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At least 19 records
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
NASA NTRS2005

Use of New Communication Technologies to Change NASA Safety Culture: Incorporating the Use of Blogs as a Fundamental Communications Tool

The purpose of this paper is to explore an innovative approach to culture change at NASA that goes beyond reorganizations, management training, and a renewed emphasis on safety. Over the last five years, a technological social revolution has been emerging from the internet. Blogs (aka web logs) are transforming traditional communication and information sharing outlets away from established information sources such as the media. The Blogosphere has grown from zero blogs in 1999 to approximately 4.5 million as of November 2004 and is expected to double in 2005. Blogs have demonstrated incredible effectiveness and efficiency with regards to affecting major military and political events. Consequently, NASA should embrace the new information paradigm presented by blogging. NASA can derive exceptional benefits from the new technology as follows: 1) Personal blogs can overcome the silent safety culture by giving voice to concerns or questions that are not well understood or seemingly inconsequential to the NASA community at-large without the pressure of formally raising a potential false alarm. Since blogs can be open to Agency-wide participation, an incredible amount of resources from an extensive pool of experience can focus on a single issue, concern, or problem and quickly vetted, discussed and assessed for feasibility, significance, and criticality. The speed for which this could be obtained cannot be matched through any other process or procedure currently in use. 2) Through official NASA established blogs, lessons learned can be a real-time two way process that is formed and implemented from the ground level. Data mining of official NASA blogs and personal blogs of NASA personnel can identify hot button issues and concerns to senior management. 3) NASA blogs could function as a natural ombudsman for the NASA community. Through the recognition of issues being voiced by the community and taking a proactive stance on those issues, credibility within NASA Management can be restored. For NASA to harness the capabilities of blogs, NASA must develop an Agency-wide policy on blogging to encourage use and provide guidance. This policy should describe basic rules of conduct and content as well as a policy of non-retribution and/or anonymity. The Agency must provide sever space within their firewalls, provide appropriate software tools, and promote blogs in newsletters and official websites. By embracing the use of blogs, a potential pool of 19,000 experts could be available to address each posted safety issue, concern, problem, or question. Blogs could result in real NASA culture change.

Huls, Dale thomas↗
DOE OSTI2012

Workload Characterization and Performance Implications of Large-Scale Blog Servers

With the ever-increasing popularity of social network services (SNSs), an understanding of the characteristics of these services and their effects on the behavior of their host servers is critical. However, there has been a lack of research on the workload characterization of servers running SNS applications such as blog services. To fill this void, we empirically characterized real-world web server logs collected from one of the largest South Korean blog hosting sites for 12 consecutive days. The logs consist of more than 96 million HTTP requests and 4.7 TB of network traffic. Our analysis reveals the followings: (i) The transfer size of non-multimedia files and blog articles can be modeled using a truncated Pareto distribution and a log-normal distribution, respectively; (ii) User access for blog articles does not show temporal locality, but is strongly biased towards those posted with image or audio files. We additionally discuss the potential performance improvement through clustering of small files on a blog page into contiguous disk blocks, which benefits from the observed file access patterns. Trace-driven simulations show that, on average, the suggested approach achieves 60.6% better system throughput and reduces the processing time for file access by 30.8% compared to the best performance of the Ext4 file system.

96 KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT AND PRESERVATION↗
DOE OSTI2014

Enhancing Graduate Student Communication to General Audiences through Blogging about Nanotechnology and Sustainability

We have developed and assessed a multiauthor science blog on the topic of nanotechnology and sustainability as a tool to improve the written communication and public engagement skills of graduate students. Focus group studies revealed that after participation in the blog, student authors felt more confident and capable of communicating technical topics to general audiences. Students' research mentors viewed this as an important component of their students' education, as indicated by survey data. Important design aspects of this effort include participation of an editor as well as having flexible content and target-audience guidelines. We have explicitly outlined aspects of the effort we see as critical in order to enable others to replicate this model in related settings.

