The Computing Community Consortium — a partnership between CRA and the National Science Foundation that seeks to catalyze the computing research community to debate longer-range, more audacious research challenges, then work to realize them — has launched its new blog, and it’s definitely worth checking out.
Given the goal of CCC to get the community talking about research visions (and then setting to work on developing the most promising ones into clearly defined initiatives that could receive funding from various federal agencies), a blog seems like a reasonable way to help spur the discussions. Researchers on the CCC Council will author some of the initial (hopefully opinionated) pieces, but I think the hope is that the discussions will get carried on both in the open comments section and in some additional online fora.
Anyway, you can check it out at http://www.cccblog.org. They’ve already got a good summary of some of the activities of the new CCC “Big Data Computing Study Group” — including the Hadoop Summit and the Data-Intensive Scalable Computing Symposium.
The blog also looks really nice — I’m a little jealous and am wondering whether my IT guy (who is also CCC’s IT guy) can set me up with the same nice WordPress setup — and features open commenting and the ability to subscribe to the articles via e-mail, which is very handy. Definitely worth checking out.

 

The saying is that a picture is worth a thousand words. Well, NSF and AAAS agree and are sponsoring the sixth annual Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge. There are five awards categories: Photographs/Pictures, Illustrations/Drawings, Informational/Explanatory Graphics, Interactive Media, and Non-Interactive Media. The deadline for entries is May 31.
The premise of the Challenge is that science is often communicated through visuals better than words, particularly in our web and graphics culture. Winning entries in each category will be published in Science Magazine and Science Online as well as at the NSF web site. One of the winners will be on the cover of Science Magazine’s September 26 issue.
More information and winning entries from the previous five years can be found here.