The opening plenary of the ESIP Winter meeting at DC is just underway.Listening to Michael Freilich, the director of NASA's Earth Science division.He's talking about how the measurements we make about the Earth need to inform the models that can tell us the longer-term picture of the Earth's climate.Sea level rise is a combination of adding water and heating the water (about half from each today).

Tom Cheatham (U. of Utah) and Tim Clark (Harvard Medical School), the final speakers at the IEEE escience 2009 meeting at Oxford University present the two sides of the escience spectrum. Cheatham’s work on bio-molecular modeling can consume as much HPC and advances in programming as the planet will permit, and then demand more. The outputs from his model runs could fill high-speed fiber for weeks. His graduate students abandon terabytes of information (soon to be petabytes) when they move on.

This data-intensive science paradigm is also a feature of the emerging datafullness of the object of study. Satellites and sensorwebs, CCTVs and Streetviews, MRIs and CAT scans, Facebook and YouTube-- what we study is no longer data poor, but increasingly data-full. The question is no longer one of how to scrape up enough data to create a study, but rather how to winnow the emerging data deluge. Sociologists can no more ignore the data available from online social networks than meteorologists can ignore an emerging Mid-Atlantic tropical depression. 

This is a note about meeting organization. The All Hands meeting was (and I would guess the IEEE meeting will be) a standard meeting type (too many plenaries, breakouts are PPT frenzies, people trying to network in the 15 minute breaks). 300 e-science experts listening (emailing) while a panel of four experts talk about a ten-year plan for e-science. How much better it would have been to set up 40 tables and have ten times the discussion and perhaps a chance of 10 new ideas? This room is ripe for a charrette! Also...

Software as a Service and Software as a Science: keynote by Tony Hoare (Microsoft scientist from Cambridge).   http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/thoare/

 Tom Rodden is looking at the history of e-Science, moving from infrastructure to collaborative tools (e.g., MyExperiment). After all the digital world is in the foreground of their lives. 1.5 billion Internet users in 2010. The more that our lives are performed on digital platforms, the larger footprint we leave.  Google uses this footprint to target advertising.

 Anne Trefethen from Oxford is opening up the All Hands e-Science meeting. 186 submissions for presentations shows the growth of interest and activity in the UK for e-Science research and practice. The meeting is on the outskirts of Oxford, at the football (soccer) stadium conference center. Next door (across the parking lot) is a bowling alley and multiplex cinema. No building older than 50 years anywhere in the vicinity. So the location looks more like Oxnard than Oxford. The crowd is appropriately geeky in an academic fashion.

In a couple weeks I will be off to Oxford, England for the All Hands eScience and IEEE eScience joint meeting. I'm looking ahead to blogging and Tweeting about what is happening there. I would guess that most of the ESIPers will be headed west to the AGU meeting in San Francisco.