Communication/Writing↗
NASA NTRS2011

AstroBetter: A Blog and Wiki for Professional Astronomers

AstroBetter.com is a multi-contributor blog and wiki website designed for information sharing among professional astronomers. The goal of the site is to increase the productivity of astronomers by creating a centralized location for tips and tools of our multifaceted trade. Our content includes topics related to data reduction and analysis, general computing, writing papers and proposals, giving talks, teaching, career planning, productivity, organization, and diversity and equity in science and education. While we have several contributors, the site is intended to be community driven and we encourage everyone to publish to the wiki, submit guest posts, suggest post ideas, and to comment on blog entries. One of our primary goals is to consolidate and reduce the transient nature of the astronomy community's collective knowledge base by having an active wiki. Currently, the most common way to share astro-centric tools and tips that are not appropriate for a published paper, is to put them on an individual's website. However, the average astronomer's website will have at least four different addresses over the course of their career and only the site owner can edit the content. As a result, information on personal websites goes stale very quickly and deal links to such sites abound. It is our hope that community maintained wikis, such as the one hosted on AstroBetter, will gradually replace the personal website. In this poster we introduce the contributors to AstroBetter, show statistics about our current readership, give excerpts of some of our most popular posts and wiki entries, and show how anyone can add or edit content on the wiki. The goal of this poster is to spread the work about AstroBetter and increase our community of readers and wiki editors, because together, we can AstroBetter.

Rigby, Jane↗
DOE OSTI2018

Tri-reforming of surrogate blogs over Ni/Mg/ceria-zirconia/alumina pellet catalysts

The performance of catalytic tri-reforming under industrially relevant situations (e.g., pellet catalysts, pressurized reactor) was investigated using surrogate biogas as the feedstock. Tri-reforming using Ni/Mg/Ce 0.6 Zr 0.4 O 2 /Al 2 O 3 pellet catalysts was studied in a bench scale fixed-bed reactor. The feed molar ratio for CH 4 : CO 2 : air was fixed as 1.0: 0.70: 0.95. The effects of temperature (800 – 860 °C), pressure (1 – 6 bar), and H 2 O/CH 4 molar feed ratio (0.23 – 0.65) were examined. Pressure has substantial impact on the reaction and transport rates and equilibrium conversions, making it a key variable. At 860 °C, CO 2 conversion increased from 4 to 61% and H 2 /CO molar ratio decreased from 2.0 to 1.1 as the pressure changed from 1 to 6 bar. CO 2 conversion and H 2 /CO molar ratio were also influenced by the temperature and H 2 O/CH 4 molar ratio. At 3 bar, CO 2 conversion varied between 4 and 43% and the H 2 /CO molar ratio varied between 1.2 and 1.9 as the temperature changed from 800 to 860 °C. At 3 bar and 860 °C, CO 2 conversion decreased from 35 to 8% and H 2 /CO molar ratio increased from 1.7 to 2.4 when the H 2 O/CH 4 molar ratio was increased from 0.23 to 0.65. This work demonstrates that the tri-reforming technology is feasible for converting biogas under scaled-up conditions in a fixed-bed reactor.

09 BIOMASS FUELS↗
NASA NTRS2009

Winter Camp: A Blog from the Greenland Summit, Part II

An earlier issue presents the first half of the author's experience living and working at the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Greenland Summit Camp. The author is a remote-sensing glaciologist at NASA s Goddard Space Flight Center. She took measurements that will be used to validate data collected by NASA s Aqua, Terra, and Ice, Clouds, and land Elevation Satellite (ICESat) satellites with ground-truth measurements of the Greenland Ice Sheet she made at Summit Camp from November 2008-February 2009. This article presents excerpts from the second half of her stay and work at the Greenland Summit.

