scholarly journals Time to Shine: Reliable Response-Timing Using R-Shiny for Online Experiments

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Agustín Perez Santangelo ◽  
Guillermo Solovey
Keyword(s):  
Low Cost ◽  
Distance Effect ◽  
Science Research ◽  
Cognitive Effect ◽  
Desktop Computer ◽  
Online Data ◽  
Online Experiments ◽  
R Shiny ◽  
Response Timing ◽  
Inference Methods

Rising interest in online experiments for cognitive science research lies in the ability to reacha large number of participants in a short time at a relatively low cost. However, compared tocontrolled laboratory studies, online data is far more noisy. This is especially relevant whenreliable response-timing at a millisecond-level is paramount, as it is the case for manydecision-making tasks. In this paper we sought to replicate a well-validated cognitive effect-the distance effect in number comparisons- using an online mobile-friendly app developedwith open-source tools in R-Shiny. In this task, adapted from (Dehaene et al., 1990), participantshave to decide whether a number on the screen is larger or smaller than a standard (65 in ourstudy). The distance effect stands for the fact that response time (RT) is significantly larger asthe presented number is closer to the standard. A total of N=170 participants (110 with amobile device, 60 on a desktop computer) completed 116 trials over a ~7-minute session.Using generalized linear mixed models estimated with Bayesian inference methods, we founda numerical distance effect strikingly consistent with the original study. Furthermore, wereport systematic offsets in RTs that different OS, browsers and devices introduced. Ourresults demonstrate the reliability of R-Shiny for RT data collection. By doing so, our workpaves the ground for a seamless and robust implementation of simple cognitive tasks inonline studies over desktop and mobile devices using only R, a widely popular programmingframework among cognitive scientists.

scholarly journals MALDIViz: A Comprehensive Informatics Tool for MALDI-MS Data Visualization and Analysis

2017 ◽  
Vol 22 (10) ◽  
pp. 1246-1252 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kishore Kumar Jagadeesan ◽  
Simon Ekström
Keyword(s):  
Mass Spectrometry ◽  
High Throughput ◽  
High Throughput Screening ◽  
Web Application ◽  
Low Cost ◽  
Maldi Ms ◽  
Ionization Mass ◽  
Label Free ◽  
Label Free Detection ◽  
R Shiny

Recently, mass spectrometry (MS) has emerged as an important tool for high-throughput screening (HTS) providing a direct and label-free detection method, complementing traditional fluorescent and colorimetric methodologies. Among the various MS techniques used for HTS, matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization mass spectrometry (MALDI-MS) provides many of the characteristics required for high-throughput analyses, such as low cost, speed, and automation. However, visualization and analysis of the large datasets generated by HTS MALDI-MS can pose significant challenges, especially for multiparametric experiments. The datasets can be generated fast, and the complexity of the experimental data (e.g., screening many different sorbent phases, the sorbent mass, and the load, wash, and elution conditions) makes manual data analysis difficult. To address these challenges, a comprehensive informatics tool called MALDIViz was developed. This tool is an R-Shiny-based web application, accessible independently of the operating system and without the need to install any program locally. It has been designed to facilitate easy analysis and visualization of MALDI-MS datasets, comparison of multiplex experiments, and export of the analysis results to high-quality images.

Making Sense of Sensor Data: How Local Environmental Conditions Add Value to Social Science Research

2020 ◽  
pp. 089443932092060
Author(s):  
Ned English ◽  
Chang Zhao ◽  
Kevin L. Brown ◽  
Charlie Catlett ◽  
Kathleen Cagney
Keyword(s):  
Social Science ◽  
Environmental Conditions ◽  
Low Cost ◽  
Social Science Research ◽  
Science Research ◽  
Sensor Nodes ◽  
Sensor Data ◽  
Federally Funded ◽  
Physical And Mental Health ◽  
Making Sense

