How Data Will Transform Science

http://www.forbes.com/sites/gregsatell/2014/07/18/how-data-will-transform-science/

Historical closed data leads to poor science

Hi Everyone,

This is a story I thought that Data Scientists would appreciate, despite being predominately skewed to the biological sciences.

Quick background: Males of Drosophila melanogaster (Fruit Fly) 'sing' to their mates by vibrating their wings.

In 1980, researchers identified rhythms in the 'wing songs' that could be related back to particular alleles.

    Kyriacou, C.P. & Hall, J.C., 1980. Circadian rhythm mutations in
    Drosophila melanogaster affect short-term fluctuations in the
    male’s courtship song. Proceedings of the National Academy of
    Sciences, 77(11), pp.6729–6733.

The paper and its research findings enter scientific legend and are reiterated and cited over and over, despite only a few being able to reproduce their results.

Recent work has verified that the rhythms reported were actually artifacts of the way the data was analyzed.

    Stern, D.L., 2014. Reported Drosophila courtship song rhythms are
    artifacts of data analysis. BMC Biology, 12(1), p.38.

A cautionary tail or a case for the release of raw data so everyone can draw their own conclusions?

NOTE: This was an email posted to the school-of-data mailing list

school-of-data@lists.okfn.org
https://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/school-of-data

Maximising the value of research data: developing incentives and changing cultures

The value of sharing research data is widely recognised by the research community and funders are setting in place stronger policy requirements for researchers to share data. But the costs to researchers in sharing their data can be considerable and the incentives are sometimes few and far between. A recent report from the cross-disciplinary Expert Advisory Group on Data Access (EAGDA) highlights the need for a shift in cultures to provide greater support for researchers in sharing data and greater recognition for those who do it well. Dave Carr and Natalie Banner, from the Wellcome Trust, highlight some of the key findings and recommendations emerging from this work.  

http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2014/07/01/maximising-value-research-data-wellcome-trust/

NASA opens earth science data, cloud computing to the public as part of new contest

SUMMARY:

NASA is launching a new challenge, hosted on Amazon Web Services, that gives the public access to a trove of earth sciences data and computational resources in the name of discovering new uses for all that information.

NASA launched a new contest Tuesday for imagining and then building new uses for the space agency’s trove of earth sciences data. The challenge — actually two of them, broken down into the imagination and building stages — kicks off on July 1 and runs through Nov. 15, and utilizes the NASA Open Earth Exchange platform. The exchange’s datasets and informational material, as well as the computing resources for the challenge, are hosted on Amazon Web Services.

http://gigaom.com/2014/06/24/nasa-opens-earth-science-data-cloud-computing-to-the-public-as-part-of-new-contest/