Koenig, Lora↗
NASA NTRS2009

Winter Camp: A Blog from the Greenland Summit

This article presents the first half of the author's experience living and working at the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Greenland Summit Camp. The author is a remote-sensing glaciologist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. She took measurements that will be used to validate data collected by NASA s Aqua, Terra, and Ice, Clouds, and land Elevation Satellite (ICESat) satellites with ground-truth measurements of the Greenland Ice Sheet she made at Summit Camp from November 2008-February 2009. This article presents excerpts from the second half of her stay and work at the Greenland Summit. The second half of the story is presented in another issue of this journal

Koenig, Lora↗
NASA NTRS2015

IYL Blog: Astronomers travel in time and space with light

As an astronomer, I use light to travel through the universe, and to look back in time to when the universe was young. So do you! All of us see things as they were when the light was emitted, not as they are now. The farthest thing you can easily see without a telescope is the Andromeda Nebula, which is a galaxy like the Milky Way, about 2.5 million light years away. You see it as it was 2.5 million years ago, and we really don't know what it looks like today; the disk will have rotated a bit, new stars will have been born, there could have been all kinds of exploding stars, and the black hole in the middle could be lighting up. People may be skeptical of the Big Bang theory, even though we have a TV show named for it, but we (I should say Penzias and Wilson) measured its heat radiation 51 years ago at Bell Telephone Labs in New Jersey. Their discovery marks the beginning of the era of cosmology as a measurement science rather than speculation. Penzias and Wilson received the Nobel Prize in 1978 for their finding, which had been predicted in 1948 by Alpher and Herman. By the way, heat radiation is just another form of light - we call it radiation because we can't see it, but it's exactly the same phenomenon of electromagnetic waves, and the only difference is the wavelength. In the old days of analog television, if you tuned your TV in between channels, about 1% of the snow that you could see came from the Big Bang. So when we look at the heat radiation of the early universe, we really are gazing right at what seems to us a cosmic fireball, which surrounds us completely. It's a bit of an illusion; if you can imagine what astronomers in other galaxies would see, they would also feel surrounded by the fireball, and they would also think they were in the middle. So from a mathematical version of imagination, we conclude that there is no observable center and no edge of our universe, and that the heat of the fireball fills the entire universe uniformly. Astronomers are also using light to find out whether we are alone in the universe. The Kepler observatory showed that thousands of stars blink a little when their orbiting planets pass between us and them, and other observatories use light to measure the wobble of stars as their planets pull on them. Eventually, we will find out whether planets like Earth have atmospheres like Earth's too - with water, carbon dioxide, oxygen, methane, and other gases that would be evidence of photosynthetic life. I think in a few decades we will have evidence that some planets do have life, and it will be done using light for remote chemical analysis. Also, astronomers at the SETI project are using light (long wavelength light we can pick up with radio telescopes) to look for signals from intelligent civilizations. That's a harder project because we don't know what to look for. But if we wanted to send signals all the way across the Milky Way, we could do it with laser beams, and if somebody over there knew what to look for, he or she could decode the message. On with the search! Dr. John C. Mather is a Senior Astrophysicist and is the Senior Project Scientist for the James Webb Space Telescope at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, MD. His research centers on infrared astronomy and cosmology. With the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) team, he showed that the cosmic microwave background radiation has a blackbody spectrum within 50 parts per million, confirming the expanding universe model (aka the Big Bang Theory) to extraordinary accuracy, and initiating the study of cosmology as a precision science. The COBE team also made the first map of the hot and cold spots in the background radiation. The COBE maps have been confirmed and improved by two succeeding space missions, the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP, built by GSFC with Princeton University), and the Planck mission built by ESA. Based on these maps, astronomers have now developed a "standard model" of cosmology and have built detailed numerical simulations that begin to match Hubble observations, and require the existence of both "dark matter" and "dark energy", neither of which has been detected or deduced in laboratory experiments. Dr. Mather is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Nobel Prize in Physics (2006) with George Smoot, for the COBE work, and the NASA Distinguished Service Medal (2007). He is a member of many professional societies including the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Dr. Mather is now working with teams and committees to develop plans for a future great telescope capable of observing signs of life on planets orbiting other stars.

