For a high-resolution simulation of the taking of the photograph, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... Narrated by Andrew Chaikin, author of "A Man on the Moon".
So, this is well within an order of magnitude of the cost estimate for Trump's wall between Mexico and the United States: https://www.brookings.edu/essa...
In the same way that there isn't a simple interface to methodologies and projects in academia or science in general, I doubt you'll see one in citizen/community science.
That said, there are some remarkable projects (or umbrella projects) that are purpose-built for the projects they support. Large-scale ones (besides Zooniverse, already mentioned) include: https://www.inaturalist.org/ — observations of living organisms https://ebird.org/ — the world of bird observations
The observations on those two sites are contributing significantly to real science outcomes.
For a decade or so, I've used MacOS Server (or its predecessors) to run a small research group with a dozen or so iMac clients and a couple of dozen staff/students. We use network logins (and hence a mounted home directory) and a small handfull of groups to determine which file shares are available. That's about all we do with Apple Server that can't obviously/easily be replaced with alternatives.
So, for someone who is Linux-comfortable at a sysadmin level, what is a path to replacing MacOS Server's network logins (with server-mounted home directories) for iMac clients? Key services are home directories and a few shared fileshares.
Oh, and thankyouverymuch Apple, for not cutting, say, $100M to maintaining and improving Mac Server for people who've been buying your hardware and software for a decade or two. After all, that would have been 0.05% of your current cash reserves. I think I'm over being an Apple recommender.
Suppose a twenty year old has no cell phone and no computer and never goes online. To a smart law enforcement agency they would take a look at that person. That person is off the bell curve of normal behavior. It could be that the person is severely handicapped or has some rational reason for being out of step with the world but more likely or not they are trying to be invisible. I'll bet all kinds of criminals could be caught by simply examining eccentric ways of life of individuals.
Doubtless.
But in the U.S., that's not how it works.
We have this thing called the Fourth Amendment that has been interpreted to mean that I have the right to be off the bell curve and live in eccentric ways without federal, state, or local scrutiny. The exception is when authorities provide probable cause that I have committed a crime or that there is evidence of a crime present in the place to be searched.
Just being different really isn't probable cause that a crime is being committed.
And of course I'm not naïve enough to think that's the way it always works in practice. But that's the standard that we, as citizens, are charged with vigilantly supporting.
NOAA runs the National Observer Program that puts Fisheries observers on commercial fishing vessels at sea. Being an observer on ships in the Pacific Northwest was, for me, an amazing education in applied biology. http://www.st.nmfs.noaa.gov/observer-home/index
It also pays you a salary while you don't need to pay rent (you're on a ship). I'm specifically recommending Pacific Northwest because it's an amazing piece of ocean to spend some time in: you train in Seattle, fly to Alaska, then get on a ship where it can snow on you in July.
Any security system, starting with a locked door, is simply a polite request to have your things left alone. Someone who chooses not to will not.
If you're techie enough to have real data (including music, etc.), then make sure you have daily offsite backup. The hardware is trivial to replace (given money), but getting your information back requires an offsite backup.
Anything else and you're basically wasting your time.
Yes. Microsoft Expression Media was a damned good product (no thanks to MS: the product barely changed after MS bought it, so I can't agree the MS destroyed it). We have no idea what will happen with the new owners, but it's definitely worth trying out: http://www.phaseone.com/en/Software/Expression-Media-2/Whats-new.aspx
You will want to Google "saturation diving". After a day at 65 feet you do not come to the surface without extensive decompression or you'll be very very ill/dead.
In Aquarius, the drill is that you are essentially cave-diving -- you can't come up if things go wrong. You swim with redundant equipment, there are air "shelters" available at depth for emergencies. The surface is not your friend after the first day.
And NASA has been doing exactly this kind of astronaut training with Aquarius for, oh, about 10 years (why this is a news story today is unclear). Apparently their experience is that it is a good use of training time and money. It's actually fairly cheap: very roughly US$10,000/day to run (yes, that is cheap on the scale of major agency expenses).
