Issues for Science and Engineering Researchers in the Digital Age (2001) / Chapter Skim
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The Research Process in a Digital World
The Research Process in a Digital World
Pages 9-23
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From page 9... ...
The proliferation of data on the world's networks is making available at a mouse-click information that has traditionally required hard, time-consuming work to gather. Digital technologies not only facilitate traditional research tasks, but also enable previously impractical analysis (i.e., being able to simultaneously retrieve information from diverse archives and to correlate it)
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From page 10... ...
(Powerful statistical software packages, for example, may be misused by people who do not understand the proper application of statistics.) Blind use of the powerful tools of digital technology, without regard to underlying assumptions, can lead to errors that are difficult to avoid and detect.
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From page 11... ...
Sifting all this data in a timely way is an enormous challenge to researchers, but it is critical in order to maximize the value of the data collections. Computer systems that are powerful enough to browse files with hundreds of billions of bytes and display visually millions of pixels may also provide powerful tools for gleaning insights from massive data collections.
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From page 12... ...
Exploratory visual "data mining" has proven to have powerful benefits in pharmaceutical drug discovery, digital libraries, and gene data presentation. Novel strategies include parallel coordinates or starfield visualizations for multidimensional data, zoomable timelines for temporal data presentations, and tree maps or hyperbolic trees for hierarchies.
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From page 13... ...
Geographically distributed groups can now better collaborate, enabled by ready exchange of data, programs, videoconferencing, and software version control systems that function across networks. The widespread adoption of the English language for international research communication, evolving technologies of machine translation, and multilingual information retrieval along with new digital tools for translating and retrieving information in many languages have also reduced barriers to collaboration.
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From page 14... ...
Digital tools to support research collaboration can begin with basic tools such as e-mail, audio/video conferencing, and screen-sharing programs that are freely available. The next generation of synchronous and asynchronous tools will be tailored to the needs of specific communities such as environmental scientists using NASA remote-sensing data sets or physicists sharing complex and expensive real-time experimental equipment.
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From page 15... ...
Today the extraordinary power of advanced scientific computers enables predictive simulation of complex phenomena directly from fundamental microscopic principles. Numerical simulations may tend to draw more closely together modelers, theoreticians, and experimentalists, because their tools (digital sensors, simulations, networks, and databases)
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From page 16... ...
National Nanofabrication Facility (http://www.nnf.cornell.edu) ; · The intermediate voltage electron microscope at the University of California at San Diego (http: / /www-ncmir.ucsd.edu/CMDA/ and http: / /www-ncmir.ucsd.edu/MIBC/~; · MOSIS, a remotely accessible facility for prototyping integrated circuits; · The synchrotron X-ray data collection facility at the Stanford Linear Accelerator (http://ssrl.slac.stanford.edu/~; · The NSF-funded chain of incoherent scatter radars for measuring electromagnetic phenomena in the magnetosphere; · The planned NSF Polar Cap Observatory; · The Telescopes in Education (TIE)
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From page 17... ...
Distributed Computing One area of research that the burgeoning networks have made possible is so-called distributed computing: using varied collections of computers, data collection and visualization engines, linked by communications networks, to solve largescale computing problems. Projects such as "Distributed.Net" or the "Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence," which rely on loosely knit groups of volunteer computer users from all around the world, are changing the paradigm for solving complex problems by distributing processing activity over networks of thousands or even millions of computers.
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From page 18... ...
So too will be work on tools to help humans rapidly review summaries, visualizations, and other organizations of information as we move from a black-and-white view of "relevance" to a fuzzier structuring that allows flexible human control. Archiving Research Data Another growing function of the university library may be the archiving of research data.
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From page 19... ...
In the broad sense, digital libraries are human and technological systems and institutions, with collections and processes that have at least some digital aspects, usually at least an electronic catalog. At the upper end of the development scale are information systems that support rich hypermedia collections, helping people communicate and collaborate over space and time as they use data, information, and knowledge (Leek, 1997~.
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From page 20... ...
Questions of research priority have grown sharper for many researchers in the past decade or so, since, in some fields, research results are potentially valuable intellectual property. (For a discussion of the changing status of research priority, see Nissenbaum, 1998.)
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From page 21... ...
It is envisioned as a "two-tiered" site, with one tier containing peer-reviewed reports much like those to be found in a printed journal, and the other (larger) tier containing information on virtually all publicly funded biomedical research.
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From page 22... ...
It would thereby speed progress. Critics of the proposal, including editors of many conventional journals, worry that it would propagate poor quality science, which, rather than speeding progress, might impede it as large numbers of researchers attempt to replicate incorrect results that would have been exposed by vigorous peer review.
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From page 23... ...
However, the significance of this effect remains to be seen; researchers at poorer colleges and universities are likely to lag those in richer institutions in gaining access to the new digital tools. Another possible result is a shift in emphasis of scientific research, farther from more-or-less direct observation of nature toward observation that is mediated by the available instruments, networks, and databases on the world's information networks.
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