Capturing and sharing our collective expertise on climate data: the CHARMe project

For users of climate services, the ability to quickly determine the datasets that best fit one's needs would be invaluable. The volume, variety and complexity of climate data makes this judgment difficult. The ambition of CHARMe ("Characterization of metadata to enable high-quality climate services") is to give a wider interdisciplinary community access to a range of supporting information, such as journal articles, technical reports or feedback on previous applications of the data. The capture and discovery of this "commentary" information, often created by data users rather than data providers, and currently not linked to the data themselves, has not been significantly addressed previously. CHARMe applies the principles of Linked Data and open web standards to associate, record, search and publish user-derived annotations in a way that can be read both by users and automated systems. Tools have been developed within the CHARMe project that enable annotation capability for data delivery systems already in wide use for discovering climate data. In addition, the project has developed advanced tools for exploring data and commentary in innovative ways, including an interactive data explorer and comparator ("CHARMe Maps") and a tool for correlating climate time series with external "significant events" (e.g. instrument failures or large volcanic eruptions) that affect the data quality. Although the project focuses on climate science, the concepts are general and could be applied to other fields. All CHARMe system software is open-source, released under a liberal licence, permitting future projects to re-use the source code as they wish.

Differences between the CME fronts tracked by an expert, an automated algorithm, and the Solar Stormwatch project

Observations from the Heliospheric Imager (HI) instruments aboard the twin STEREO spacecraft have enabled the compilation of several catalogues of coronal mass ejections (CMEs), each characterizing the propagation of CMEs through the inner heliosphere. Three such catalogues are the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL)-HI event list, the Solar Stormwatch CME catalogue, and, presented here, the J-tracker catalogue. Each catalogue uses a different method to characterize the location of CME fronts in the HI images: manual identification by an expert, the statistical reduction of the manual identifications of many citizen scientists, and an automated algorithm. We provide a quantitative comparison of the differences between these catalogues and techniques, using 51 CMEs common to each catalogue. The time-elongation profiles of these CME fronts are compared, as are the estimates of the CME kinematics derived from application of three widely used single-spacecraft-fitting techniques. The J-tracker and RAL-HI profiles are most similar, while the Solar Stormwatch profiles display a small systematic offset. Evidence is presented that these differences arise because the RAL-HI and J-tracker profiles follow the sunward edge of CME density enhancements, while Solar Stormwatch profiles track closer to the antisunward (leading) edge. We demonstrate that the method used to produce the time-elongation profile typically introduces more variability into the kinematic estimates than differences between the various single-spacecraft-fitting techniques. This has implications for the repeatability and robustness of these types of analyses, arguably especially so in the context of space weather forecasting, where it could make the results strongly dependent on the methods used by the forecaster.

Application of dried blood spots to determine vitamin D status in a large nutritional study with unsupervised sampling: the Food4Me project

An efficient and robust method to measure vitamin D (25-hydroxy vitamin D3 (25(OH)D3) and 25-hydroxy vitamin D2 in dried blood spots (DBS) has been developed and applied in the pan-European multi-centre, internet-based, personalised nutrition intervention study Food4Me. The method includes calibration with blood containing endogenous 25(OH)D3, spotted as DBS and corrected for haematocrit content. The methodology was validated following international standards. The performance characteristics did not reach those of the current gold standard liquid chromatography-MS/MS in plasma for all parameters, but were found to be very suitable for status-level determination under field conditions. DBS sample quality was very high, and 3778 measurements of 25(OH)D3 were obtained from 1465 participants. The study centre and the season within the study centre were very good predictors of 25(OH)D3 levels (P<0·001 for each case). Seasonal effects were modelled by fitting a sine function with a minimum 25(OH)D3 level on 20 January and a maximum on 21 July. The seasonal amplitude varied from centre to centre. The largest difference between winter and summer levels was found in Germany and the smallest in Poland. The model was cross-validated to determine the consistency of the predictions and the performance of the DBS method. The Pearson's correlation between the measured values and the predicted values was r 0·65, and the sd of their differences was 21·2 nmol/l. This includes the analytical variation and the biological variation within subjects. Overall, DBS obtained by unsupervised sampling of the participants at home was a viable methodology for obtaining vitamin D status information in a large nutritional study.

Generic intertextuality in online social activism: the case of the It Gets Better project

The It Gets Better project has been held up as a model of successful social media activism. This article explores how narrators of It Gets Better videos make use of generic intertextuality, strategically combining the canonical narrative genres of the exemplum, the testimony, and the confession in a way that allows them to claim ‘textual authority’ and to make available multiple moral positions for themselves and their listeners. This strategy is further facilitated by the ambiguous participation frameworks associated with digital media, which make it possible for storytellers to tell different kinds of stories to different kinds of listeners at the same time, to simultaneously comfort the victims of anti-gay violence, confront its perpetrators, and elicit sympathy from ‘onlookers’. This analysis highlights the potential of new practices of online storytelling for social activism, and challenges notions that new media are contributing to the demise of common narrative traditions.

Monuments, mobility and Medieval perceptions of designed landscapes: The Pleasance, Kenilworth

The Pleasance was a ’virandarium’ or pleasure garden, constructed by Henry V in the grounds of his castle at Kenilworth. Despite its high academic profile and the survival of well-preserved earthwork remains, the Pleasance has never previously been subjected to a programme of detailed archaeological survey and investigation. This article discusses the results of a new analytical earthwork survey undertaken by staff from English Heritage in 2012. It considers the contribution that these new findings make to the wider debate on medieval designed landscapes, with a particular focus on mobility and its role in unlocking the meaning and symbolism embedded in elite landscapes.