Life in optical

A couple of weeks ago, I was invited by the excellent Christina Scott to take part in her weekly radio show ‘Science Matters’. The main item of news that was going to be covered was the official signing of the agreement between the South African government and the International Astronomical Union to host the IAU’s Office for Astronomy Development and I was there as a foreign researcher, having just landed in the country.

Having just arrived, I wanted to brush up on the status of various projects that are funding my position in case the journalist asked me about them. I had long phone conversations with Kim de Boer, manager of the the SKA Human Capacity Development programme and Prof. Justin Jonas, Associate Director for Science and Engineering in the SKA South Africa Project Office.

As it turns out I wasn’t asked about SKA during the radio show: the main news was the astronomy development office. But since I got this great update, I thought I’d share a bit about the status of the SKA and MeerKAT projects in this country, because what is happening here is really cool.

First thing: there is way more to the South African SKA project than just the bid to host it.

There is a wealth of investment in people and when you invest in people, you don’t add up assets, you multiply them. And with MeerKAT well under way, cutting edge science and technology are already happening.

So what is happening with the telescopes?

© SKA South Africa

First, there was KAT-7, the Karoo Array Telescope, a 7-dish array that was proposed as a prototype to the SKA. Quickly, this was complemented by MeerKAT, aka more of KAT, which would consist of 80 such dishes.

Well guess what, KAT-7 is being commissioned as I write this. 7 dishes are built, 4 are operating as an interferometer already. All of it on budget, on specs – and ahead of schedule.

There is also C-BASS, installed and operating. Members of the scientific collaboration from South Africa, the U.S. and the U.K look forward to the full-sky temperature and polarization map at 5GHz that will help extract CMB signal from other experiments and observe the synchrotron radiation from relativistic electrons in the galaxy.

What about MeerKAT?

MeerKAT prototype dish at HartRAO in 2007 (Wikipedia)

MeerKat has undergone a ‘concept design review‘, during which international teams and experts come to evaluate the idea. This has all gone swimmingly with positive comments and useful input.

Now, the project is going through the ‘design review process‘, which basically turns the science goals into technical requirements, which then get translated into concrete choices of appropriate technologies and if all goes well, the selected technology should deliver the science.

While the design is being finalised, there are some things that can already be installed, and the team are not wasting any time. The telescopes will need solid foundations in the ground and excellent data connections to transfer the observations to the computers that are going to process them. Those are in an advanced planning stage.

Exciting times! The teams involved are working very hard on this, and on everything at once. Sometimes I wish I could be a fly seeing it all happen…

The Human Capacity Programme of the SKA project is well worth its own blog post and being one of its postdocs, I look forward to meeting SKA scientists and students at the next SKA Postgraduate Bursary conference where everyone will get together.

Tribute to Escher in Barcelona

I love this incredible visualization of a simulation of two galaxies colliding, and the comparaison with fantastic images of galaxy mergers taken by the Hubble Space Telescope.

If anything, it really shows that our simulations seem to be a really good imitation of nature!

Sit back, and enjoy the dynamics of the cosmos :)

Here is the Guardian blog post about the Science Hack Day. I”m just putting it here because I am testing the new brilliant Guardian WordPress plugin, and I love it! That’s all I have to add to this article :)

This article was written by Matt McAlister, for guardian.co.uk on Monday 21st June 2010 12.36 UTC

The first-ever Science Hack Day took place over the weekend here at the Guardian offices in London.

With about 100 people attending and 25 brilliant hacks the event turned out to be a big hit. Jeremy Keith posted a roundup on the Science Hack Day web site:

“I hereby declare the mission a success! It was a truly wonderful weekend. There was plenty of food, plenty of drink, plenty of bandwidth, but most of all, plenty of incredibly smart people with great ideas.”

The list of hacks is posted on the event wiki. You can see some of the photos people took in the Flickr pool for the event. And here’s a wonderful little video capturing the day in 90 seconds by Carolina Odman.

Science Hack Day was sponsored by The Wellcome Trust, Nature Publishing Group, Yahoo! Developer Network, Thoughtworks, Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network, Global Radio, Elsevier, and BERG.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010

The first Science Hack Day took place at The Guardian Newspaper’s headquarters in London, on June 19-20.

It was one of those moments of magic when everybody’s minds align and collective creativity explodes. In one word: awesome.

I love those times: it feels like anything is possible because people are not individuals anymore they’re a swarm, we’re a swarm. A swarm of hackers :) Then there was the atmosphere. High spirits, collaboration, everyone learns something from everyone else. Lots of coffee, tea, beer, even fresh fruit!

It was simply brilliant. Definitely worth the trip from the Netherlands.

I’ve experienced that same magic in December 2009 at the .Astronomy workshop. We have a video to prove it :)
We had it in October 2006 at the UNAWE Workshop; it was there in 2004, the first time I went to South Africa and spent an incredible month tutoring at AIMS, its first year, it was there in my high-school years last century because I was in one of the first years to attend this shiny new high-school. It has now long since reached cruising speed and is just like any other high school.

