Posts tagged mobile
CU researchers plotting the "Map of Life
May 22nd
A research team involving Yale University and the University of Colorado Boulder has developed a first public demonstration version of its “Map of Life,” an ambitious Web-based endeavor designed to show the distribution of all living plants and animals on the planet.
The demonstration version allows anyone with an Internet connection to map the known global distribution of almost 25,000 species of terrestrial vertebrate animals, including mammals, birds, amphibians, reptiles and North American freshwater fish. The database, which continues to expand, already contains hundreds of millions of records on the abundance and distribution of the planet’s diverse flora and fauna.
“We are taking 200 years of different types of knowledge coming from different sources, all documenting the locations of species around the world and compiling them in a way that will greatly enhance our knowledge of biodiversity,” said CU-Boulder Associate Professor Robert Guralnick of the ecology and evolutionary biology department, part of the Map of Life research team. “Such information could be used by any organization that needs to make informed decisions regarding land management, health, conservation and climate change.”
The initial version of the map tool being released today is intended to introduce it to the broader public, according to the researchers. It allows users to see several levels of detail for a given species — at its broadest, the type of environment it lives in, and at its finest, specific locations where the species’ presence has been documented. One function allows users to click a point on the map and generate a list of vertebrate species in the surrounding area. More functions will be added over time, according to the team.
“It is the where and the when of a species,” said Walter Jetz, associate professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Yale and the project lead. “It puts at your fingertips the geographic diversity of life. Ultimately, the hope is for this literally to include hundreds of thousands of animal and plant species and show how much or indeed how little we know of their whereabouts.”
A paper by Jetz, Guralnick and Jana McPherson of the Calgary Zoological Society describing the evolving Map of Life technology tool appeared in a recent issue of the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution.
By highlighting the known abundance and distribution of species, the researchers hope to identify and fill knowledge gaps and also offer a tool for detecting change over time. They expect the map tool will prove useful for professional scientists, wildlife and land managers, conservation organizations and the general public.
The team is using information gleaned from a wide variety of sources, including field guides, museum collections and wildlife checklists that involved scientists, conservation organizations and “citizen scientists.” The project’s success will depend on participation by other scientists and informed amateurs, and subsequent versions of the mapping tool will offer mechanisms for users to supply new or missing information about the distribution and abundance of particular species.
Jetz called the Map of Life “an infrastructure, something to help us all collaborate, improve, share and understand the still extremely limited geographic knowledge about biodiversity.” The team continues to work on several other tasks and challenges, including who will be contributing data and how information supplied by the contributors will be verified and curated.
“A small but powerful next step is to provide a means for anyone, anywhere on the globe to use their mobile devices to instantly pull up animal and plant distributions and even get a realistic assessment on the odds of encountering a particular species of wildlife,” said Guralnick, who also is the curator of invertebrate zoology at the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History.
Guralnick said the Map of Life project is following in the footsteps of other knowledge repositories like the GenBank project, a National Institutes of Health-funded effort with a public database of more than 135 million gene sequences from more than 300,000 organisms that allows users to explore genes and genomes using bioinformatics tools. In the biodiversity arena, the Global Biodiversity Information Facility in Copenhagen has developed an important resource that provides access to more than 300 million records of plant and animal occurrences, which is one of the distributional databases being used by the Map of Life team.
The National Science Foundation has provided initial support for the Map of Life project. Other supporters are the Encyclopedia of Life; the International Union for the Conservation of Nature; and the Senckenberg Research Institute and Natural History Museum, and the Biodiversity and Climate Research Center, both in Germany.
The public demonstration version of Map of Life can be found at http://www.mappinglife.org/ and more information about the project is available at http://www.mappinglife.org/about.
Get free music downloads at BPL
Apr 18th
For everyone who’s ever heard a song on the radio and wanted to add it their collection, wanted a hit single off an album, or just wanted to explore the work of new musical artists, Boulder Public Library offers a new, free online music download service. Freegal Music, a downloadable music service designed for libraries, is now available through the library’s website at: http://boulderlibrary.freegalmusic.com/.
Freegal is free for all Boulder Public Library (BPL) cardholders who live in Boulder County, and all downloads may be kept permanently. Each library cardholder may download up to three songs per week (156 per year) and keep the songs forever. All that is needed to access this service is a Boulder Public Library card number in good standing.
