By Christina Folz, OPN Managing Editor
I attended a lecture this morning on “Science 2.0” at the American Center for Physics in College Park, Md. It was given by Ben Shneiderman from the University of Maryland’s Computer Science Department, who wrote a compelling article on the same topic that appeared in the March 7, 2008, issue of the journal Science.
Schneiderman made the case that modern scientists need to adapt new methods in order to keep current and solve complex 21st century problems (e.g., exploring alternative energy, reducing global warming, protecting ourselves against terrorism and remaining competitive). He talked about the need for scientists to adopt more interactive, interdisciplinary approaches that integrate social media tools (e.g., the “wiki” model for review). In addition, as they adopt Science 2.0 strategies, scientists will gradually move away from a model in which data are only generated in controlled studies; they will also embrace large data sets and case studies drawn from imperfect, multivariate, real-time, real-world data.
He also mentioned that, in the future, the underlying data for research will become more and more important, and that scientists will need to become accustomed to that reality. In fact, Shneiderman said that some scientific journals are no longer willing to publish articles if authors do not provide their raw data along with their manuscripts.
By Patricia Daukantas
Wow, I feel as if I have just been through a semester or more of graduate school—and all in the space of two and a half days!
Now, this wasn’t for credit, and I haven’t been doing homework or taking tests. I’ve just finished taking the “Fundamentals of Optics” course at the Institute of Optics Summer School at the University of Rochester. (OSA is one of the institute’s Industrial Associates.)
The course comprised five lectures: geometrical optics, taught by Duncan Moore, a past president of OSA; optical design and lens aberrations, by Julie Bentley of Corning Tropel Inc.; Fourier optics, by Nicholas George; polarization and birefringence, by Thomas Brown; and radiometry and detector principles, by Gary Wicks. We students also were offered a smorgasbord of laboratory sessions, too; among other things, I helped measure the amount of a spherical aberration in a lens and helped make a white-light hologram.
Many of the other 50 or so students taking the fundamentals class were professionals in various branches of engineering who wanted to learn more about optics. Others were in sales or technical writing, and one was a local high school technology teacher.
As for myself, it had been more than a decade since I had taken a class in physics or astronomy, and I was sorely in need of a good refresher. I’m taking home lots of notes and a better understanding of the principles behind the technology I write about for a living.
The summer school continues over the next week and a half. A course in high-resolution microscopy ran parallel to the class I took. Other courses are in modern optical engineering, opto-mechanics, lasers and optoelectronics, biomedical optics and optical thin-film coating technology. Summer school instructors whose names might be familiar to OPN readers include G. Michael Morris, another past president of OSA; James Wyant, the Society’s current vice president; Chunlei Guo, whose work in nanoscale structuring of metals has been featured in OPN’s “Scatterings” column; and James Zavislan, current chair of OPN’s editorial advisory committee.
By Patricia Daukantas
The OPN blog now has a presence on Twitter.com. If you have an account on that two-year-old social-networking site, please set it up to “follow” OPNBlog and you’ll get a notice whenever we make a blog post to OPN’s home page.
Twitter is also called a “microblogging” service because it limits posts to 140 characters each. However, there is no limit on creative ways to use the technology. For example, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory set up a Twitter feed for the Mars Phoenix Lander to “tweet” to its followers as it landed on the Red Planet and began its mission.
Please let us know what you think of this outreach effort. We hope it will make it easier for you to keep up to date with OPN’s Web site.
By Patricia Daukantas
Usually, press conferences at scientific meetings present results that have already happened instead of things that might come in handy someday. At this week’s American Astronomical Society meeting, however, a group of scientists presented a recipe for making mirrors on the moon using materials that happen to be convenient—including lots of moon dust.
Peter Chen and colleagues at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., have already manufactured a 12-inch-diameter mirror blank with the technique, which they say could be scaled up on the Moon to produce telescope mirrors as much as 50 m in diameter. Such mirrors would dwarf those of any optical telescopes on Earth.
Chen, also of the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., and his NASA team mixed carbon nanotubes and epoxy with crushed rock of the same composition and grain size as dust from the lunar surface. They found that their concoction made a strong material that could be configured as a telescope mirror, which is normally made with glass.
Several amateur astronomers—who have their own club at the NASA facility—advised Chen’s group on the polishing experiments and other details.
NASA has a Web site on the prospective lunar telescope technology and folks in both the science press and the blogosphere have been weighing in on the project as well.