Unfortunately, the Blog is being discontinued. Without a persistent base of participants and contributors to maintain a steady diet of posts, keeping the blog active is just not feasible. For all those who have participated in the past, thank you on behalf of the entire CTWatch staff. While there will be no more posts here, all previous posts will remain along with the rich supply of links, reports, etc. available in the right-hand column.

At long last, we are restarting CTWatch blog. In doing so, we (i.e. CTWatch Quarterly editors) wanted to make at least a couple changes from our previous installment. First, we want to try to give it a more unique and personalized perspective. The people who post to CTWatch (just us for the moment) should feel free to speak in there own voice and from their own point of view. When we started the blog originally, we felt inhibited on this front because CTWatch Quarterly, which is the main focus of our effort, is supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) via the CyberInfrastructure Partnership (CIP) of SDSC and NCSA. But a newsy blog written in an impersonal way just didn’t work too well, partly because the wide world of cyberinfrastructure technology is replete with blog-like, news oriented, on-line publishers. Recycling news items can be valuable, but will only take you so far. Within the boundaries of CTWatch’s general mission, and along with continued flow of pointers to other news items, we want to encourage CTWatch bloggers to talk about the things that they care about and that are happening in their own world.

The other change we plan to make is to increase our focus on the use of new communication media by the cyberinfrastructure (CI) community. This includes blogs, but especially the use of multimedia, such as podcasts, on-line video, screencasts, etc. Although such new media are an important part of what advanced CI enables, their use within the community is not well covered by traditional outlets.

We’ve tried to start taking account of this in the new incarnation of the blog. You’ll notice that the links on the right hand column point to blogs from CI notables and other such-like folk, and also multimedia publication/netcasting efforts within the CI community. (We would be happy to expand this list as appropriate, so please send us your suggestions.) Notable among this group is the European Gridcast, which the folks International Science Grid This Week alerted us too. As far as I know, this use of video podcasts puts the Grid community on the other side of the pond out in front of the US in the use of this new medium. In the spirit of friendly “coopetition,” we plan to use the CTWatch blog to track of what’s happening on this front and help the US close the gridcasting gap!!

Contrary to what you may think, the blog is not dead. It’s just on hiatus. We’re working on a new approach for delivering first rate, cutting edge content. We’re making some changes to this forum and hope to incorporate some new content that will make the site more interesting, more news worthy, and more engaging. While we don’t have a timeframe for when we’ll have the revised version up, we hope to begin phasing in some new material very soon.

We apologize for such a late notice but we had hoped to have our new strategy in place by now. Stay tuned.

The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription required) reports that NSF is slated to receive $5.65 billion in the 2006 fiscal year, $181 million more than this year and $49 million more than President Bush requested. $4.93 billion of that would go toward research.

Senate and the House came to this compromise bill late last week; NSF has operated under a continuing resolution since FY05 ended on September 30.

The title–with a healthy “Holy Cow!” thrown in there–probably says enough.

ZDNet reports.

The article is in Nature for those with access.

The Australian Research Council (ARC), an Australian equivalent of the NSF, recently awarded more than $3.5 milliion over the next couple of years for grid computing technologies aimed to increase medical research collaboration. One key beneficiary of the grant, Dr. Andrew Lonie of the University of Melbourne, will be using his share of the funds to work on the international Physiome Project, the successor to the Human Genome effort, which has a goal to

describe the human organism quantitatively, so that one can understand its physiology and pathophysiology, and to use this understanding to improve human health.

As part of this new ongoing effort, Dr. Lonie’s research centers around modeling and simulation of the human kidney, via the Kidney Simulation Project.

Continued funding for grid technologies and the maturation of high-speed networking will boost opportunities for international reearch collaboration and engagement. The result will be the ability to link the worlds foremost authorities in medical science to massive amounts of data, which will ultimately lead to quicker solutions to, and better treatment for, both local and global health issues.