Freegal Music provides access to the Sony Music Entertainment catalog, which includes hundreds of thousands of songs, more than 100 genres of music, and more than 50 record labels. No special software is needed to use the service, and there are no digital rights management restrictions. Downloading of songs is completely free and legal for library cardholders. Songs are downloaded in a universally compatible MP3 format, so they can be saved to any computer, mobile device or MP3 player, including an iPod. Songs can be downloaded at home or at computer stations in libraries via a USB device, such as a flash drive or MP3 player. One click and you can save the songs to your iTunes or Windows Media Player.
“We are excited to be able to offer this free music download service to Boulder Public Library cardholders,” said Valerie Maginnis, library director. “It gives our patrons access to more of the materials they want, in a convenient, accessible format, while also being highly efficient for the library. We anticipate that this will be a very popular new service.”
More information and answers to frequently asked questions about Freegal are available on the BPL website, www.boulderlibrary.org. Music can also be found in the library’s catalog by searching for “Freegal.” BPL offers other music and film streaming services, such as Alexander Street, which offers 30,000 albums for streaming, at: http://research.boulderlibrary.org/music_film.
CU’s Android App tweets disaster aid
Sep 28th
PEOPLE TWEET DURING DISASTERS
Just as codes once were developed for public safety communication via citizens band radios, a common language now is being formulated for disaster communication via Twitter — posing a challenge for people who haven’t yet learned or can’t recall it.
Daniel Schaefer, a University of Colorado Boulder doctoral student in communication, recently created a solution to this problem in the form of a software application, or app, for mobile devices. It turns everyday language into a Twitter syntax used during disasters through a special smart phone keyboard.
“Twitter has become popular during disasters because it offers a concise and efficient communication medium,” said Schaefer, who was inspired by the 2010 Fourmile Canyon Fire near Boulder. “However, a need to standardize the syntaxes used on Twitter has surfaced particularly for the emergency personnel, affected individuals, concerned loved ones, information officers and journalists who use it to provide and monitor information and collaborate on rescue efforts.”
The free app, called the Bucket Brigade Keyboard, is designed for Android devices. It transforms the standard smart phone keyboard display into a keypad of 12 message choices such as “help,” “location” and “request.” When these messages are selected, corresponding tweets — about one’s status, needs and offers to help — are queued for posting online.
“In a disaster, communication and working together can save lives,” said Schaefer. “Just as a bucket brigade fills and passes buckets of water to help put out a fire, this app allows people to fill and pass buckets of tweets to help during a disaster.”
The syntax used in Schaefer’s app — which turns an “I’m Ok” key into “#imok” — is based on a concept devised in 2009 by doctoral student Kate Starbird of CU’s Project EPIC (Empowering the Public with Information in Crisis) research group. The streamlining of disaster-related Twitter communication through Starbird’s idea, called “Tweak the Tweet,” makes the information computationally easier to extract and collate, which can help connect people with needs to responders.
Nearly 3,000 tweets using the Tweak the Tweet syntax were posted in the weeks following the 2010 earthquake in Haiti. More than 500 tweets using the syntax were posted in the wake of the 2011 tornado in Joplin, Mo.
During those instances, users manually entered text that now can be deployed with the touch of a button through the Bucket Brigade Keyboard.
The app not only empowers people with a standard language, but also is designed for convenience using accessible technology, according to Schaefer.
“People are going to be holding smart phones during disasters,” he said. “They’re not going to be going to laptop computers or cafés with time to look up the syntax.”
Schaefer entered the Bucket Brigade Keyboard in the Federal Communications Commission’s Apps for Communities contest. The challenge calls for apps that help local government deliver quality-of-life-improving information to populations that are typically disenfranchised or disconnected from broadband communications.
The Bucket Brigade Keyboard has been downloaded in 20 countries.
Schaefer says a planned update to the Bucket Brigade Keyboard will add more Twitter shortcuts to the app, as well as auto-fill and auto-correction features.
For more information on the Bucket Brigade Keyboard visit https://market.android.com/details?id=com.bucketbrigade.softkeyboard&feature=search_result. For information on the Apps for Communities challenge visit http://appsforcommunities.challenge.gov/.
-CU-