[naturenews] from [nature.com]
[Nature News]
Published online 24 August 2009 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2009.857
News: Q&A
The science of Google Wave
How an online application could change research communication.
Richard Van Noorden
Web-savvy scientists gathered at the Science Online London conference in London on 22 August to explore how the Internet is changing the communication, practice and culture of science. Biochemist Cameron Neylon, of the University of Southampton, UK, was one of a few scientists at the conference who have been given pre-release access to Google Wave — an online collaboration and communication tool announced with great fanfare on 27 May. Nature spoke to Neylon about how Google Wave could transform the way that scientists work.
What is Google Wave, and how might scientists use it?
It is a communication tool that is essentially e-mail crossed with an instant messenger. You can think of each 'wave' — or e-mail thread — as a flexible document, which allows collaborators to chat and edit the same version in real time. You can also easily drop rich media — such as sound files, charts and videos — into the document. So Google Wave could be used for collaborative authoring, to speed up writing papers and grant applications, for example.
However, it is also possible to create automatic programs that buzz around the document, annotating it in ways that are hidden from the human reader. The automated programs, or 'robots', make it possible to link to related scientific documents; mark up text so that, for example, protein names are automatically linked to a protein database; or pull in data from elsewhere and create live graphs that update as the data change.
Might this change the scientific manuscript?
Yes, in several ways. Documents created in Google Wave would be much richer, and one could convert them to the format of a published paper and retain all that annotation.
The real-time authoring and date-stamped recording of contributions also makes for an obvious way to create papers that aren't static, that are updated over time, perhaps in combination with one or many frozen versions of record.
How else can you see Google Wave affecting scientists?
I can imagine that the robots could really come in useful in a laboratory notebook. For example, as data come off a laboratory instrument via a computer, a program could insert them straight into the document. You might have another program that visualises those data for you. These widgets would help you control, monitor and observe an experiment, and even share that wave with someone else as a template for their experiment. Scientists could share their experimental processes in a way that's hard to do at the moment.
What have you actually done with the tool so far?
Relatively few people, perhaps 10,000, have had access to the developer sandbox so far, and perhaps only 100 of those are scientists. It is early days — we're at the playing stage.
I have made a robot that recognizes chemical names when triggered by the right text input, searches for information about them on ChemSpider [an open-access search for chemical information such as molecular structures], and can turn weights into molarities. Euan Adie, a product manager in Nature's web publishing group, has developed a 'references' robot that can search the PubMed archive of journal papers for related terms, and turn that text into correctly formatted citations.
Is this going to be too complicated for most scientists to bother learning?
At the moment it feels very complicated. A lot of people who have looked at it have been scared off by that fact. But the potential is enormous. The kind of functionality demonstrated here is what the web will look like in a couple of years' time.
However, the level of interest of the original announcement among most scientists was probably close to zero. It generated a lot of excitement among tech-minded people, though, and I can see it being adopted rapidly by some scientists for certain tasks, in much the same way that e-mail spread through academic research group in the 1980s and 1990s. But it is by no means certain that will happen.
The Google team is very supportive of our efforts, but they aren't, as far as I'm aware, thinking specifically about scientists using Wave as a tool. I don't think we really figure on their radar. It is up to us to work out what the potential is.
[naturenews]
Published online 24 August 2009 | Nature | doi:10.1038/4601070a
News
Canada assumes weighty mantle
Instrument to help redefine the kilogram makes a transatlantic move.
Nicola Jones
{Ian Robinson might be able to tweak Canada’s watt balance to increase its accuracy.NPL}
In the mission to define the kilogram more sensibly, only two of the instruments known as 'watt balances' have proven good enough to tackle the job. And one of them is currently in pieces, having been sold and shipped from the United Kingdom — the birthplace of this type of device — to Canada.
The move has some UK scientists saddened by their loss, and Canadians excited by their gain. It also has metrologists around the world holding their breath. "Taking it all apart, shipping it, putting it back together — the worrisome thing is that something will break," says Richard Steiner, who works with the other top watt balance at the US National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) in Gaithersburg, Maryland. "It's very fragile, and a lot of it is pretty old." The Canadian lab expects to receive the package by the end of August.
The kilogram is the only unit of measure still defined by a single object — a lump of platinum-iridium held in a vault near Paris. Over time, as atoms accrete or fall off this particular kilogram, its mass changes. Metrologists are thus aiming to redefine the kilogram on the basis of something more stable — such as Planck's constant, the value that quantifies the relationship between the energy and frequency of light, and which can be related to mass through equations of quantum physics and electromagnetism.
The best way to pin down the value of Planck's constant is with a precision watt balance. Canada's device, which is about the size of a minivan, contains a metre-long balance beam, with a precisely known mass at one end and a 30-centimetre-wide metal coil in a magnetic field at the other. Running a current through the coil creates an electromagnetic force that balances the gravitational force on the other side. Further measurements are made to eliminate hard-to-measure factors and produce a value for Planck's constant.