Recent advances in computing technologies have enabled the development of low-cost, compact weather and air quality monitors. The U.S. federally funded Array of Things (AoT) project has deployed more than 140 such sensor nodes throughout the City of Chicago. This article combines a year’s worth of AoT sensor data with household data collected from 450 elderly Chicagoans in order to explore the feasibility of using previously unavailable data on local environmental conditions to improve traditional neighborhood research. Specifically, we pilot the use of AoT sensor data to overcome limitations in research linking air pollution to poor physical and mental health and find support for recent findings that exposure to pollutants contributes to both respiratory- and dementia-related diseases. We expect that this support will become even stronger as sensing technologies continue to improve and more AoT nodes come online, enabling additional applications to social science research where environmental context matters.

scholarly journals Sensing global tourism numbers with millions of publicly shared online photographs

2019 ◽  
Vol 52 (3) ◽  
pp. 471-477 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tobias Preis ◽  
Federico Botta ◽  
Helen Susannah Moat
Keyword(s):  
Low Cost ◽  
The United States ◽  
Global Scale ◽  
Official Statistics ◽  
Online Data ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Photo Sharing ◽  
Global Tourism ◽  
Global Travel ◽  
Opening Up

In our increasingly connected world, individuals produce continuous streams of data through their constant interactions with the Internet. This data is opening up opportunities to measure human behaviour that was previously time consuming or expensive to capture. Here, we explore whether data from online photographs can be used to estimate travel statistics on a global scale. We draw on the locations attached to 69 million publicly shared photographs to infer the global travel patterns of almost half a million users of the photo-sharing platform Flickr. We find that our photo-based estimates of tourist arrival statistics for the G7 countries Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States correlate with the corresponding official statistics released by those countries. Our results highlight the potential for vast volumes of online data to inform the generation of timely, low-cost indicators of the state of society. We discuss practical considerations that remain before this methodology could be used in the production of official statistics.

Seismology at School in Nepal: a network and program for education and citizen seismology

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
György Hetényi ◽  
Shiba Subedi ◽  
Paul Denton ◽  
Anne Sauron
Keyword(s):  
Epicentral Distance ◽  
Low Cost ◽  
Plate Boundary ◽  
Test Site ◽  
School Curriculum ◽  
Learning By Doing ◽  
Peak Ground Velocity ◽  
Online Data ◽  
Network Operation ◽  
Instrumental Intensity

<p>Nepal, located above the convergent India-Eurasia plate boundary, has repeatedly experienced devastating earthquakes. During the 2015 magnitude 7.8 Gorkha earthquake, an often-reported experience was that people were not aware of the threatening seismic hazard and have insufficient level of preparedness. An important source of the problem is that earthquake-related topics are not part of the school curriculum. Earthquake education reaching a broad group of the population early in their lives is therefore strongly needed.</p><p>We established an initiative in Nepal to introduce seismology in schools, with focus on education and citizen seismology. We have prepared educational materials adapted to the Nepali school system, which we distributed and also share on our program’s website: . In selected schools, we also installed a low-cost seismometer to record seismicity and to allow learning-by-doing classroom activities. Our approach was very well received and we hope it will help making earthquake-safe communities across Nepal.</p><p>The seismic sensor installed in schools is a Raspberry Shake 1D (RS1D), selected based on performance in laboratory tests and adequacy to field conditions. At a test site in Switzerland we were able to record magnitude 1.0 events up to 50 km distance with a RS1D. In Nepal, 22 such seismometers installed in schools create the Nepal School Seismology Network providing online data openly. The seismometer in each school allows students to be informed of earthquakes, visualize the respective waveforms, and estimate distance and magnitude of the event. For significant local and regional events, we provide record sections and network instrumental intensity maps on our program’s website.</p><p>In 6 months of network operation, more than 194 local and teleseismic earthquakes of M≥4 have been recorded. From a local and a global catalogue, complemented with our own visual identifications, we provide an earthquake wave detectability graph in distance—magnitude space. Based on our observations, we calibrate a new magnitude equation for Nepal, related to the epicentral distance <em>D[km]</em> and to the observed peak ground velocity <em>PGV[µm/s]</em>. The calibration is done to best fit local catalogue magnitudes, and we will present the updated parameters at the conference.</p>

scholarly journals Sensing Urban Transportation Events from Multi-Channel Social Signals with the Word2vec Fusion Model

