We\u27re Working On It: Transferring the Sloan Digital Sky Survey from Laboratory to Library

This article reports on the transfer of a massive scientific dataset from a national laboratory to a university library, and from one kind of workforce to another. We use the transfer of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) archive to examine the emergence of a new workforce for scientific research data management. Many individuals with diverse educational backgrounds and domain experience are involved in SDSS data management: domain scientists, computer scientists, software and systems engineers, programmers, and librarians. These types of positions have been described using terms such as research technologist, data scientist, e-science professional, data curator, and more. The findings reported here are based on semi-structured interviews, ethnographic participant observation, and archival studies from 2011-2013. The library staff conducting the data storage and archiving of the SDSS archive faced two performance problems. The preservation specialist and the system administrator worked together closely to discover and implement solutions to the slow data transfer and verification processes. The team overcame these slow-downs by problem solving, working in a team, and writing code. The library team lacked the astronomy domain knowledge necessary to meet some of their preservation and curation goals. The case study reveals the variety of expertise, experience, and individuals essential to the SDSS data management process. A variety of backgrounds and educational histories emerge in the data managers studied. Teamwork is necessary to bring disparate expertise together, especially between those with technical and domain education. The findings have implications for data management education, policy and relevant stakeholders. This article is part of continuing research on Knowledge Infrastructures

The rotating molecular core and precessing outflow of the young stellar object Barnard 1c

We investigate the structure of the core surrounding the recently identified deeply embedded young stellar object Barnard 1c which has an unusual polarization pattern as traced in submillimeter dust emission. Barnard 1c lies within the Perseus molecular cloud at a distance of 250 pc. It is a deeply embedded core of 2.4 solar masses (Kirk et al.) and a luminosity of 4 +/- 2 solar luminosities. Observations of CO, 13CO, C18O, HCO+ and N2H+ were obtained with the BIMA array, together with the continuum at 3.3 mm and 2.7 mm. Single-dish measurements of N2H+ and HCO+ with FCRAO reveal the larger scale emission in these lines, The CO and HCO+ emission traces the outflow, which coincides in detail with the S-shaped jet recently found in Spitzer IRAC imaging. The N2H+ emission, which anticorrelates spatially with the C18O emission, originates from a rotating envelope with effective radius ~ 2400 AU and mass 2.1 - 2.9 solar masses. N2H+ emission is absent from a 600 AU diameter region around the young star. The remaining N2H+ emission may lie in a coherent torus of dense material. With its outflow and rotating envelope, B1c closely resembles the previously studied object L483-mm, and we conclude that it is a protostar in an early stage of evolution. We hypothesize that heating by the outflow and star has desorbed CO from grains which has destroyed N2H+ in the inner region and surmise that the presence of grains without ice mantles in this warm inner region can explain the unusual polarization signature from B1c.Comment: 17 pages, 17 figures (9 colour). Accepted to The Astrophysical Journal. For higher resolution images, see http://astrowww.phys.uvic.ca/~brenda/preprints.htm

Spatially Explicit Data: Stewardship and Ethical Challenges in Science

Scholarly communication is at an unprecedented turning point created in part by the increasing saliency of data stewardship and data sharing. Formal data management plans represent a new emphasis in research, enabling access to data at higher volumes and more quickly, and the potential for replication and augmentation of existing research. Data sharing has recently transformed the practice, scope, content, and applicability of research in several disciplines, in particular in relation to spatially specific data. This lends exciting potentiality, but the most effective ways in which to implement such changes, particularly for disciplines involving human subjects and other sensitive information, demand consideration. Data management plans, stewardship, and sharing, impart distinctive technical, sociological, and ethical challenges that remain to be adequately identified and remedied. Here, we consider these and propose potential solutions for their amelioration

Webometric analysis of departments of librarianship and information science: a follow-up study

This paper reports an analysis of the websites of UK departments of library and information science. Inlink counts of these websites revealed no statistically significant correlation with the quality of the research carried out by these departments, as quantified using departmental grades in the 2001 Research Assessment Exercise and citations in Google Scholar to publications submitted for that Exercise. Reasons for this lack of correlation include: difficulties in disambiguating departmental websites from larger institutional structures; the relatively small amount of research-related material in departmental websites; and limitations in the ways that current Web search engines process linkages to URLs. It is concluded that departmental-level webometric analyses do not at present provide an appropriate technique for evaluating academic research quality, and, more generally, that standards are needed for the formatting of URLs if inlinks are to become firmly established as a tool for website analysis

The Emerging Scholarly Brain

It is now a commonplace observation that human society is becoming a coherent super-organism, and that the information infrastructure forms its emerging brain. Perhaps, as the underlying technologies are likely to become billions of times more powerful than those we have today, we could say that we are now building the lizard brain for the future organism.Comment: to appear in Future Professional Communication in Astronomy-II (FPCA-II) editors A. Heck and A. Accomazz

We’re Working On It: Transferring the Sloan Digital Sky Survey from Laboratory to Library

This article reports on the transfer of a massive scientific dataset from a national laboratory to a university library, and from one kind of workforce to another. We use the transfer of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) archive to examine the emergence of a new workforce for scientific research data management. Many individuals with diverse educational backgrounds and domain experience are involved in SDSS data management: domain scientists, computer scientists, software and systems engineers, programmers, and librarians. These types of positions have been described using terms such as research technologist, data scientist, e-science professional, data curator, and more. The findings reported here are based on semi-structured interviews, ethnographic participant observation, and archival studies from 2011-2013. The library staff conducting the data storage and archiving of the SDSS archive faced two performance problems. The preservation specialist and the system administrator worked together closely to discover and implement solutions to the slow data transfer and verification processes. The team overcame these slow-downs by problem solving, working in a team, and writing code. The library team lacked the astronomy domain knowledge necessary to meet some of their preservation and curation goals. The case study reveals the variety of expertise, experience, and individuals essential to the SDSS data management process. A variety of backgrounds and educational histories emerge in the data managers studied. Teamwork is necessary to bring disparate expertise together, especially between those with technical and domain education. The findings have implications for data management education, policy and relevant stakeholders. This article is part of continuing research on Knowledge Infrastructures