{“If anyone was going to bust it, it had to be me.”}
The watt balance was thought up in 1975 at the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) in Teddington, UK. Ian Robinson, who helped to develop that first instrument and worked with its successor for more than 30 years, disassembled his life's work this summer. More than 500 items, including the 1-tonne magnet, were stowed in some 50 wooden crates to be shipped. Robinson packed the precision coil himself: "If anyone was going to bust it," he says, "it had to be me."
NPL research director Kamal Hossain says they decided to discontinue the watt-balance work because they already had some good results from the device and wanted to focus on more practical areas, such as nanometrology.
"It was a bit of a surprise when the NPL decided to roll this up," says Alan Steele, head of metrology for the Institute for National Measurement Standards in Ottawa, Ontario. The machine will both stretch the metrological science done in the lab and give Canada an entrée into the kilogram scene.
Pursuit of accuracy
Another approach to redefining the kilogram involves more accurately calculating the Avogadro constant — the number of atoms or molecules in one mole of a substance — by determining the number of atoms in a near-perfect silicon sphere. Should the watt-balance project win out, national labs with watt balances will have an advantage in measuring exact masses and maintaining mass standards. Watt balances are being built and tested in Switzerland and France, but have not produced published results to prove their precision.
Thus far, the NIST watt balance and the one from the NPL do not quite agree on the value of Planck's constant. Although each has an uncertainty of tens of parts in a billion, the difference between the two most recently published values is ten times larger than that. The team working on the silicon-sphere approach, meanwhile, say they have data that are in fairly good agreement with NIST's value for Planck's constant, although these have not yet been published. The goal is to iron out discrepancies in time to redefine the kilogram in 2011.
Steele says his team plans to start reassembling the watt balance this October, with Robinson's help. They hope that the Ottawa lab, which is vibration-free and shielded from magnetic interference, will prove an ideal spot for the sensitive instrument. Moving the device should help to create a third, independent, set of data to help pin down Planck's constant, says Steele: "The equipment is so complex, just taking it apart and reassembling it is equivalent to doing a novel experiment." Robinson says he has possibly identified a small flaw in the experiment that he intends to fix once it is reassembled. If that creates agreement with the NIST value, then consensus should be easy.
CONTINUED ON newsnn2
[Nature News]
Published online 24 August 2009 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2009.857
News: Q&A
The science of Google Wave
How an online application could change research communication.
Richard Van Noorden
Web-savvy scientists gathered at the Science Online London conference in London on 22 August to explore how the Internet is changing the communication, practice and culture of science. Biochemist Cameron Neylon, of the University of Southampton, UK, was one of a few scientists at the conference who have been given pre-release access to Google Wave — an online collaboration and communication tool announced with great fanfare on 27 May. Nature spoke to Neylon about how Google Wave could transform the way that scientists work.
What is Google Wave, and how might scientists use it?
It is a communication tool that is essentially e-mail crossed with an instant messenger. You can think of each 'wave' — or e-mail thread — as a flexible document, which allows collaborators to chat and edit the same version in real time. You can also easily drop rich media — such as sound files, charts and videos — into the document. So Google Wave could be used for collaborative authoring, to speed up writing papers and grant applications, for example.
However, it is also possible to create automatic programs that buzz around the document, annotating it in ways that are hidden from the human reader. The automated programs, or 'robots', make it possible to link to related scientific documents; mark up text so that, for example, protein names are automatically linked to a protein database; or pull in data from elsewhere and create live graphs that update as the data change.
Might this change the scientific manuscript?
Yes, in several ways. Documents created in Google Wave would be much richer, and one could convert them to the format of a published paper and retain all that annotation.
The real-time authoring and date-stamped recording of contributions also makes for an obvious way to create papers that aren't static, that are updated over time, perhaps in combination with one or many frozen versions of record.
How else can you see Google Wave affecting scientists?
I can imagine that the robots could really come in useful in a laboratory notebook. For example, as data come off a laboratory instrument via a computer, a program could insert them straight into the document. You might have another program that visualises those data for you. These widgets would help you control, monitor and observe an experiment, and even share that wave with someone else as a template for their experiment. Scientists could share their experimental processes in a way that's hard to do at the moment.
What have you actually done with the tool so far?
Relatively few people, perhaps 10,000, have had access to the developer sandbox so far, and perhaps only 100 of those are scientists. It is early days — we're at the playing stage.
I have made a robot that recognizes chemical names when triggered by the right text input, searches for information about them on ChemSpider [an open-access search for chemical information such as molecular structures], and can turn weights into molarities. Euan Adie, a product manager in Nature's web publishing group, has developed a 'references' robot that can search the PubMed archive of journal papers for related terms, and turn that text into correctly formatted citations.
