Tuesday, January 26, 2016

The Return of Live Broadcast Experiments at UWYO

Join the fun and watch some live experiments being broadcast now from the University of Wyoming by Kim Miller and Brandon McElroy.

https://youtu.be/6biMhboBczA

Leave comments on the youtube site and provide your feedback to our science experiments!

Wednesday, January 20, 2016

January Newsletter

Dear Experimentalists,

We hope everyone is having a great start to the New Year.   We have exciting news to get 2016 started on the right foot!

This issue contains the following:

  1. 2015 Year in Review
  2. Events for 2016
  3. Three easy ways to get involved in EarthCube
  4. SEAD 2.0 Launch Webinar


2015 Year in Review
2015 has been a great year for SEN. In case you missed some of it, here are a few highlights.  We presented an invited talk at the 46th annual Binghamton Geomorphology Symposium with a corresponding paper in Geomorphology.   We also held our first graduate student and early career travel grant contest for funds to AGU.  This contest is the first of many that SEN will be funding.   We started broadcasting live experiments using YouTube so that scientists from around the globe could participate in data collection. At the AGU Fall Meeting this year, we spread the word about SEN and the Wiki by handing out buttons and stickers.  The Wiki (www.sedexp.net) saw many helpful updates as well as 81 entries to the Knowledge Base with 21 new accounts created on sedexp.net.  For more information on these events and others, please check out the archive on the SEN blog.

Events for 2016
SEN has many exciting events planned for 2016.  Here are a few that are currently in the works:
CSDMS/SEN Annual Meeting
SEN will be cohosting the Community Surface Dynamics Modeling System’s (CSDMS) annual meeting being held on May 17-19th, 2016 in Boulder, Colorado.  This year’s theme is Capturing Climate Change.  Keynote talks and hands-on clinics will focus on “advances in simulating the imprint of climate change on the land and seascapes, including the processes that influence them”. For more information or to register, please follow this link.

SEN Travel Grant Contest to CSDMS/SEN Annual Meeting
SEN is sponsoring a data-utilization contest for graduate-student and early-career geoscience modelers who feel passionate about advancing science through experimental data sharing and reuse. The top four winners of the data-utilization contest will have all travel and registration costs paid for. For more information or to register, please follow this link.

More Live Experiments
SEN will be broadcasting more live experiments this year.  Please stay tuned to the SEN twitter account (@sedimentexp) and the blog for updates and links to live feeds.  If you are interested in broadcasting your experiments, please email us (sedimentexp@gmail.com) and we can help you get set up.

Three easy ways to get involved in EarthCube  
Much of the funding from NSF's EarthCube program goes to projects developing technologies to aid in geoscience research.  Below are three ways you can learn more about, get involved with, and inform the future of these projects.

Not sure if EarthCube projects are useful for you?  
Check out the newly created "EarthCube Tools for Doing Geoscience" monthly webinar series (goo.gl/1E6gEJ).  An upcoming webinar on Friday, 1/22 at 2 PM EST (11 AM PST) will describe OntoSoft's efforts to train scientists in writing "Geoscience Papers of the Future" that document data and methods associated with published research.

Found a new technology of interest and want to learn more?  
If you are a graduate student or early career scientist, apply for an EarthCube "Visiting Scholar Travel Grant."  This will pay for you to visit the institution developing the technology to learn more about applying it to your research.  More information can be found here: goo.gl/UEydTb.

Feel like EarthCube isn't meeting your technical needs?  
Submit a Use Case.  This is basically a formal description of the technical needs for your research project.  Take two minutes to fill out a simple survey (goo.gl/As9NRh), then a member of EarthCube will follow up with you to conduct a phone interview.  The Use Cases will help to inform the funding and development of future EarthCube projects, so here's your chance to steer EarthCube toward building technologies that are useful for you.

SEAD 2.0 Launch webinar (1/21) 
SEN has been partnering with SEAD ("Sustainable Environment Actionable Data") to link our SEN Knowledge Base with their technical tools for storing data and making it discoverable.  SEAD is launching an upgraded version 2.0 and is hosting a webinar to describe their new release.  The webinar will be held on Thursday, 1/21, at 1:30 PM EST (10:30 AM PST).  More information is available here: http://sead-data.net/webinar-introduction-to-sead-2-0-the-next-generation-of-sead-data-services/

For up to date information about SEN, please check out our blog at http://sedimentexperiments.blogspot.com/ and follow us on Twitter (@sedimentexp).