telescopes↗
NASA NTRS2010

There's Enough Space for Everyone

Only a few fortunate people have the opportunity to go into space and experience the wonders of our universe first-hand. But thanks to social media and virtual worlds, many unique opportunities exist for us to learn, explore and experience what s out there from wherever we are. NASA and Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) are making this even easier to do. From blogs to Twitter messages, from Facebook pages to Flickr Photo sites, NASA is leveraging social media to share never-before-seen footage and inside information on spaceflight, scientific discoveries and other space activities. Over the last year, Marshall has reached more than half-a-million viewers through its high-profile, real-time blogs. Through its Watching a Launch blog, visitors were invited to take the "virtual" rides of their lives as they received a first-hand account of seeing a powerful shuttle launch - up close and personal. Through the Shuttle Ferry Flight blog, they got to experience the Shuttle Atlantis journey home to Kennedy Space Center as it rode "piggyback" on a modified Boeing 747 airplane. This year, Marshall s Flickr photo galleries have been visited over 700,000 times, Ares rocket videos have been viewed on iTunes, YouTube, TeacherTube and NASA Web sites more than 1.2 million times, and Marshall s Facebook Page has over 2,800 "friends" who regularly follow NASA. Social media tools have been a powerful way to reach and inspire the public, but NASA has also used these tools effectively to promote education and outreach. From events such as the Great Moonbuggy Race to the Student Launch Initiative, Marshall has used social networks to interest, excite and engage students. This presentation shares some of NASA s experiences on what has worked . . . and what hasn't . . . and seeks to spread the message that through social media "there's enough space for everyone."

Schumacher, Daniel M.↗
NASA NTRS2010

21st Century Connections: Making Sense of Social Media Tools

Twitter? Blog? Facebook? In an environment of complex project teams and demanding timelines, you may wonder whether any of these new-fangled social media tools that are in the news will help you and your team do a better job delivering project results. What in the world is Facebook and why would I ever want to use it? What does a blog have to do with a NASA project? Aside from my teenager, who cares about Twitter? This introduction to social media is a great way to get your feet wet with some of these new terms and tools. For example, we'll talk about what the difference is between a blog and Facebook. We'll look at some examples of NASA projects that benefit from using blogs, Facebook or Twitter. Most importantly, we'll spend some time talking about how a small or medium-sized project might evaluate whether to use one, many or none of these new ideas. Although there are many commercial tools available and in use across the agency, this talk emphasizes NASA-sponsored tools that are freely available within the Agency.

Fujiech, Maura C.↗
DOE OSTI2017

Bioprose: Building the Bioeconomy through Technology & Communication Factsheet

The Bioenergy Technologies Office (BETO) Bioprose blog is a key re- source for scientific information on the U.S. bioeconomy. The blog posts will provide technical knowledge that shows how BETO sustainably deve- lops biofuels and bioproducts; they will also communicate how resear- chers are making progress in enha- ncing U.S. energy security and com- petitive advantage.

bioenergy, blog, bioprose, biofuels, bioproducts↗
DOE OSTI2015

Chinese social media analysis for disease surveillance

Here, it is reported that there are hundreds of thou- sands of deaths caused by seasonal flu all around the world every year. More other diseases such as chickenpox, malaria, etc. are also serious threats to people’s physical and mental health. There are 250,000–500,000 deaths every year around the world. Therefore proper techniques for disease surveillance are highly demanded. Recently, social media analysis is regarded as an efficient way to achieve this goal, which is feasible since growing number of people have been posting their health information on social media such as blogs, personal websites, etc. Previous work on social media analysis mainly focused on English materials but hardly considered Chinese materials, which hinders the application of such technique to Chinese peo- ple. In this paper, we proposed a new method of Chinese social media analysis for disease surveillance. More specifically, we compared different kinds of methods in the process of classification and then proposed a new way to process Chinese text data. The Chinese Sina micro-blog data collected from September to December 2013 are used to validate the effectiveness of the proposed method. The results show that a high classification precision of 87.49 % in average has been obtained. Comparing with the data from the authority, Chinese National Influenza Center, we can predict the outbreak time of flu 5 days earlier.