Large-scale decontamination and decommissioning technology demonstration project at a former uranium metal production facility

The Department of Energy`s (DOE) Office of Science and Technology Decontamination and Decommissioning (D&D) Focus Area, led by the Federal Energy Technology Center, has been charged with improving upon baseline D&D technologies with the goal of demonstrating and validating more cost-effective and safer technologies to characterize, deactivate, survey, decontaminate, dismantle, and dispose of surplus structures, buildings, and their contents at DOE sites. The D&D Focus Area`s approach to verifying the benefits of the improved D&D technologies is to use them in large-scale technology demonstration (LSTD) projects at several DOE sites. The Fernald Environmental Management Project (FEMP) was selected to host one of the first three LSTD`s awarded by the D&D Focus Area. The FEMP is a DOE facility near Cincinnati, Ohio, that was formerly engaged in the production of high quality uranium metal. The FEMP is a Superfund site which has completed its RUFS process and is currently undergoing environmental restoration. With the FEMP`s selection to host an LSTD, the FEMP was immediately faced with some challenges. The primary challenge was that this LSTD was to be integrated into the FEMP`s Plant 1 D&D Project which was an ongoing D&D Project for which a firm fixed price contract had been issued to the D&D Contractor. Thus, interferences with the baseline D&D project could have significant financial implications. Other challenges include defining and selecting meaningful technology demonstrations, finding/selecting technology providers, and integrating the technology into the baseline D&D project. To date, twelve technologies have been selected, and six have been demonstrated. The technology demonstrations have yielded a high proportion of {open_quotes}winners.{close_quotes} All demonstrated, technologies will be evaluated for incorporation into the FEMP`s baseline D&D strategy

An Analysis of the Shapes of Interstellar Extinction Curves. V. The IR-Through-UV Curve Morphology

We study the IR-through-UV interstellar extinction curves towards 328 Galactic B and late-O stars. We use a new technique which employs stellar atmosphere models in lieu of unreddened "standard" stars. This technique is capable of virtually eliminating spectral mismatch errors in the curves. It also allows a quantitative assessment of the errors and enables a rigorous testing of the significance of relationships between various curve parameters, regardless of whether their uncertainties are correlated. Analysis of the curves gives the following results: (1) In accord with our previous findings, the central position of the 2175 A extinction bump is mildly variable, its width is highly variable, and the two variations are unrelated. (2) Strong correlations are found among some extinction properties within the UV region, and within the IR region. (3) With the exception of a few curves with extreme (i.e., large) values of R(V), the UV and IR portions of Galactic extinction curves are not correlated with each other. (4) The large sightline-to-sightline variation seen in our sample implies that any average Galactic extinction curve will always reflect the biases of its parent sample. (5) The use of an average curve to deredden a spectral energy distribution (SED) will result in significant errors, and a realistic error budget for the dereddened SED must include the observed variance of Galactic curves. While the observed large sightline-to-sightline variations, and the lack of correlation among the various features of the curves, make it difficult to meaningfully characterize average extinction properties, they demonstrate that extinction curves respond sensitively to local conditions. Thus, each curve contains potentially unique information about the grains along its sightline.Comment: To appear in the Astrophysical Journal, Part 1, July 1, 2007. Figures and Tables which will appear only in the electronic version of the Journal can be obtained via anonymous ftp from ftp://ftp.astronomy.villanova.edu . After logging in, change directories to "fitz/FMV_EXTINCTION". A README file describes the various files present in the director

Comparison of the predictive performance of the BIG, TRISS, and PS09 score in an adult trauma population derived from multiple international trauma registries

The BIG score (Admission base deficit (B), International normalized ratio (I), and Glasgow Coma Scale (G)) has been shown to predict mortality on admission in pediatric trauma patients. The objective of this study was to assess its performance in predicting mortality in an adult trauma population, and to compare it with the existing Trauma and Injury Severity Score (TRISS) and probability of survival (PS09) score. A retrospective analysis using data collected between 2005 and 2010 from seven trauma centers and registries in Europe and the United States of America was performed. We compared the BIG score with TRISS and PS09 scores in a population of blunt and penetrating trauma patients. We then assessed the discrimination ability of all scores via receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves and compared the expected mortality rate (precision) of all scores with the observed mortality rate. In total, 12,206 datasets were retrieved to validate the BIG score. The mean ISS was 15 ± 11, and the mean 30-day mortality rate was 4.8%. With an AUROC of 0.892 (95% confidence interval (CI): 0.879 to 0.906), the BIG score performed well in an adult population. TRISS had an area under ROC (AUROC) of 0.922 (0.913 to 0.932) and the PS09 score of 0.825 (0.915 to 0.934). On a penetrating-trauma population, the BIG score had an AUROC result of 0.920 (0.898 to 0.942) compared with the PS09 score (AUROC of 0.921; 0.902 to 0.939) and TRISS (0.929; 0.912 to 0.947). The BIG score is a good predictor of mortality in the adult trauma population. It performed well compared with TRISS and the PS09 score, although it has significantly less discriminative ability. In a penetrating-trauma population, the BIG score performed better than in a population with blunt trauma. The BIG score has the advantage of being available shortly after admission and may be used to predict clinical prognosis or as a research tool to risk stratify trauma patients into clinical trial