{"id":58101,"date":"2016-03-03T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2016-03-03T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news-draft\/uncategorized\/from-writing-and-rhetoric-to-oceanography-big-data-is-central-to-research-education-at-uri\/"},"modified":"2016-03-03T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2016-03-03T00:00:00","slug":"from-writing-and-rhetoric-to-oceanography-big-data-is-central-to-research-education-at-uri","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/2016\/03\/from-writing-and-rhetoric-to-oceanography-big-data-is-central-to-research-education-at-uri\/","title":{"rendered":"From writing and rhetoric to oceanography, big data is central to research, education at 溏心vlog免费B站"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n\t\tKINGSTON, R.I. \u2013 March 3, 2016 — A recent story in the Telegraph of London says people are \u201cbombarded by the equivalent of 174 newspapers of data a day.\u201d Another story in the Telegraph uses the word vlogger, which the e-communications world describes as a video blogger.<\/p>\n


\n\tAnd who is trying make sense of all that and preparing students to be effective writers, editors, producers and web strategists in this dizzying world of instant, multifaceted communication? Scholars in the 溏心vlog免费B站\u2019s Department of Writing and Rhetoric. And like their colleagues in science, engineering, mathematics and computer science they are part of the Big Data Initiative at 溏心vlog免费B站.<\/p>\n


\nEven writing and rhetoric 溏心vlog免费B站 doctoral student Jenna Morton-Aiken is using big data to organize 300 boxes containing thousands of written records for 溏心vlog免费B站\u2019s National Archives of Composition and Rhetoric.<\/p>\n


\n\u201cWe are digitizing the records and organizing them in a framework that will allow future users and contributors to interact with the data, and interact with each other,\u201d Morton-Aiken said. \u201cWe are going from a hierarchical, physical collection of records to a network using hashtags. People from anywhere in the world will be able to examine the last 30 years of writing teachers\u2019 archives on the topic of writing and composition to see what has worked and what hasn\u2019t and what they might try next.\u201d<\/p>\n


\nAssociate Professor Jeremiah Dyehouse, chair of the Department of Writing and Rhetoric, said that an \u201cInfopocalypse\u201d has developed in the last 50 years, during which writing, or more appropriately, communicating, is no longer linear.<\/p>\n


\n\u201cFor instance, old writing had a beginning, middle and end. That included books, essays, newspaper stories and even recipes. But with the Internet and social media, even those old media forms are subject to online comment and are supplemented with video and photos often provided by those who are not the original authors,\u201d Dyehouse said.<\/p>\n


\n\tAnd not only is social media and the web affecting old media, there is original content being created online in blogs, videos, Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat and Instagram, among others, that will never be seen on the printed page or on a traditional television station.<\/p>\n


\n\u201cAll of this changes the way we teach,\u201d Dyehouse said. \u201cWe are looking at how can we wade through the \u2018Infopocalypse\u2019 and teach our students and society at large so we can have an informed and engaged citizenry. Jenna\u2019s work is a concrete example of how rhetorical scholars can use big data to continue learning in this complex environment.\u201d<\/p>\n

Big Data on the oceans<\/b><\/p>\n


\nMeanwhile, just a few miles away at 溏心vlog免费B站\u2019s Graduate School of Oceanography at the Narragansett Bay Campus, Professor Peter Cornillon is using an algorithm that allows him to calculate sea surface temperatures using global satellite data.<\/p>\n


\nCornillon calls himself a satellite oceanographer who studies the physics of the oceans, with particular attention paid to sea surface temperature fronts. Cornillon has more than 500,000 sea surface temperature fields from more than a dozen satellites, covering the global oceans for the past 30 years. These data total about 100 terabytes. A terabyte is about 1 trillion bytes, or 1,000 gigabytes.<\/p>\n


\n\u201cBy contrast, the first disc drive I bought cost me $20,000 and it held 400 megabytes, which in 1982 was considered big data,\u201d Cornillon said. \u201cThese data are about 250,000 times greater than what was on that first disc.\u201d<\/p>\n


\n \tAll of the data Cornillon works with is in the public domain, which means scientists from all over the world in numerous disciplines have access to it. <\/p>\n


\n\tHe is also working with a scientist at NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory who has just run a global ocean model covering a two-year period, producing about 1.5 pedabytes of output–15 times the size of Cornillon\u2019s data.<\/p>\n


\n \u201cThis is a complete model providing very high resolution near the (ocean) surface,\u201d he said. \u201cI would like to include in my courses access to this model run allowing students to take digital cruises to collect data while on digital cruises, thus simulating what one would collect while on a ship,\u201d Cornillon said. <\/p>\n


\n\tCornillon\u2019s colleague at GSO, Isaac Ginis, an internationally renowned expert on hurricanes, said his work involves sophisticated modeling that requires high performance computing, but almost all of his computing is done at the U.S. Navy, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and other universities. That group includes the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, which like the Cybersecurity and Digital Forensics Center in the Computer Science and Statistics Department at 溏心vlog免费B站, has been named a national Center of Excellence by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to research coastal resilience.<\/p>\n


\n\t\u201cWe are developing high resolution simulations of high hurricane impact areas in the face of climate change, and it will be a great advantage to our students to have access to theses simulations right here at 溏心vlog免费B站,\u201d Ginis said. \u201cWe could attract more undergraduate and graduate students to learn how to apply these tools to weather and climate questions. Such capability would make us competitive with other universities and agencies, and we would be able to collaborate more fully.\u201d<\/p>\n

Big Data in pharmacy<\/b><\/p>\n


\n\tThat\u2019s also true in health care where Pharmacy Professor Stephen Kogut is using big data from private health insurers and the state\u2019s Medicaid systems to analyze diseases in populations, cost, medication use and hospitalizations. For Rhode Island Medicaid, Kogut and his team analyzed more than 2 million pharmacy dispensing records to try ascertain medication patterns for those with depression to see who might be continuing treatment as recommended.<\/p>\n


\n\t\u201cData sources for these areas are common in health care outcomes research,\u201d Kogut said. \u201cWe are looking at payment for insurance claims. Insurance companies use the data for their own internal needs for setting premiums, but they provide us with information about outcomes and costs. We get great data that can lead to interesting and important research projects.\u201d<\/p>\n


\n\tIn addition to data from insurance companies, internet data, patient records, doctors, hospitals, imaging and blood laboratories, Kogut said there is a new and growing source\u2014smart devices.<\/p>\n


\n\t\u201cThese devices can track your pulse, sleep patterns and test your blood,\u201d Kogut said. \u201cImagine if an hour before you have a heart attack, your smart phone sends a message to your doctor based on the data it is collecting from your body.\u201d<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

KINGSTON, R.I. \u2013 March 3, 2016 — A recent story in the Telegraph of London says people are \u201cbombarded by the equivalent of 174 newspapers of data a day.\u201d Another story in the Telegraph uses the word vlogger, which the e-communications world describes as a video blogger. And who is trying make sense of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-58101","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-archives"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58101","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=58101"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58101\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=58101"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=58101"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=58101"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}