MERRA Analytic Services: Meeting the Big Data Challenges of Climate Science Through Cloud-enabled Climate Analytics-as-a-service

Climate science is a Big Data domain that is experiencing unprecedented growth. In our efforts to address the Big Data challenges of climate science, we are moving toward a notion of Climate Analytics-as-a-Service (CAaaS). We focus on analytics, because it is the knowledge gained from our interactions with Big Data that ultimately produce societal benefits. We focus on CAaaS because we believe it provides a useful way of thinking about the problem: a specialization of the concept of business process-as-a-service, which is an evolving extension of IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS enabled by Cloud Computing. Within this framework, Cloud Computing plays an important role; however, we it see it as only one element in a constellation of capabilities that are essential to delivering climate analytics as a service. These elements are essential because in the aggregate they lead to generativity, a capacity for self-assembly that we feel is the key to solving many of the Big Data challenges in this domain. MERRA Analytic Services (MERRAAS) is an example of cloud-enabled CAaaS built on this principle. MERRAAS enables MapReduce analytics over NASAs Modern-Era Retrospective Analysis for Research and Applications (MERRA) data collection. The MERRA reanalysis integrates observational data with numerical models to produce a global temporally and spatially consistent synthesis of 26 key climate variables. It represents a type of data product that is of growing importance to scientists doing climate change research and a wide range of decision support applications. MERRAAS brings together the following generative elements in a full, end-to-end demonstration of CAaaS capabilities: (1) high-performance, data proximal analytics, (2) scalable data management, (3) software appliance virtualization, (4) adaptive analytics, and (5) a domain-harmonized API. The effectiveness of MERRAAS has been demonstrated in several applications. In our experience, Cloud Computing lowers the barriers and risk to organizational change, fosters innovation and experimentation, facilitates technology transfer, and provides the agility required to meet our customers' increasing and changing needs. Cloud Computing is providing a new tier in the data services stack that helps connect earthbound, enterprise-level data and computational resources to new customers and new mobility-driven applications and modes of work. For climate science, Cloud Computing's capacity to engage communities in the construction of new capabilies is perhaps the most important link between Cloud Computing and Big Data

Making sense of leadership development: Developing a community of education leaders

In education literature there is a distinct lack of scholarly work on issues of leadership other than on functional leadership at lower levels or high-level individual leadership activity which dominates existing studies. This empirical research is based on the result of a merger of education providers within the North East of England. A crucial aspiration of the newly merged organisation was to provide an overarching innovative leadership structure to facilitate integrated leadership. The specific focus of this article is participants of a bespoke postgraduate learning intervention. The authors apply sense-making theory to identify how student-leaders undertaking a leadership development intervention developed to become a community of education leaders. The reflective accounts of the student-leaders indicated a combined approach of distributed, shared and collaborative leadership. Whilst the study was conducted in the UK, the concepts and ideas are likely to have international application

Effective dementia education and training for the health and social care workforce: A systematic review of the literature

Ensuring an informed and effective dementia workforce is of international concern, however there remains limited understanding of how this can be achieved. This systematic review aimed to identify factors associated with effective dementia educational programmes. Critical Interpretive Synthesis underpinned by Kirkpatrick’s return on investment model for evaluation of education was applied. One hundred and fifty-two papers of variable quality were included in the review. Common features of more efficacious educational programmes included the need for educational programmes to: be relevant to participants’ role and experience; involve active face-to-face participation; underpin practice-based learning with theory; be delivered by an experienced facilitator; have a total duration of at least eight hours with individual sessions of 90 minutes or more; support application of learning in practice; and provide a structured tool or practice guideline to underpin care practice. Further robust research is required to develop the evidence base; however, the findings of this review have relevance for all working in workforce education

The impact of whole-person development programmes on managerial learning

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Outsourcing A flexible option for the future?

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Modeling And Measuring Gouy Phase Anomaly In Astigmatic Beams

We simulate the predicted Gouy phase anomaly near astigmatic foci of Gaussian beams using a beam propagation algorithm integrated with lens design software and compare computational results with experimental data using a modified Mertz Interferometer. © 2010 Optical Society of America

Individual commitment to learning Motivation and rewards

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