Somehow, the magic seems to always go hand in hand with novelty. I would argue it doesn’t have to do with novelty as much as with ownership. When you’re the first generation to do something, you set a standard, you write the story. Not competing with history is very motivating.
I also believe it doesn’t stop at novelty. The magic really happens when the moment sets a new threshold and the ‘high’ remains. When history is indeed written and not forgotten. I get the feeling that the Science Hack Day achieved that.

OK, enough of my incompetent pseudo-sociology here (apologies to real sociologists).

What happened?

First, there were presentations of the new shiny toys we could use, and the throwing in of ideas for hacks. One of those toys stood out like LEGO in a box of action figures: YQL – the tool with which you can do anything. Most of us were super-keen to try it out. With the help of Christian Heilmann (@codepo8) it was a breeze. His presentation promised ‘half-hour jobs’ to implement new things. I must admit that I thought that the @codepo8-half-hour was probably equivalent to a @carolune-week. But there he was providing the support in half-hour-jobs. Mid-afternoon, he has already added two new APIs into YQL: arXiv and Mendeley and we were off hacking with YQL in no time! Woot!

Stuart Lowe @astronomyblog and hacker extraordinaire (see Chromoscope, LookUP, The Jodcast, etc., all pre-#scihack) and I teamed up and came up with the Co-author cloud. Thank you Stuart, that’s one new language ~learnt (Javascript) yay!

While I was spending my time between the co-author cloud and timelapsing the event, Stuart also teamed up with other astronomers to hack something to actually listen to the Universe for extra-terrestrial intelligence. Jill Tarter had challenged the participants by video to do something cool with all the SETI data, using the SETIquest API and they took up the challenge.

Bring out your headphones! SETI.fm will give you the opportunity to have a ‘Contact’ moment ;).

Jokes aside, it’s a brilliant way of using the human brain & ear’s built-in Fourier transform to detect signal above noise and could potentially bring the SETI programme from passive (idle CPU time donated by people) to active (use what the human brain does better than computers) citizen science.

I loved every hack that came out of the weekend. Two (ok, maybe three, or four, or more…) of those stand out to me:

One was a hardware hack, nicknamed Aurorascope (by Dan W and S. Cheng), that would pull aurora data off the internet and light up a set-up of LEDs inside a sphere to show the atmosphere lighting up almost in real time. I love this idea! I would love to have one of those devices on my desk when I work. Why? Because it’s much more than a gimmick. It’s looking at the planet and seeing what’s going on, right there, right then. It’s the ultimate über-webcam. The perspective is amazing.

And if I push the dream a bit further, that globe would also be coupled to Flightradar24.com and to a screen with Google Earth so that you could zoom in on any part of the globe and see in real-time what’s going on there, like for example, the awesome live tube map, another awesome hack from Matthew Somerville coming out of the science hack day thanks to Transport for London making their data available online…

OK it’s a silly thought, it’s the sort of device that only James Bond villains have :)

What about the rest of the planet?

Let’s come back to Earth a little. Not all the hacks were high-tech 1st worldly gadgets. One in particular could be super-relevant to the developing world, or any region with lots of agriculture going on: CROWDSOILING! Nothing to be afraid of, it’s crowdsourced soil testing. Using people with cheap kits to test soil and upload their data so that we get a better knowledge of what the soils are like around the world.

I would love to see the amazing Open Dirt Map deployed on a very large scale, interfaced with an Ushahidi platform so that people can sms their soil testing results to the Open Dirt Map.

I can really see a utility in that for the developing world. If anyone is interested, @moleitau, @ds1935, @fidothe and @blech are the awesome people from the crowdsoiling hack and here anyone can join Ushahidi. I’m going to look around if this idea can be tested somehow when I arrive in South Africa.

I am sure I missed out on lots of things that happened, because it was literally a beehive of ideas buzzing for 36 hours at the Guardian.

Twitter was of course abuzz with #scihack hashtagged tweets, of which this wordle is a compilation – from the definition of the hashtag, to the moment of writing this.

The person who probably has the best overview is Jeremy Keith (@adactio), the organiser of the event. You can read about the whole adventure from idea to event here and, while you’re at it, why don’t you buy his latest book, fresh off the press HTML5 for Web Designers ;)

There were quite a number of astronomers. Does that reflect anything? Are astronomers more likely to hack for fun than scientists from other disciplines? Any opinions or insights would be appreciated.

Meanwhile, go check out the list of hacks that came out of the project. Progress is being made on a number of them if they weren’t finished during the hack day.

Thank you Jeremy, thank you Stuart (when you come to South Africa you have stargazing credits to claim under one of the most stunning skies in the world :) ), thank you Christian, thank you Amanda, thank you Ed, thank you everyone else who was there – or not but made it possible, thank you the Guardian for an excellent venue, thank you the sponsors for the food and drinks. It was memorable, and if things go well, I’ll try to take the Science Hack Day concept with me to South Africa. Anyone wants to join in?