Is this going to be too complicated for most scientists to bother learning?
At the moment it feels very complicated. A lot of people who have looked at it have been scared off by that fact. But the potential is enormous. The kind of functionality demonstrated here is what the web will look like in a couple of years' time.
However, the level of interest of the original announcement among most scientists was probably close to zero. It generated a lot of excitement among tech-minded people, though, and I can see it being adopted rapidly by some scientists for certain tasks, in much the same way that e-mail spread through academic research group in the 1980s and 1990s. But it is by no means certain that will happen.
The Google team is very supportive of our efforts, but they aren't, as far as I'm aware, thinking specifically about scientists using Wave as a tool. I don't think we really figure on their radar. It is up to us to work out what the potential is.
[naturenews]
Published online 24 August 2009 | Nature | doi:10.1038/4601070a
News
Canada assumes weighty mantle
Instrument to help redefine the kilogram makes a transatlantic move.
Nicola Jones
{Ian Robinson might be able to tweak Canada’s watt balance to increase its accuracy.NPL}
In the mission to define the kilogram more sensibly, only two of the instruments known as 'watt balances' have proven good enough to tackle the job. And one of them is currently in pieces, having been sold and shipped from the United Kingdom — the birthplace of this type of device — to Canada.
The move has some UK scientists saddened by their loss, and Canadians excited by their gain. It also has metrologists around the world holding their breath. "Taking it all apart, shipping it, putting it back together — the worrisome thing is that something will break," says Richard Steiner, who works with the other top watt balance at the US National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) in Gaithersburg, Maryland. "It's very fragile, and a lot of it is pretty old." The Canadian lab expects to receive the package by the end of August.
The kilogram is the only unit of measure still defined by a single object — a lump of platinum-iridium held in a vault near Paris. Over time, as atoms accrete or fall off this particular kilogram, its mass changes. Metrologists are thus aiming to redefine the kilogram on the basis of something more stable — such as Planck's constant, the value that quantifies the relationship between the energy and frequency of light, and which can be related to mass through equations of quantum physics and electromagnetism.
The best way to pin down the value of Planck's constant is with a precision watt balance. Canada's device, which is about the size of a minivan, contains a metre-long balance beam, with a precisely known mass at one end and a 30-centimetre-wide metal coil in a magnetic field at the other. Running a current through the coil creates an electromagnetic force that balances the gravitational force on the other side. Further measurements are made to eliminate hard-to-measure factors and produce a value for Planck's constant.
{“If anyone was going to bust it, it had to be me.”}
The watt balance was thought up in 1975 at the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) in Teddington, UK. Ian Robinson, who helped to develop that first instrument and worked with its successor for more than 30 years, disassembled his life's work this summer. More than 500 items, including the 1-tonne magnet, were stowed in some 50 wooden crates to be shipped. Robinson packed the precision coil himself: "If anyone was going to bust it," he says, "it had to be me."
NPL research director Kamal Hossain says they decided to discontinue the watt-balance work because they already had some good results from the device and wanted to focus on more practical areas, such as nanometrology.
"It was a bit of a surprise when the NPL decided to roll this up," says Alan Steele, head of metrology for the Institute for National Measurement Standards in Ottawa, Ontario. The machine will both stretch the metrological science done in the lab and give Canada an entrée into the kilogram scene.
Pursuit of accuracy
Another approach to redefining the kilogram involves more accurately calculating the Avogadro constant — the number of atoms or molecules in one mole of a substance — by determining the number of atoms in a near-perfect silicon sphere. Should the watt-balance project win out, national labs with watt balances will have an advantage in measuring exact masses and maintaining mass standards. Watt balances are being built and tested in Switzerland and France, but have not produced published results to prove their precision.
Thus far, the NIST watt balance and the one from the NPL do not quite agree on the value of Planck's constant. Although each has an uncertainty of tens of parts in a billion, the difference between the two most recently published values is ten times larger than that. The team working on the silicon-sphere approach, meanwhile, say they have data that are in fairly good agreement with NIST's value for Planck's constant, although these have not yet been published. The goal is to iron out discrepancies in time to redefine the kilogram in 2011.
Steele says his team plans to start reassembling the watt balance this October, with Robinson's help. They hope that the Ottawa lab, which is vibration-free and shielded from magnetic interference, will prove an ideal spot for the sensitive instrument. Moving the device should help to create a third, independent, set of data to help pin down Planck's constant, says Steele: "The equipment is so complex, just taking it apart and reassembling it is equivalent to doing a novel experiment." Robinson says he has possibly identified a small flaw in the experiment that he intends to fix once it is reassembled. If that creates agreement with the NIST value, then consensus should be easy.
CONTINUED ON newsnn2
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