Sensors ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 18 (12) ◽  
pp. 4093 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hao Lu ◽  
Kaize Shi ◽  
Yifan Zhu ◽  
Yisheng Lv ◽  
Zhendong Niu
Keyword(s):  
Single Channel ◽  
Low Cost ◽  
Transportation Systems ◽  
Urban Traffic ◽  
Traffic Information ◽  
Social Signals ◽  
Fusion Model ◽  
Online Data ◽  
Traffic Incidents ◽  
Traffic Incident

Social sensors perceive the real world through social media and online web services, which have the advantages of low cost and large coverage over traditional physical sensors. In intelligent transportation researches, sensing and analyzing such social signals provide a new path to monitor, control and optimize transportation systems. However, current research is largely focused on using single channel online social signals to extract and sense traffic information. Clearly, sensing and exploiting multi-channel social signals could effectively provide deeper understanding of traffic incidents. In this paper, we utilize cross-platform online data, i.e., Sina Weibo and News, as multi-channel social signals, then we propose a word2vec-based event fusion (WBEF) model for sensing, detecting, representing, linking and fusing urban traffic incidents. Thus, each traffic incident can be comprehensively described from multiple aspects, and finally the whole picture of unban traffic events can be obtained and visualized. The proposed WBEF architecture was trained by about 1.15 million multi-channel online data from Qingdao (a coastal city in China), and the experiments show our method surpasses the baseline model, achieving an 88.1% F1 score in urban traffic incident detection. The model also demonstrates its effectiveness in the open scenario test.

scholarly journals Correcting Drift, Head and Body Misalignments between Virtual and Real Humans

2014 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Vitor Reus ◽  
Márcio Mello ◽  
Luciana Nedel ◽  
Anderson Maciel
Keyword(s):  
Virtual Environments ◽  
Inertial Sensors ◽  
Tracking System ◽  
Low Cost ◽  
Head Tracking ◽  
Desktop Computer ◽  
Head Mounted Displays ◽  
Incremental Information ◽  
Ms Kinect ◽  
Head Rotations

Head-mounted displays (HMD) allow a personal and immersive viewing of virtual environments, and can be used with almost any desktop computer. Most HMDs have inertial sensors embedded for tracking the user head rotations. These low-cost sensors have high quality and availability. However, even if they are very sensitive and precise, inertial sensors work with incremental information, easily introducing errors in the system. The most relevant is that head tracking suffers from drifting. In this paper we present important limitations that still prevent the wide use of inertial sensors for tracking. For instance, to compensate for the drifting, users of HMD-based immersive VEs move away from their suitable pose. We also propose a software solution for two problems: prevent the occurrence of drifting in incremental sensors, and avoid the user from move its body in relation to another tracking system that uses absolute sensors (e.g. MS Kinect). We analyze and evaluate our solutions experimentally, including user tests. Results show that our comfortable pose function is effective on eliminating drifting, and that it can be inverted and applied also to prevent the user from moving their body away of the absolute sensor range. The efficiency and accuracy of this method makes it suitable for a number of applications in immersive VR.

scholarly journals Baby’s Online Live Database: An Open Platform for Developmental Science

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Masaharu Kato ◽  
Hirokazu Doi ◽  
Xianwei Meng ◽  
Taro Murakami ◽  
Sachiyo Kajikawa ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Low Cost ◽  
Science Research ◽  
Developmental Studies ◽  
Participant Recruitment ◽  
Open Platform ◽  
Developmental Science ◽  
Gender And Age ◽  
Efficient Data ◽  
Near Future ◽  
Access Data

Efficient data collection in developmental studies is facing challenges due to the decreased birth rates in many regions, reproducibility problems in psychology research, and the COVID-19 pandemic. Here, we propose a novel platform for online developmental science research, the Baby’s Online Live Database (BOLD), which extends the scope of the accessible participant pool, simplifies its management, and enables participant recruitment for longitudinal studies. Through BOLD, researchers can conduct online recruitment of participants preregistered to BOLD simply by specifying their attributes, such as gender and age, and direct the participants to dedicated webpages for each study. Moreover, BOLD handles participant recruitment and reward payment, thereby freeing researchers from the labor of participant management. BOLD also allows researchers the opportunity to access data that were collected from participants in previous research studies. This enables researchers to carry out longitudinal analyses at a relatively low cost. To make BOLD widely accessible, a consortium was formed within the Japan Society of Baby Science, where members from diverse research groups discussed the blueprint of this system. Once in full-scaled operation, BOLD is expected to serve as a platform for various types of online studies and facilitate international collaboration among developmental scientists in the near future.