It's very peculiar that nowhere in the discussion here or Chamberland's video does anyone mention NOAA's Aquarius habitat, in operation since 1988: http://www.uncw.edu/aquarius/ . Aquarius has been in operation as a civilian research station underwater off Key Largo for years. Before that it was in the Virgin Islands. It is operated by NOAA (the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) for marine biology research and NASA training. It's an amazing place where researchers get to do 10-day research projects that would be difficult or impossible to run from the surface.
But what's not mentioned by Chamberland or anyone involved in his little promo piece is that living underwater is grueling. You're in a single-wide trailer equivalent with multiple other people. Going outside is wonderfully liberating, but y'know, it's cold. Even in Florida, once you've been in the water for a few hours, you're cold. Then you do it again. And again. It's humid and pretty much everyone gets skin problems after a few days.
And you can't come up. You've saturated to 55-foot depth after a day, so you'd get the bends if you surfaced. So all your diving is done with cave-diving rigs that are designed for diving where there's no surface to go to. If you get in trouble, you have to get back to the habitat, not the surface. Oh, you'd probably survive if you had to surface, but it wouldn't be healthy or pretty. At the end of the 10-day mission it takes 18 hours to decompress to surface pressure.
That said, it is really truly astounding to live underwater for a while. Looking out through the window at dinner at the fish, and realizing that they're looking at you: you're the one in the aquarium. It's a trip.
But it's an incredibly resource-intensive thing to do. Rough estimates I recall from my Aquarius trips were that it cost about US$10,000 per day to support four researchers in the habitat. That's not sustainable for daily life.
As far as I can tell, Dennis Chamberland wants to set up some sort of high-end hotel-like underwater facility. More power to him. But don't pretend that we're all going to have the chance to go live under the ocean.
In theory, Beagle does this for you. To quote: "Beagle is a Linux desktop-independent service which transparently and unobtrusively indexes your data in real-time."
In practice, when I tried it out (quite some time ago, though), I found the indexing to be a bit quirky and inconsistent. There's been lots of time for improvement since then, so I'd recommend giving it a try.
In most cases, I think your only alternative is to change your phone number (the phone company will do this without charge if you explain the reason).
The problem is that the faxes are most likely coming in because of a typographical error in an advertisement (or business listing). That means that they come from multiple different sources, so you can't simply block the one source for all the faxes.
We had this trouble because of a wrong area code posted for an insurance company's claim-filing fax machine. Dozens of calls from dozens of lawyers' fax machines. Of course, the new number we have is listed as the contact number for some scam artists (unknown to us) who generate regular bill-collection phone calls. But that's another problem...
I will second the recommendation to look into Unison. I used a very similar solution when I was trotting back and forth between home and a university office. In my case I didn't carry a laptop between sites, but did the synch when I got to the office (over the network). Within a minute or so, my office machine had everything I'd worked on at home. Last thing before leaving was to launch another synch that would pop everything home from the office. For the first month or two I paranoiacally copied things onto a thumb drive to take to the office (not cool to show up without the lecture handouts or the exam for class...). After it worked flawlessly for long enough, though, I gave up with the hardware.
Seconded. And it will accept videos, PDFs, and various other picture-like objects.
The interface is not iPhoto-simple, but is very flexible and rewards a bit of investment and experimentation. You can use IPTC tags, plus add your own custom tags. Metadata is exportable as XML. It can (optionally) be embedded within image files (for image formats that permit embedded metainformation).
One real strength that may be useful is that you can use all the cataloging (including thumbnails) even if you don't have access to the images themselves. So you can use iView to index all your images on external hard drives (for example), and use the catalog when the hard drives aren't connected.
But realize that making an Ogg version is a political statement, not a useful video format. Yes, I know that all good nerds have invested the hours of codec shuffling it takes for them to be able to view Ogg, but normal people don't do that. And won't.
Make sure the content is available in the form your viewers can view.
Feynman because he is the exemplar of a truly clever person.
Charles Darwin because he had such an astonishingly insightful way of slowly accumulating information until he could see the "big picture".
Ed Ricketts because he had such an intensely committed life in biology that he is a wonderful example of how doing science can be an intensely fun life -- quite the opposite of the cold passionlessness one usually sees portrayed in science biographies
Seconding (thirding...) the recommendation for the news & views sections of Science and Nature. These are written by well trained professional science journalists. Because the articles will certainly be read by scientists working in the field being covered, the journalists have to be exceptionally careful to do a good job of reporting the stories.
