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05 October 2001
From the Forum
New Web Concept to Support Citizen Science
A potentially interesting project would be to build a website that would be a repository for link to interesting data. An enormous amount of data are posted to the web, but much of it is difficult to find and often useless to anyone other than a specialist. Even more useful would be a mechanism to alert amateurs to interesting transient phenomena.
An outstanding example of this type of site is Spaceweather. In addition to links relevant to solar astronomy and weather, it offers nice descriptions, alerts (flares, aurorae, etc) and even photography submitted by amateurs. The site is very active and is worth visiting daily (be sure and check out the helioseismic holography).
Over time one could imagine assembling a site with links to places like spaceweather as well as building important resources where such sites do not exist. One might start by trying to assemble the best of the earthquake sites and perhaps build some display tools.
It should be noted that some people have built clients that access data sites (this is particularly common in for meteorology and Solscape X for Mac OS X is a clientized version of spaceweather). These can be interesting exercises and can be useful for near real time alerts, but a web interface makes more sense and one could offer email alerts.
Steve Crandall
Miscellaneous Software for Scientists
These are some of my favorites:
Scientific Visualization:
OpenDX, the, now free, IBM's Data Explorer.
Mesa 3D, the free clone of Silicon Graphics OpenGL.Numerical Libs:
FFTW, one of the fastest implementations of the Fourier Transform.
ATLAS, one of the fastest BLAS (linear algebra) implementations.
GSL, the GNU Scientific Library.Molecular Simulations:
MolDy a molecular dynamics program for the simulation of gases, liquids and solids.Electronic Structure:
GAMESS the General Atomic and Molecular Electronic Structure System. This is a really 'for experts' program but it is free.Ana Maria Silva
I am trying to get a good size image of the Goose Lake meteorite which was discovered in N. California in 1938. The meteorite, a ton, is on display in the NMNH (National Museum of Natural History) in Wash., D.C. I'm trying to get an image for a museum in N. California near where the meteorite was found. I've contacted the NMNH about it but they do not have an image. In searching the web, I've found one small image of it, about 16K and maybe 2 by 3 inches. Having a 5 by 7" or 4 by 6" image would be much better.
Note: The opinions expressed in the SAS forum are those of the individual contributors and do not necessarily reflect the views of SAS or its staff.