

2013-03-28 14:16:38 (3 comments, 4 reshares, 8 +1s)

Watch magnetic putty surround and engulf a rare-earth magnet like the Blob. This is both really cool and kind of creepy.

2013-03-28 14:11:34 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

Fun Facts About NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory. 
http://chandra.harvard.edu/resources/illustrations/infographics.html

(Illustration: NASA/CXC/M.Weiss)

2013-03-09 19:28:20 (1 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

When are people twittering about #JWST and it's appearance at #SXSW?

2013-03-08 21:08:28 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

2013-03-08 20:57:35 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

2013-03-06 19:39:10 (2 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

We used to dream big, looking to the Moon for inspiration.

2013-03-01 02:34:08 (0 comments, 1 reshares, 2 +1s)

More technology benefits to come from Astronomy.

2013-02-28 21:38:11 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 2 +1s)

The NASA Chandra X-Ray Observatory (+NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory) can produce some stunning pictures (just follow them and +Joseph DePasquale), but unfortunately most of them look like the first image in this article (ignoring the Cass A image shown below).

2013-02-21 20:24:33 (0 comments, 1 reshares, 2 +1s)

I've finally got around to throwing together a very basic API for talking to MineCraft: Pi edition (i.e. MineCraft on the #raspberrypi  ) from #haskell  .
It's on github at https://github.com/DougBurke/hmcpi or hackage at http://hackage.haskell.org/package/mcpi

It is very basic at the moment (it's only at version 0.0.0.2 ;-), doesn't support everything that the Python version does, and would be much nicer to use if I had ghc 7.4.2 or later so that ghci worked.

2013-01-29 15:42:28 (0 comments, 1 reshares, 1 +1s)

Sponsored by +NASA , ISS (International Space Station) EarthKAM (Earth Knowledge Acquired by Middle school students) is an educational outreach program allowing middle school students to capture images of our Earth from a digital camera on board the International Space Station. 

2013-01-29 15:05:03 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

I'm a little bit proud of this:

" To our knowledge, there is only one paper that offers a plausible speedup based on a tighter lower bound—Lemire (2009) suggests a mean speedup of about 1.4 based on a tighter bound. These results are reproducible, and testing on more general data sets we obtained similar results (...) " (Wang et al. 2013, http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10618-012-0250-5) 

If you read Wang et al., you will notice that some of the denounced papers (those that are not reproducible) appeared in top-tier conferences. My own paper could not appear in such conferences because I did not claim 10x improvements or other spectacular gains.

Which paper do you prefer? A paper  reporting a 1.4x gain that you can reproduce, or one that reports a 100x gain that you can't reproduce? 

My original article is athttp://arxi... more »

2013-01-22 01:30:05 (1 comments, 0 reshares, 4 +1s)

Check this out, Try Git!

http://try.github.com/

What a great idea. I'm sure this will encourage a lot of new users to try git out, and of course to make an account on Github. Quite smart actually. I'm always happy to see any new interactive teaching things put online!

(Also it uses my jquery-console library, which is cool. But it probably won't work on Opera. Nothing works on Opera.)

+Chris Smith: Might be relevant to your interests.

2013-01-18 02:12:09 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

WOW, +José Pedro Magalhães , Haskell for the m-f-ing win. Check out Chordify, which figures out the chord progression for a song and plays it to you. Here's it doing "Wife" by Joseph Stepper: http://chordify.net/chords/joseph-stepper-wife-anth-msv

2013-01-17 16:19:17 (0 comments, 2 reshares, 1 +1s)

Science communication FTW.

2013-01-15 20:06:24 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

2013-01-12 19:10:38 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 2 +1s)

2013-01-11 02:53:17 (1 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

Okay, this is HOT off the presses, made today at Hack Day at AAS. Get your red/blue 3D glasses on and WATCH THIS NOW. You explore Mars from the point of view of Curiosity. Hack by +Ashley Disbrow and +Michele Vallisneri 

Cruising on Mars in 3D

#hackAAS   #aas221   #beremarkable  

2013-01-08 15:31:51 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

The 221st meeting of the American Astronomical Society is currently going on over in Long Beach, CA. Whilst I'm not there in body, I am tracking the goings on from afar via the magic of Twitter (looking for #AAS221 or #hackAAS, amongst other terms), and providing some simple analysis.

2013-01-01 20:44:32 (1 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

2013-01-01 14:29:54 (1 comments, 0 reshares, 5 +1s)

What do Astronomers, Belgians, and glow worms have to do with sharks being dropped on London?

Plus obligatory XKCD and +Dinosaur Comics references.

2012-12-31 00:50:28 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

2012-12-28 19:10:35 (1 comments, 1 reshares, 4 +1s)

Galaxies can swarm together to form groups and clusters of galaxies held together by their mutual galaxy. X-ray observations show that these enormous systems of galaxies are filled with colossal clouds of hot gas that have temperatures as high as a hundred million degrees.
http://chandra.harvard.edu/xray_sources/galaxy_clusters.html

2012-12-24 21:16:20 (2 comments, 0 reshares, 3 +1s)

2012-12-24 21:05:50 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 2 +1s)

Modern-day icicles.

2012-12-24 14:00:58 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 3 +1s)

The kids were excited to spot Santa this morning. They didn't seem concerned it was 18 hours too early.

2012-12-15 21:34:46 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

Official Chandra Blog: Chandra In 2012: A Teenager In Space
http://chandra.harvard.edu/blog/node/414

In July of 2012, Chandra completed its 13th year of operation, making it a teenager. That is young in human terms, but it is getting up there for an automobile, and could be considered a "senior citizen" for a spacecraft of Chandra's complexity. How many computers do you have that are 13 years old? Chandra's magnificent sister NASA flagship observatory, Hubble, is older, at 22, but astronauts have paid 4 house calls to make major upgrades over the years.

2012-12-14 16:21:31 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

I first came across Voronoi diagrams when looking at source detection algorithms in X-ray data (e.g. http://cxc.harvard.edu/ciao/ahelp/vtpdetect.html) but here it's being used to model the "quintessential British countryside".

+1 for the sentiment: "maths lets us do what our budget does not"

2012-12-13 00:19:19 (1 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

+figshare I went to http://figshare.com/articles/X-ray_spectra_for_galaxy_or_galaxy_group_in_a_Chandra_observation_of_MACS_J0717.5+3745/97108 and selected the 'download all' button which then error-ed out, with firefox claiming

  Firefox can't find the file at http://figshare.com/download/article_archive/97108

2012-12-11 22:10:25 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 2 +1s)

I feel this study would have benefitted from adding its data to +figshare , so that we could really have checked claims like " (we’re pretty sure that, were it calculated, p would definitely be something really significant, and certainly less than 0.05)" and how large the "Zombie repopulation" is really likely to be.

2012-12-07 00:33:57 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

My colleague +Christopher Erdmann  has just released this dataset - http://hdl.handle.net/10904/10201 - which matches papers from the SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System - http://adswww.harvard.edu/ - to NSF awards, storing it on the Astronomy Dataverse Network - http://cfa.lib.harvard.edu/dvn/ - so you can download the data, do what you want with it, and then cite it. #opendata #textmining

2012-12-04 16:41:54 (0 comments, 3 reshares, 4 +1s)

Did you wake up this morning and ask yourself "What does the Earth look like?" or think "I remember seeing some cool photos from the ISS, but I can't find them any more". Well, worry no longer, as here's a one-top-shop-for-space-photos. At least for photos taken by Astronauts.

2012-12-03 17:18:51 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

I've never really been into the transformers, but I want this.

2012-12-03 14:59:25 (1 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

Enjoy the astro fun next year.