Web Apps in the Cloud: Even Astronomers Can Write Them!
From the post:
Philip Cowperthwaite and Peter K. G. Williams work in time-domain astronomy at Harvard. Philip is a graduate student working on the detection of electromagnetic counterparts to gravitational wave events, and Peter studies magnetic activity in low-mass stars, brown dwarfs, and planets.
Astronomers that study GRBs are well-known for racing to follow up bursts immediately after they occur — thanks to services like the Gamma-ray Coordinates Network (GCN), you can receive an email with an event position less than 30 seconds after it hits a satellite like Swift. It’s pretty cool that we professionals can get real-time notification of stars exploding across the universe, but it also seems like a great opportunity to convey some of the excitement of cutting-edge science to the broader public. To that end, we decided to try to expand the reach of GCN alerts by bringing them on to social media. Join us for a surprisingly short and painless tale about the development of YOITSAGRB, a tiny piece of Python code on the Google App Engine that distributes GCN alerts through the social media app Yo.
If you’re not familiar with Yo, there’s not much to know. Yo was conceived as a minimalist social media experience: users can register a unique username and send each other a message consisting of “Yo,” and only “Yo.” You can think of it as being like Twitter, but instead of 140 characters, you have zero. (They’ve since added more features such as including links with your “Yo,” but we’re Yo purists so we’ll just be using the base functionality.) A nice consequence of this design is that the Yo API is incredibly straightforward, which is convenient for a “my first web app” kind of project.
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While “Yo” has been expanded to include more content, the origin remains an illustration of the many meanings that can be signaled by the same term. In this case, the detection of a gamma-ray burst in the known universe.
Or “Yo” could mean it is time to start some other activity when received from a particular sender. Or even be a message composed entirely of “Yo’s” where different senders had some significance. Or “Yo’s” sent at particular times to compose a message. Or “Yo’s” sent to leave the impression that messages were being sent. 😉
So, does a “Yo” have any semantics separate and apart from that read into it by a “Yo” recipient?