Happy experimenting,
The Sediment Experimentalist Network

Wednesday, January 13, 2016

SEN / CSDMS travel grant contest

The Sediment Experimentalist Network (SEN) is sponsoring a data-utilization contest for graduate-student and early-career geoscience modelers who feel passionate about advancing science through experimental data sharing and reuse. The top four winners of the data-utilization contest will have all travel and registration costs paid for their participation at the 2016 joint CSDMS (Community Surface Dynamics Modeling System) - SEN annual meeting in Boulder, CO, on May 17-19, 2016.


The Sediment Experimentalist Network (SEN) is funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) EarthCube program as a Research Coordination Network (RCN). SEN integrates the efforts of sediment experimentalists to build a knowledge base for data collection and management. The network facilitates cross-institutional collaborative experiments and communicates with the research community about data and metadata guidelines for sediment-based experiments. This effort aims to improve the efficiency and transparency of sedimentary research for field geologists and modelers as well as experimentalists. More information is available here: http://earthcube.org/group/sen


In contrast with past contests focused on submission of data entries to the SEN Knowledge Base (www.sedexp.net), the purpose of this contest is toward the utilization of Knowledge Base entries and the coordination of new collaborations between modelers and experimentalists through SEN toward achieving science goals.  In particular, how can sediment experimental data be utilized to inform, test, and refine models and predictions for earth surface processes?  This will be a major goal of this year’s joint CSDMS-SEN annual meeting on “Capturing Climate Change.”


Applicants will be judged primarily on the basis of a brief (2 page max) proposal describing how items in the SEN Knowledge Base can help to answer a science question of interest.  We particularly encourage contest entrants to try to track down data and existing experimental facilities and their capabilities listed on the SEN Knowledge Base.  If data can be found, we encourage descriptions of preliminary analyses in the proposal.  If data cannot be found or are difficult to use, please explain the problems you encountered and ways these problems might be addressed in future development of the SEN Knowledge Base.  If data do not exist but potential experimental collaborators can be found, please describe a collaborative project that can be coordinated through SEN. (Please note that we will be highlighting the proposals of successful applications during the CSDMS / SEN meeting.)


Eligibility
This contest is open to current graduate students and early career scientists (within 5 years of graduating) who are interested in advancing science through data sharing and reuse.


Requirements
  1. Sign up for the SEN Newsletter: http://goo.gl/s7dLjb
  2. Create a Knowledge Base account at www.sedexp.net
  3. Start browsing entries containing experimental data, set-ups, methods, and equipment relevant to your science question.
  4. Think of an earth-surface science question to be answered using experimental data and/or new collaborations with experimentalists and prepare your proposal as described above.
  5. Prepare an abstract for the SEN / CSDMS that mentions your proposed data utilization idea, and include this in your presentation at the meeting.  The data utilization idea does not need to be a central feature of your CSDMS presentation, but it should be included.
  6. Write a brief (one paragraph) professional biography.
  7. Deadline for submissions is April 1, 2016.  When registering for the CSDMS meeting, be sure to check the box to indicate that you are applying for the SEN / CSDMS travel grant.  Then, send your application materials (proposal, professional biography) to sedimentexp@gmail.com by April 1, 2016.


Selection of Winners
Winners will be selected on the following criteria:
  1. Originality of proposal.
  2. Depth of engagement with the SEN Knowledge Base.
  3. Applicability of proposal to planned presentation at CSDMS.
  4. Feasibility of proposal and qualifications of applicant toward proposed idea.
Winners will be notified via email and will be given instructions on the funding process. Names of winners will also be featured in the SEN Newsletter. Winners should acknowledge funding from NSF SEN when presenting their work at the CSDMS meeting.


Timeline
~January 15th: Contest opens
April 1st: Deadline for CSDMS abstract submission, registration, and SEN travel grant application
April 15th: Notification of winners
May 17-19th: CSDMS meeting (Boulder, Colorado)

Questions? Please contact SEN at sedimentexp@gmail.com.