Note that if you have a university or college affiliation, you probably have "free" access to the online versions of Science and Nature (which include everything that is in the print editions). Check with your librarians. (By "free" I mean that your institution has paid dearly for the privilege, so you might as well take advantage of it!)
Treat your internal network the same way you'd treat the Internet: plug in a cheap firewall box (or use a similarly set up Linux box to do the networking). Do your installs while you're NATed behind your own little firewall. Tighten up the boxes, and only then release them to be plugged into the Great Unwashed University Network.
I stand corrected: we're talking the top or tie plate here. But it really does beat having to find the studs for all the screws, and you can get enough screws in a top bracket to hold a fine bunch of shelves (recalling that the weight of the shelving puts screws in shear, not tension, so they can really hold a lot).
In the shelving we used there are no horizontal brackets -- only the shelving itself. Though in theory it's nice to put the other screws on the vertical members into studs, it really doesn't matter much. Those screws are there mainly to keep the vertical members from swinging sideways (something they're unlikely to do once the shelves are loaded, anyway). If you find studs, go for it, it's a win. But if you don't, it's not really a problem. The beauty of this system (as compared with the simpler vertical-supports-only system) is that you can get away without finding studs first -- you're nearly guaranteed to find wood under every screw at the top or tie plate near the top corner of the closet.
Spend quality time meticulously planning shelving in your closets. You can get far more shelves in than you initially suspect, if you're careful about the layout. Check the "ShelfTrack"-based shelving from Closetmaid (the white wire shelving available at Home Depot) -- http://www.closetmaid.com/ . You mount one horizontal bracket near the ceiling (i.e. on the wood of the header behind the wallboard there), and the vertical supports hang on that -- hence no searching for studs.
Plan on shelves closer than you normally might: you won't want things stacked more than a foot deep on the shelves, anyway, so you can get them 18" apart (vertically) for almost all things.
Another advantage is that the wire allows for air circulation, keeping things from molding (if that can be a problem for you).
Off topic as all hell, but now that we're on diving...
The reason nitrox extends time in shallow-water diving is because one gets less nitrogen in a gas mixture where the fraction of oxygen is increased. It is not because you can "train yourself to breathe slower". That is a very dangerous idea, since it will inevitably lead to at least some breath-holding, which can easily lead to embolism (major injury or death).
Again: nitrox is used because the larger fraction of oxygen in the gas mixture means a smaller fraction of nitrogen. Since it's nitrogen that causes decompression sickness (bends), less nitrogen in the mix permits longer times at a given depth without decompression.
Some information is available at http://www.iantd.com
On the off chance this was a serious question...
This is estimated using various sampling procedures. In simplified form, you can sparsely sample a large area for some taxon of interest. That gives you a low estimate of the number of species (you know you're missing lots of rare ones). Then you progressively more intensely sample smaller areas. (Why not intensely sample large areas? It's simply not possible to do it with available labor, plus intensive sampling tends to be destructive.) After a series of these efforts, culminating in complete sampling of very small areas (e.g. bagging an entire tree, gassing it, and identifying every single insect on it), you have a relationship between the intensity of sampling and the number of species (of a particular group) that you find. You can use that relationship to make (admittedly gross) estimates of how many species are still undiscovered in the rest of the sparsely-sampled world.
Where I work(ed), University of South Carolina, we had anti-virus software available to all (with staff to support installation, along with online instructions), but it was not compulsory. That seemed to work fairly well. Now, it didn't catch everything by any means, but students' own computers are their own responsibility after all.
I can't agree with the viewpoint that using the University network gives legitimate rights to access the students' hard drives. I don't think for a moment that you mean to use the access maliciously, but there are places that one doesn't go in order to avoid even the appearance of impropriety. To try the usual argument by analogy: the students go to class all day in University-owned buildings under University regulation. That does not give rights to the the University to inspect the contents of every (or any!) student's wallet as they traverse the campus, however non-malicious the intent of the search.
Slashdot Mirror
For a high-resolution simulation of the taking of the photograph, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Narrated by Andrew Chaikin, author of "A Man on the Moon".
