Ada Lovelace Day

About The Authors

Suw Charman-Anderson

Suw Charman-Anderson

Suw Charman-Anderson is a social software consultant and writer who specialises in the use of blogs and wikis behind the firewall. With a background in journalism, publishing and web design, Suw is now one of the UK’s best known bloggers, frequently speaking at conferences and seminars.

Her personal blog is Chocolate and Vodka, and yes, she’s married to Kevin.

Email Suw

Kevin Anderson

Kevin Anderson

Kevin Anderson is a freelance journalist and digital strategist with more than a decade of experience with the BBC and the Guardian. He has been a digital journalist since 1996 with experience in radio, television, print and the web. As a journalist, he uses blogs, social networks, Web 2.0 tools and mobile technology to break news, to engage with audiences and tell the story behind the headlines in multiple media and on multiple platforms.

From 2009-2010, he was the digital research editor at The Guardian where he focused on evaluating and adapting digital innovations to support The Guardian’s world-class journalism. He joined The Guardian in September 2006 as their first blogs editor after 8 years with the BBC working across the web, television and radio. He joined the BBC in 1998 to become their first online journalist outside of the UK, working as the Washington correspondent for BBCNews.com.

And, yes, he’s married to Suw.

E-mail Kevin.

Member of the Media 2.0 Workgroup
Dark Blogs Case Study

Case Study 01 - A European Pharmaceutical Group

Find out how a large pharma company uses dark blogs (behind the firewall) to gather and disseminate competitive intelligence material.


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All content © Kevin Anderson and/or Suw Charman

Interview series:
at the FASTforward blog. Amongst them: John Hagel, David Weinberger, JP Rangaswami, Don Tapscott, and many more!

Corante Blog

Thursday, September 2nd, 2010

Tom Humphrey, Herbaria@home: crowd-sourcing the documentation of natural science collections

Posted by Suw and Kevin

Strange Attractor has now permanently moved to charman-anderson.com. Please pop over there to to read and comment on the full version of this post. Thank you!

Herbaria@home, herbarium records, snapshot of the world before agriculture, including areas now completely obliterated. Found plant, Ghost Orchid, thought to be extinct.

Plant don’t move, but they do invade, e.g. Oxford Ragwort. Scilian plant introduced in 1700 to an Oxford botanical garden, escaped, and now has spread out across UK. Roesbay willowherb, but railways have distributed seeds and now it’s everywhere. Plants also go by road, e.g. Danish scurvy grass, should be coastal, but now has colonised verges.

Plant populations are in flux. Modern survey data alone isn’t enough, so need the historic data to give context.

Web based project to

Thursday, September 2nd, 2010

Bruce Allen, Einstein@Home: hunting for neutron stars with gravitational and radio waves

Posted by Suw and Kevin

Strange Attractor has now permanently moved to charman-anderson.com. Please pop over there to to read and comment on the full version of this post. Thank you!

Einstein@Home is a traditional citizen science project. Have 100,000 computers at any one time contacting project and looking for work. People join the project by joining website, download & install software, and then leave it alone. Get a screensaver (which is very pretty!), and when their computer is idle it is analysing data.

Physics experiment data. Not simulating, but taking real data about physical world and searching for very weak signals that reveal neutron stars – very compact, small start, 10km radius, which beams radio waves like a lighthouse. As beam passes by Earth you see a flash. Forms when

Thursday, September 2nd, 2010

Myles Allen, Why does climate science needs petaflops?

Posted by Suw and Kevin

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Most citizen computing projects can do no wrong. That does not apply to climate science. ClimatePrediction.net raises a few hackles, often in situations such as a recent meeting about investment in supercomputer, and when someone said, “I hear you can do a lot of this on PS3s nowadays?” there was a degree of hostility.

It’s just a way of addressing certain problems. People think of models as being done on a petaFLOP Cray XT-6, but most climate scientists don’t have access to these. They can have access to citizen scientists.

Climate modelling depends on:

  • Complexity, e.g. number of processes,

Thursday, September 2nd, 2010

David Anderson, A Brief History of (CPU) Time

Posted by Suw and Kevin

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Comp scientist at UC Berkley, building platform for citizen science. Looking for commonalities, software support that addresses community’s needs to make it easier for scientists to use volunteer power. Tech is only one piece of the solution.

Build platforms for:

  • Volunteer computing
  • Distributed thinking
  • Education

Computational science:

Simulations are now so vastly complex that they can only be done on computer. Simulations at various scales,  e.g. proteins, ecosystems, Earth, galaxy, universe. . Need lots of computing power because need to fit models to observed data. To predict what’s going to happen you need to run thousands or millions of simulations.

Generation of new

Thursday, September 2nd, 2010

Christian Thiemann, Follow the money: what we’ve learned from ‘Where’s George?’

Posted by Suw and Kevin

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Where’s George? is a project tracking one dollar notes in the US. Put a stamp on the note, and log it on the website. Creates link between the two places where the not was logged. Provides a lot of data about how money moves around the US, therefore data about how people move around the US.

Administrative system of US: Divisions contain States contain Counties. Spatially compact hierarchical structure historically evolved with geographic determinants.

Human mobility – are these divisions spatially compact, determined by geography? How much geography is encoded in the network of money movements?

Can make groups of

Thursday, September 2nd, 2010

David Grier, Lessons from the Ancient History of Crowd Sourcing

Posted by Suw and Kevin

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I’m here at the Citizen Cyberscience Summit for the next two days. Expect quite a few notes (although probably not all session!).

Lessons in crowdsourcing.

Nothing new under the sun. Science shaped by forces that have existed a long time, and we understand them. Works on calculation and making mathematical models work. That has long history as being citizen science, going back 200 years. Take large task, divide into small exchangeable jobs, send out into the world with instructions on how to do them. Charles Babbage wrote extensively about this in the 1830s.

Babbage was thinking about this because of

Wednesday, September 1st, 2010

links for 2010-09-01

Posted by Suw and Kevin

Strange Attractor has now permanently moved to charman-anderson.com. Please pop over there to to read and comment on the full version of this post. Thank you!

  • Kevin: This looks very handy for data journalism. Paste in CSV or tab-delimited data into a form, and it will output the data in common web data formats such as JSON, XML, Actionscript or Ruby.
  • Kevin: Ellie Behling at eMedia Vitals writes: "Despite slow adoption rates, media brands should pay attention to location-based services. Localized information is probably the next frontier for information; it's just catching on slowly. As the technology evolves and smartphones become more popular, adoption will increase."

Tuesday, August 31st, 2010

links for 2010-08-31

Posted by Suw and Kevin

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Monday, August 30th, 2010

links for 2010-08-30

Posted by Suw and Kevin

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Sunday, August 29th, 2010

links for 2010-08-29

Posted by Suw and Kevin

Strange Attractor has now permanently moved to charman-anderson.com. Please pop over there to to read and comment on the full version of this post. Thank you!