Ambient Media Association (AMEA)’s CFP

An interesting concept and organization: “Ambient Media”

Description of the Workshop

The medium is the message! And the message was transmitted via a single distinguishable media such as television, the Web, the radio, or books. In the age of ubiquitous and pervasive computation, where the information through a distributed interlinked network of devices the question, “what is content in the age of ambient media?” becomes more and more of importance. Ambient media are embedded throughout the natural environment of the consumer – in his home, in his car, in restaurants, and on his mobile device. Predominant example services are smart wallpapers in homes, location based services, RFID based entertainment services for children, or intelligent homes. The distribution of the medium throughout the natural environment implies a paradigm change of how to think about content. Until recently, content was identified as single entities to information – a video stream, audio stream, TV broadcast. However, in the age of ambient media, the notion of content extends from the single entity thinking towards a plethora of sensor networks, smart devices, personalized services, and media embedded in the natural environment of the user. The user actively participates and co-designs media experience with his location based input. Initiatives as the smart Web considering location based tagging for web-pages underline this development. This multidisciplinary workshop aims to answer to the challenges how to select, compose, and generate ambient content; how to present ambient content?; how to re-use ambient content and learning experiences?; what is the characteristics of ambient media, its content, and technology?; and what are ambient media in terms of story-telling and art? And finally, how do ambient media create business and value? How can ambient media be integrated into business processes and strategies? Semantics plays a crucial role in the generation of ambient media content. It can be seen as the glue between the raw data and the ambient media. Therefore we are interested to see innovative ideas how data can be (semi-)automatically be interpreted and translated into media presentations. The workshop aims at a series, and at the creation of a think-tank of creative thinkers coming from technology, art, human-computer interaction, and social sciences, that are interested in glimpsing the future of semantic ambient intelligent empowered media technology.

Ambient Media Association (AMEA)

How to Teach Research Ethics

Both of us, independently, have been “victims” of research misconduct – plagiarism as well as fabricated data. One day, while venting about these experiences, we agreed to co-teach a very practical graduate course on research ethics: “Research Ethics for the Life Sciences.” The hope was that we could ward off future problems for us, our profession, and, ultimately, society. Ethical misconduct is a big crisis in science. No longer are misdeeds buried in journals; they often make for international headlines.

Our dean and department heads were enthusiastic. They must have realized that while we were reminding them of a problem, we were also willing to step up and accept the challenge of making a difference.

Neither of us are ethicists, though that didn’t seem to matter. At first blush, bioethics, a field unto itself, might be included in a research ethics course for graduate students. But, we had more than enough ground to cover in our one-hour, one-day-a-week, 8:00 am course without including bioethics content. First and foremost, we wanted our students to learn and discuss the best practices in our fields of research. Twelve students enrolled in our experiment, a pragmatic and experiential course that primarily consisted of case study discussions.

We decided to focus on the areas where graduate students, technical staff, postdocs, and even established scientists run into trouble: plagiarism, authorship, grantsmanship, peer review, research misconduct, image fraud, whistle-blowing, conflicts of interest, patenting, and as a special topic, women in science. (See our syllabus under “teaching” at http://plantsciences.utk.edu/stewart.htm.)

The first homework assignment was to find plagiarism. They did. They found gratuitous cases, and some not so black and white. Here we parsed through what is acceptable and not acceptable from a scientific standpoint. More importantly, we discussed, rather than lectured, about best practices and what happens when shortcuts are taken. So it went for the entire semester.

For those of you who’d like to teach your own courses, here’s a bit of what we learned:

Team up with another faculty member. As coinstructors we often had disparate opinions; sometimes we agreed, and sometimes we debated. The students appreciated hearing the range of opinions from us and from their peers.
Case studies are a powerful tool. They personalized real events and problems. They helped us all empathize with wrongdoers and victims, roles we’ve found ourselves in from time to time.
Teach best practices in your discipline, and not just general issues of right and wrong. Keep it practical.
Have fun. Sometimes we felt like some of the examples could be condemning – with us being the condemned. Did I plagiarize when I recycled text from my own writing? These instances don’t sound like much fun, but the students observed that we all make mistakes and we’re all human. Don’t be afraid to laugh.
Keep class size small, with a limit of 20 students. In larger classes, shy students might not feel comfortable with sharing.
Don’t focus on morality. Focus on ethics. One of our students thanked us for that specifically.

We look forward to teaching this class again. Feel free to “plagiarize” our syllabus. Teaching this course should count toward teaching (obviously), research (making it more efficient and productive by keeping open lines of communication/expectations of staff and students), and service (to your colleagues and profession). We bet it will be the best course you’ve ever taught.

C. Neal Stewart, Jr., is professor and Ivan Racheff Chair of Excellence in Plant Molecular Genetics at the University of Tennessee, where J. Lannett Edwards is associate professor and graduate director in the Department of Animal Science.

Source: http://www.the-scientist.com/article/display/54226/

Can blogging about your research-in-progress help feed the ideas pipeline?

Crowdsourcing for science? Posted by Alison McCook
[Entry posted at 20th February 2008 01:42 PM GMT]
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Last night, I and other attendees of the Knight Science Journalism Fellowships 25th Anniversary Symposium in Boston were introduced to an interesting idea, courtesy of Clive Thompson, science writer extraordinaire for Wired and other outlets: Write blogs to get ideas.

Source: http://www.the-scientist.com/blog/display/54344/
It’s a basic concept. Thompson — a surprisingly dapper (for a writer), well-coiffed, quick-talking presenter — explained that he constantly feeds his blog, collisiondetection.net, because blogging is “highly promiscuous” — meaning, you blog and link to another blog, then that person links to you in a future post, and so on. You find out who’s linked to you (technorati.com ), check them out, and see other blogs by like-minded people, who might think about something you’d never considered before.

Journalism is a bit like science: If someone works on your same idea and publishes first, your work is practically for naught. However, Thompson convinced his editors at Wired to let him post online some information about a column he was working on, asking for reader comments. He received nearly 15,000 words from readers and 65 emails — suggesting examples that illustrate his idea, or something else to think about.

Which made me think: Should scientists be doing more of this? As in, you’ve got a question you’d like to research, but you’re not sure how best to conduct your experiment. Why not ask the scientific community? We’ve written about moves in this direction, such as Nature Precedings. Would scientists participate without poaching?

We’ve also done some of our own experiments about crowdsourcing — notably, a feature last September that asked readers how they thought tenure should change, which received over 100 comments.

Thompson had all sorts of interesting ideas about how to get — well, ideas. For instance, in front of the audience, he logged onto his profile on twitter.com, which operates under a practically inexplicable premise, and asked: “Does anyone have a question they want to ask a room full of science journalists?” Twenty minutes or so later, he checked back and found six or so questions, including our opinion of the new movie “Jumper.” One question, however, came from “Hermida” — Alfred Hermida, an assistant professor at the graduate school of journalism at the University of British Columbia, who was in the audience and scheduled to speak today (February 20). His question: “Why aren’t they on Twitter?”

By the end of Thompson’s one-hour presentation, Hermida had posted a blog about the talk on reportr.net.