So, this is well within an order of magnitude of the cost estimate for Trump's wall between Mexico and the United States: https://www.brookings.edu/essa...
Global cost / benefit, anyone?
In the same way that there isn't a simple interface to methodologies and projects in academia or science in general, I doubt you'll see one in citizen/community science.
That said, there are some remarkable projects (or umbrella projects) that are purpose-built for the projects they support. Large-scale ones (besides Zooniverse, already mentioned) include:
https://www.inaturalist.org/ — observations of living organisms
https://ebird.org/ — the world of bird observations
The observations on those two sites are contributing significantly to real science outcomes.
Generally, this would be illegal: https://www.govdocs.com/can-em...
In California (and some other places), it's definitely illegal: https://www.dir.ca.gov/dlse/Ca...
For a decade or so, I've used MacOS Server (or its predecessors) to run a small research group with a dozen or so iMac clients and a couple of dozen staff/students. We use network logins (and hence a mounted home directory) and a small handfull of groups to determine which file shares are available. That's about all we do with Apple Server that can't obviously/easily be replaced with alternatives.
So, for someone who is Linux-comfortable at a sysadmin level, what is a path to replacing MacOS Server's network logins (with server-mounted home directories) for iMac clients? Key services are home directories and a few shared fileshares.
Oh, and thankyouverymuch Apple, for not cutting, say, $100M to maintaining and improving Mac Server for people who've been buying your hardware and software for a decade or two. After all, that would have been 0.05% of your current cash reserves. I think I'm over being an Apple recommender.
Suppose a twenty year old has no cell phone and no computer and never goes online. To a smart law enforcement agency they would take a look at that person. That person is off the bell curve of normal behavior. It could be that the person is severely handicapped or has some rational reason for being out of step with the world but more likely or not they are trying to be invisible. I'll bet all kinds of criminals could be caught by simply examining eccentric ways of life of individuals.
Doubtless.
But in the U.S., that's not how it works.
We have this thing called the Fourth Amendment that has been interpreted to mean that I have the right to be off the bell curve and live in eccentric ways without federal, state, or local scrutiny. The exception is when authorities provide probable cause that I have committed a crime or that there is evidence of a crime present in the place to be searched.
Just being different really isn't probable cause that a crime is being committed.
And of course I'm not naïve enough to think that's the way it always works in practice. But that's the standard that we, as citizens, are charged with vigilantly supporting.
This is wrong: 990s are public: guidestar.org is an easy source.
NOAA runs the National Observer Program that puts Fisheries observers on commercial fishing vessels at sea. Being an observer on ships in the Pacific Northwest was, for me, an amazing education in applied biology. http://www.st.nmfs.noaa.gov/observer-home/index
It also pays you a salary while you don't need to pay rent (you're on a ship). I'm specifically recommending Pacific Northwest because it's an amazing piece of ocean to spend some time in: you train in Seattle, fly to Alaska, then get on a ship where it can snow on you in July.
You'll have some good stories when you get back.
Seriously.
Any security system, starting with a locked door, is simply a polite request to have your things left alone. Someone who chooses not to will not.
If you're techie enough to have real data (including music, etc.), then make sure you have daily offsite backup. The hardware is trivial to replace (given money), but getting your information back requires an offsite backup.
Anything else and you're basically wasting your time.
Yes. Microsoft Expression Media was a damned good product (no thanks to MS: the product barely changed after MS bought it, so I can't agree the MS destroyed it). We have no idea what will happen with the new owners, but it's definitely worth trying out: http://www.phaseone.com/en/Software/Expression-Media-2/Whats-new.aspx
You will want to Google "saturation diving". After a day at 65 feet you do not come to the surface without extensive decompression or you'll be very very ill/dead.
In Aquarius, the drill is that you are essentially cave-diving -- you can't come up if things go wrong. You swim with redundant equipment, there are air "shelters" available at depth for emergencies. The surface is not your friend after the first day.
And NASA has been doing exactly this kind of astronaut training with Aquarius for, oh, about 10 years (why this is a news story today is unclear). Apparently their experience is that it is a good use of training time and money. It's actually fairly cheap: very roughly US$10,000/day to run (yes, that is cheap on the scale of major agency expenses).
