USGS: Science Serving Society

Virtual Globes: Serving Science and Society

Virtual Globes reached the mass market in 2005. They created multi-million dollar businesses in a very short time by providing novel ways to explore data geographically. We use the term “Virtual Globes” as the common denominator for technologies offering capabilities to annotate, edit and publish geographic information to a world-wide audience and to visualize information provided by the public...

USGS Digital Libraries for Coastal and Marine Science

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) has developed three related digital libraries providing access to topical and georeferenced information for coastal and marine science: the Marine Realms Information Bank (MRIB) and its two offshoots, the Monterey Bay Science Digital Library and Coastal Change Hazards Digital Library. These three members of the MRIB family run on the same software and share a c...

Where science meets society.

T he theme for next week's American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) annual meeting, " The Nexus: Where Science Meets Society, " reminds us of many events of the past few years that suggest that the relationship between science and society is undergoing significant stress. Some members of the public are finding certain lines of scientific research and their outcomes disquieting...

Bridging science and society.

THE THEME OF THIS YEAR’S ANNUAL MEETING OF THE AMERICAN ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT of Science (AAAS) seems especially timely: Bridging Science and Society. Virtually every major issue now confronting society has a science and technology component, and this means that “the need for general scientifi c understanding by the public has never been larger, and the penalty for scientifi c illiter...

Society, science, and values.