scholarly journals How to create an interactive dashboard using R: the example of the Queensland COVID-19 tracker

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 39-47
Author(s):  
Julia Loginova ◽  
Pia Wohland
Keyword(s):  
Low Cost ◽  
Data Driven ◽  
Web Page ◽  
Software Environment ◽  
Online Data ◽  
Interactive Tools ◽  
Queensland Health ◽  
Dissemination Of Research ◽  
Supplementary Material ◽  
Interactive Data

Background  Interactive tools like data dashboards enable users both to view and interact with data. In today’s data-driven environment it is a priority for researchers and practitioners alike to be able to develop interactive data visualisation tools easily and where possible at a low cost. Aims  Here, we provide a guide on how to develop and create an interactive online data dashboard in R, using the COVID-19 tracker for Health and Hospital Regions in Queensland, Australia as an example. We detail a series of steps and explain choices made to design, develop, and easily maintain the dashboard and publish it online. Data and methods  The dashboard visualises publicly available data from the Queensland Health web page. We used the programming language R and its free software environment. The dashboard webpage is hosted publicly on GitHub Pages updated via GitHub Desktop. Results  Our interactive dashboard is available at https://qcpr.github.io/. Conclusions  Interactive dashboards have many applications such as dissemination of research and other data. This guide and the supplementary material can be adjusted to develop a new dashboard for a different set of data and needs.

scholarly journals The Development of Solar Astronomy in Malaysia

2014 ◽  
Vol 38 ◽  
pp. 46-55
Author(s):  
Zety Sharizat Hamidi ◽  
N.N.M. Shariff ◽  
C. Monstein
Keyword(s):  
Solar Activity ◽  
Radio Astronomy ◽  
Low Cost ◽  
Low Frequency ◽  
Monitoring Network ◽  
Science Research ◽  
Radio Observation ◽  
The Sun ◽  
Activity Data ◽  
Solar Astronomy

Monitoring the Sun reveals a variety of fascinating and complex physical phenomena which are being studied mainly by analyzing its emission. Solar activity has an impact with space weather. The characteristic features of the climate of Malaysia are uniform temperature, very high humidity and copious rainfall. It has an average of temperature of 26.7 °C. Therefore, it is suitable to monitor the Sun. In following work, we will emphasize the development of solar astronomy in Malaysia. The ground based observation (i) optical and (ii) radio are the main region that we focused on. Optical observation has started earlier comparing with radio observation. In optical region it covers from 400 – 700 nm while in radio region, we focus from 45 MHz to 870 MHz. The number of observatories is increasing. A dedicated work to understand the Sun activity in radio region is a part of an initiative of the United Nations together with NASA in order to support developing countries participating in „Western Science‟ research. Realize how important for us to keep doing a research about the solar bursts, by using the new radio spectrometer, CALLISTO (Compound Low Cost Low Frequency Transportable Observatories) spectrometer. Malaysia is one of the earliest country from South-East Asia (ASEAN) that involve this research. One of the advantages to start the solar monitoring in Malaysia is because our strategic location as equator country that makes possible to observing a Sun for 12 hours daily throughout a year. We strongly believe that Malaysia as one of contributor of solar activity data through E-CALLISTO network. This is a very good start for developing a radio astronomy in Malaysia. With the implementation of 45 MHz - 870 MHz CALLISTO systems and development of solar burst monitoring network, a new wavelength regime is becoming available for solar radio astronomy. Overall, this article presents an overview of optical and radio astronomy in Malaysia. With the present level of the international collaboration, it is believed that the potential involvement of local and international scientist in solar astrophysics will increase.

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