It's very peculiar that nowhere in the discussion here or Chamberland's video does anyone mention NOAA's Aquarius habitat, in operation since 1988: http://www.uncw.edu/aquarius/ . Aquarius has been in operation as a civilian research station underwater off Key Largo for years. Before that it was in the Virgin Islands. It is operated by NOAA (the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) for marine biology research and NASA training. It's an amazing place where researchers get to do 10-day research projects that would be difficult or impossible to run from the surface.
But what's not mentioned by Chamberland or anyone involved in his little promo piece is that living underwater is grueling. You're in a single-wide trailer equivalent with multiple other people. Going outside is wonderfully liberating, but y'know, it's cold. Even in Florida, once you've been in the water for a few hours, you're cold. Then you do it again. And again. It's humid and pretty much everyone gets skin problems after a few days.
And you can't come up. You've saturated to 55-foot depth after a day, so you'd get the bends if you surfaced. So all your diving is done with cave-diving rigs that are designed for diving where there's no surface to go to. If you get in trouble, you have to get back to the habitat, not the surface. Oh, you'd probably survive if you had to surface, but it wouldn't be healthy or pretty. At the end of the 10-day mission it takes 18 hours to decompress to surface pressure.
That said, it is really truly astounding to live underwater for a while. Looking out through the window at dinner at the fish, and realizing that they're looking at you: you're the one in the aquarium. It's a trip.
But it's an incredibly resource-intensive thing to do. Rough estimates I recall from my Aquarius trips were that it cost about US$10,000 per day to support four researchers in the habitat. That's not sustainable for daily life.
As far as I can tell, Dennis Chamberland wants to set up some sort of high-end hotel-like underwater facility. More power to him. But don't pretend that we're all going to have the chance to go live under the ocean.
In theory, Beagle does this for you. To quote: "Beagle is a Linux desktop-independent service which transparently and unobtrusively indexes your data in real-time."
In practice, when I tried it out (quite some time ago, though), I found the indexing to be a bit quirky and inconsistent. There's been lots of time for improvement since then, so I'd recommend giving it a try.
In most cases, I think your only alternative is to change your phone number (the phone company will do this without charge if you explain the reason).
The problem is that the faxes are most likely coming in because of a typographical error in an advertisement (or business listing). That means that they come from multiple different sources, so you can't simply block the one source for all the faxes.
We had this trouble because of a wrong area code posted for an insurance company's claim-filing fax machine. Dozens of calls from dozens of lawyers' fax machines. Of course, the new number we have is listed as the contact number for some scam artists (unknown to us) who generate regular bill-collection phone calls. But that's another problem...
I will second the recommendation to look into Unison. I used a very similar solution when I was trotting back and forth between home and a university office. In my case I didn't carry a laptop between sites, but did the synch when I got to the office (over the network). Within a minute or so, my office machine had everything I'd worked on at home. Last thing before leaving was to launch another synch that would pop everything home from the office. For the first month or two I paranoiacally copied things onto a thumb drive to take to the office (not cool to show up without the lecture handouts or the exam for class...). After it worked flawlessly for long enough, though, I gave up with the hardware.
Seconded. And it will accept videos, PDFs, and various other picture-like objects.
The interface is not iPhoto-simple, but is very flexible and rewards a bit of investment and experimentation. You can use IPTC tags, plus add your own custom tags. Metadata is exportable as XML. It can (optionally) be embedded within image files (for image formats that permit embedded metainformation).
One real strength that may be useful is that you can use all the cataloging (including thumbnails) even if you don't have access to the images themselves. So you can use iView to index all your images on external hard drives (for example), and use the catalog when the hard drives aren't connected.
But realize that making an Ogg version is a political statement, not a useful video format. Yes, I know that all good nerds have invested the hours of codec shuffling it takes for them to be able to view Ogg, but normal people don't do that. And won't.
Make sure the content is available in the form your viewers can view.
Richard Feynman
Charles Darwin
Ed Ricketts
Feynman because he is the exemplar of a truly clever person.
Charles Darwin because he had such an astonishingly insightful way of slowly accumulating information until he could see the "big picture".