60 APPLIED LIFE SCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2023

A Collaboration Website for Muon Catalyzed Fusion and Muon Beam Production

This project sets up a website to support the nascent Muon Catalyzed Fusion collaboration including development of particle accelerators and transport beamlines for muon beams. The website is envisioned as having the general public information pages and private pages for collaboration members. Multimedia elements like images, text animations, and video lectures, covering a broad spectrum of topics will populate the educational site, covering muon facilities, to comprehensive explorations and seminal documents that define the science of Muon Catalyzed Fusion, Acceleration, Applications, Instrumentation, Beamline Design, and beam dynamics design codes. Ensuring compatibility across devices and operating systems, it also features integration with Google Docs for collaboration, a code repository (GitHub), a blog platform with comments (WordPress), the potential for ChatGPT integration and interactive graph plotting with Python Plotty to enhance data visualization. This project will maintain public and protected private pages, due to the proprietary nature of the work or research in progress. The public sections will be built to foster dissemination of information and highlight recent work within the NK Labs collaboration, including lectures, published papers, and regular blog posts with open commenting. The private section will support unpublished or nonpublic research, by facilitating collaborative efforts through integrated Google Docs and Python Plotty for shared graphing work. Ultimately, this project strives to make complex scientific knowledge more accessible to the public, foster enhanced collaboration, and serve as a platform for sharing cutting-edge research in Muon Catalyzed Fusion and Accelerators.

43 PARTICLE ACCELERATORS↗
NASA NTRS2009

Use of Web 2.0 Technologies for Public Outreach on a Simulated Mars Mission

Recent advances in social media and internet communications have revolutionized the ways people interact and disseminate information. Astronauts are already taking advantage of these tools by blogging and tweeting from space, and almost all NASA missions now have presences on the major social networking sites. One priotity for future human explorers on Mars will be communicating their experiences to the people back on Earth. During July 2009, a 6-member crew of volunteers carried out a simulated Mars mission at the Flashline Mars Arctic Research Station (FMARS). The Mars Society built the mock Mars habitat in 2000-01 to help develop key knowledge and inspire the public for human Mars exploration. It is located on Devon island about 1600 km from the North Pole within the Arctic Circle. The structure is situated on the rim of Haughton Crater in an environment geologically and biologically analogous to Mars. Living in a habitat, conducting EVAs wearing spacesuits, and observing communication delays with "Earth,"the crew endured restrictions similar to those that will be faced by future human Mars explorers. Throughout the expedition, crewmembers posted daily blog entries, reports, photos, videos, and updates to their website and social media outlets Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Picasa Web Albums. During the sixteen EVAs of thier field science research campaign, FMARS crewmembers collected GPS track information and took geotagged photos using GPS-enabled cameras. They combined their traverse GPS tracks with photo location information into KML/KMZ files that website visitors can view in Google Earth.

Ferrone, Kristine↗
DOE OSTI2023

A Collaboration Website for Muon Catalyzed Fusion and Muon Beam Production

This research initiative establishes a dynamic online platform geared towards supporting the burgeoning Muon Catalyzed Fusion collaboration, focusing on the concurrent development of particle accelerators and transport beamlines for muon beams. The central feature of this endeavor is the creation of a multifaceted website comprising both public facing and private sections to cater to diverse user needs. The public segment is meticulously designed to serve as an educational hub, featuring information pages targeted at the general public alongside private pages exclusively accessible to collaboration members. These pages will host an array of multimedia elements, ranging from images and text animations to video lectures, covering an extensive spectrum of topics integral to the science of Muon Catalyzed Fusion. Encompassing areas such as Acceleration, Applications, Instrumentation, Beamline Design, and beam dynamics design codes, the educational content aims to make complex scientific concepts more accessible to a broader audience. Ensuring seamless accessibility across various devices and operating systems, the website incorporates integration with collaborative tools such as Google Docs for document collaboration, GitHub for code repository management, and WordPress for blogging with interactive commenting features. The bifurcation between public and private sections is a strategic approach to maintaining transparency while safeguarding proprietary research and works in progress. The public pages are strategically crafted to disseminate information, showcasing the latest endeavors and achievements within the NK Labs collaboration, including lectures, published papers, and regular blog posts open to public comments. On the other hand, the private section provides collaboration members with a secure space to share unpublished or nonpublic research, fostering collaborative efforts through integrated Google Docs and Python Plotty for shared graphing work. In essence, this ambitious project endeavors to bridge the gap between complex scientific knowledge and public understanding, enhance collaboration among researchers, and serve as a dynamic and inclusive platform for sharing and advancing the state-of-the-art in Muon Catalyzed Fusion and Accelerators.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