Daily Archives: July 8, 2010

GES DISC (Goddard Earth Science Data and Information Services Center)

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Giovanni: Remote Sensing Data Access, Visualization, and Analysis

James Acker

The GES DISC (Goddard Earth Science Data and Information Services Center) provides an extensive public archive of Earth Science data to the global research community. With an emphasis on precipitation, atmospheric dynamics, and atmospheric chemistry, the GES DISC also provides weather and climate model data, land hydrology data, and ocean color radiometry data.

The GES DISC is NASA’s archive for Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission Data (TRMM), the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS), the Ozone Measuring Instrument (OMI), and the Modern-Era Retrospective-Analysis for Research and Applications (MERRA). The GES DISC will be the NASA archive for data form the upcoming GLORY mission.

The GES DISC’s innovative data search-and-order interface, Mirador, and the renowned Goddard Interactive Online Visualization And aNalysis Infrastructure (GIOVANNI) provide users of all skill and education levels the opportunity to find, examine, and use NASA Earth Science remote-sensing data.

GES DISC: http://disc.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/

Mirador: http://mirador.gsfc.nasa.gov/

Giovanni: http://giovanni.gsfc.nasa.gov/

Web-based, user friendly, customized data analyses and visualizations: lat/long maps, scatter plots, correlation maps, time series and difference plots, temporal animation plots

Laboratory for ocean color users: tutorials for using Giovanni to observe the oceans

NASA’s S’Cool Program

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Any primary or secondary school teacher and his or her class is eligible to participate in S’COOL. We suggest students be at least nine to ten years old, but younger students have successfully participated and are welcome if the teacher feels it is appropriate. Teachers are invited to participate as it best fits with the curriculum they are teaching in the classroom. Note that there are many cross-disciplinary lesson plan ideas available. Occasionally Intensive Observing Periods (IOP) will still be announced, during which we would like to receive the most observations possible to contribute to validation of the CERES instrument data. The S’COOL letter of invitation provides details on how to register with the project. Find out How to Participate.

Those not at a fixed site such as a school are also invited to participate through the Rover part of the project.

Absolute requirements are: a teacher, some students, a place to observe the sky, and a convenient satellite overpass. We also suggest a few other items.

Current Participants

S’COOL currently reaches over 2800 schools in all 50 states and in over 75 countries. Most Recent Map. Complete list of those who are currently active observers.

NASA’s GLOBE Program

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GLOBE (Global Learning and Observations to Benefit the Environment) is a worldwide hands-on, primary and secondary school-based science and education program. GLOBE’s vision promotes and supports students, teachers and scientists to collaborate on inquiry-based investigations of the environment and the Earth system working in close partnership with NASA and NSF Earth System Science Projects (ESSPs) in study and research about the dynamics of Earth’s environment.

Who is involved in GLOBE?

Announced in 1994, GLOBE began operations on Earth Day 1995. Today, the international GLOBE network has grown to include representatives from 111 participating countries coordinating GLOBE activities that are integrated into their local and regional communities. Due to their efforts, there are more than 50,000 GLOBE-trained teachers representing over 23,000 schools around the world. GLOBE students have contributed more than 20 millionmeasurements to the GLOBE database for use in their inquiry-based science projects.

GLOBE brings together students, teachers and scientists through the GLOBE Schools Network in support of student learning and research. Parents, Scientists and GLOBE Alumni also support students’ engagement in GLOBE.

Recently found … 07/08/2010

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  • Building One Big Brain – Opinionator Blog – NYTimes.com Annotated

    tags: technology philosophy evolution educational reform

    • “What Technology Wants,” by Kevin Kelly

    • technology is weaving humans into electronic webs that resemble big brains — corporations, online hobby groups, far-flung N.G.O.s. And I personally don’t think it’s outlandish to talk about us being, increasingly, neurons in a giant superorganism

    • Could it be that, in some sense, the point of evolution — both the biological evolution that created an intelligent species and the technological evolution that a sufficiently intelligent species is bound to unleash — has been to create these social brains, and maybe even to weave them into a giant, loosely organized planetary brain? Kind of in the way that the point of the maturation of an organism is to create an adult organism?

    • I have to admit that I’m not totally loving the life of a cell. I’m as nostalgic as the next middle-aged guy for the time when focus was easier to come by, and I do sometimes feel, after a hard day of getting lots of tiny little things more-or-less done, that the superorganism I’m serving is tyrannical — as if I’m living that line in Orwell’s “1984”: “Can you not understand, Winston, that the individual is only a cell? The weariness of the cell is the vigor of the organism.”

      But at least the superorganism that seems to be emerging, though in some ways demanding, isn’t the totalitarian monster that Orwell feared; it’s more diffuse, more decentralized, more reconcilable — in principle, at least — with liberty.

    • What sort of human existence is implied by the ongoing construction of a social brain; and, within the constraints of that brain, how much room is there to choose our fate?

    • I’ll let Kelly speak for himself as  the timely publication of his fascinating book approaches. But it’s safe to say that he’s  upbeat. He writes of technology “stitching together all the minds of the living, wrapping the planet in a vibrating cloak of electronic nerves” and asks, “How can this not stir that organ in us that is sensitive to something larger than ourselves?”

      No doubt some of his critics will think of ways. But the question he’s asking strikes me as the right long-term question: Not so much how do we reconcile ourselves to technology, but how do we reconcile ourselves to — and help shape — the very big thing that technology seems devoted to building?

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.