Ed Ricketts because he had such an intensely committed life in biology that he is a wonderful example of how doing science can be an intensely fun life -- quite the opposite of the cold passionlessness one usually sees portrayed in science biographies
Seconding (thirding...) the recommendation for the news & views sections of Science and Nature. These are written by well trained professional science journalists. Because the articles will certainly be read by scientists working in the field being covered, the journalists have to be exceptionally careful to do a good job of reporting the stories.
Note that if you have a university or college affiliation, you probably have "free" access to the online versions of Science and Nature (which include everything that is in the print editions). Check with your librarians. (By "free" I mean that your institution has paid dearly for the privilege, so you might as well take advantage of it!)
Treat your internal network the same way you'd treat the Internet: plug in a cheap firewall box (or use a similarly set up Linux box to do the networking). Do your installs while you're NATed behind your own little firewall. Tighten up the boxes, and only then release them to be plugged into the Great Unwashed University Network.
I stand corrected: we're talking the top or tie plate here. But it really does beat having to find the studs for all the screws, and you can get enough screws in a top bracket to hold a fine bunch of shelves (recalling that the weight of the shelving puts screws in shear, not tension, so they can really hold a lot).
In the shelving we used there are no horizontal brackets -- only the shelving itself. Though in theory it's nice to put the other screws on the vertical members into studs, it really doesn't matter much. Those screws are there mainly to keep the vertical members from swinging sideways (something they're unlikely to do once the shelves are loaded, anyway). If you find studs, go for it, it's a win. But if you don't, it's not really a problem. The beauty of this system (as compared with the simpler vertical-supports-only system) is that you can get away without finding studs first -- you're nearly guaranteed to find wood under every screw at the top or tie plate near the top corner of the closet.
Spend quality time meticulously planning shelving in your closets. You can get far more shelves in than you initially suspect, if you're careful about the layout. Check the "ShelfTrack"-based shelving from Closetmaid (the white wire shelving available at Home Depot) -- http://www.closetmaid.com/ . You mount one horizontal bracket near the ceiling (i.e. on the wood of the header behind the wallboard there), and the vertical supports hang on that -- hence no searching for studs.
Plan on shelves closer than you normally might: you won't want things stacked more than a foot deep on the shelves, anyway, so you can get them 18" apart (vertically) for almost all things.
Another advantage is that the wire allows for air circulation, keeping things from molding (if that can be a problem for you).
Off topic as all hell, but now that we're on diving...
The reason nitrox extends time in shallow-water diving is because one gets less nitrogen in a gas mixture where the fraction of oxygen is increased. It is not because you can "train yourself to breathe slower". That is a very dangerous idea, since it will inevitably lead to at least some breath-holding, which can easily lead to embolism (major injury or death).
Again: nitrox is used because the larger fraction of oxygen in the gas mixture means a smaller fraction of nitrogen. Since it's nitrogen that causes decompression sickness (bends), less nitrogen in the mix permits longer times at a given depth without decompression.
Some information is available at http://www.iantd.com
On the off chance this was a serious question...
This is estimated using various sampling procedures. In simplified form, you can sparsely sample a large area for some taxon of interest. That gives you a low estimate of the number of species (you know you're missing lots of rare ones). Then you progressively more intensely sample smaller areas. (Why not intensely sample large areas? It's simply not possible to do it with available labor, plus intensive sampling tends to be destructive.) After a series of these efforts, culminating in complete sampling of very small areas (e.g. bagging an entire tree, gassing it, and identifying every single insect on it), you have a relationship between the intensity of sampling and the number of species (of a particular group) that you find. You can use that relationship to make (admittedly gross) estimates of how many species are still undiscovered in the rest of the sparsely-sampled world.
I can't agree with the viewpoint that using the University network gives legitimate rights to access the students' hard drives. I don't think for a moment that you mean to use the access maliciously, but there are places that one doesn't go in order to avoid even the appearance of impropriety. To try the usual argument by analogy: the students go to class all day in University-owned buildings under University regulation. That does not give rights to the the University to inspect the contents of every (or any!) student's wallet as they traverse the campus, however non-malicious the intent of the search.