Michael Nielsen » The Future of Science - The Diigo Meta page

• 10 Dec 09
  

  Thieme Hennis

  post about future of science

  future science blogpost collaboration crowdsourcing

• 06 Oct 09
  

  Cochin Blogger

  science

  • Building a better collective memory

    
    

    
    

    
    In your High School science classes you may have learnt Hooke’s law, the law of physics which relates a spring’s length to how hard you pull on it. What your High School science teacher probably didn’t tell you is that when Robert Hooke discovered his law in 1676, he published it as an anagram, “ceiiinossssttuv”, which he revealed two years later as the Latin “ut tensio, sic vis”, meaning “as the extension, so the force”. This ensured that if someone else made the same discovery, Hooke could reveal the anagram and claim priority, thus buying time in which he alone could build upon the discovery.
    

    
    

    
    Hooke was not unusual. Many great scientists of the age, including Leonardo, Galileo and Huygens, used anagrams or ciphers for similar purposes. The Newton-Leibniz controversy over who invented calculus occurred because Newton claimed to have invented calculus in the 1660s and 1670s, but didn’t publish until 1693. In the meantime, Leibniz developed and published his own version of calculus. Imagine modern biology if the human genome had been announced as an anagram, or if publication had been delayed thirty years.
    

    
    

    
    Why were Hooke, Newton, and their contemporaries so secretive? In fact, up until this time discoveries were routinely kept secret. Alchemists intent on converting lead into gold or finding the secret of eternal youth would often take their discoveries with them to their graves. A secretive culture of discovery was a natural consequence of a society in which there was often little personal gain in sharing discoveries.
    

    
    

    
    The great scientific advances in the time of Hooke and Newton motivated wealthy patrons such as the government to begin subsidizing science as a profession. Much of the motivation came from the public benefit delivered by scientific discovery, and that benefit was strongest if discoveries were shared. The result was a scientific culture which to this day rewards the sharing of discoveries with jobs and prestige for the discoverer.
    

    
    

    This cultural transition was just beginning in the time of Hooke and Newton, but a little over a century later the great physicist Michael Faraday could advise a younger colleague to “Work. Finish. Publish.” The culture of science had changed so that a discovery not published in a scientific journal was not truly complete. Today, when a scientist applies for a job, the most important part of the application is their published scientific papers. But in 1662, when Hooke applied for the job of Curator of Experiments at the Royal Society, he certainly was not asked for such a record, because the first scientific journals weren’t created until three years later, in 1665.
    

    
    

    
    The adoption and growth of the scientific journal system has created a body of shared knowledge for our civilization, a collective long-term memory which is the basis for much of human progress. This system has changed surprisingly little in the last 300 years. The internet offers us the first major opportunity to improve this collective long-term memory, and to create a collective short-term working memory, a conversational commons for the rapid collaborative development of ideas. The process of scientific discovery – how we do science – will change more over the next 20 years than in the past 300 years.
    

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    • 

      Cochin Blogger on 2009-10-06

      A marvellous introduction!
• 21 Sep 09
  

  Michel Roland

  science_2.0 scholarly_communication

  • “Work. Finish. Publish.”
  • when Robert Hooke discovered his law in 1676, he published it as an anagram, “ceiiinossssttuv”, which he revealed two years later as the Latin “ut tensio, sic vis”, meaning “as the extension, so the force”. This ensured that if someone else made the same discovery, Hooke could reveal the anagram and claim priority, thus buying time in which he alone could build upon the discovery.
  • 12 more annotations...
  • • In April 2008, Cameron Neylon, a chemist from the University of Southampton, used FriendFeed messaging to post a request for assistance in building molecular models. Pretty quickly Pawel Szczesny replied, and said he could help out.
    • In April 2008, Cameron Neylon, a chemist from the University of Southampton, used FriendFeed messaging to post a request for assistance in building molecular models. Pretty quickly Pawel Szczesny replied, and said he could help out.
    • Einstein’s greatest contribution to science was his theory of gravity, often called the general theory of relativity. He worked on and off on this theory between 1907 and 1915, often running into great difficulties. By 1912, he had come to the astonishing conclusion that our ordinary conception of geometry, in which the angles of a triangle add up to 180 degrees, is only approximately correct, and a new kind of geometry is needed to correctly describe space and time. This was a great surprise to Einstein, and also a great challenge, since such geometric ideas were outside his expertise. Fortunately for Einstein and for posterity, he described his difficulties to a mathematician friend, Marcel Grossman. Grossman said that many of the ideas Einstein needed had already been developed by the mathematician Bernhard Riemann. It took Einstein three more years of work, but Grossman was right, and this was a critical point in the development of general relativity.
    • How could you measure the different sorts of contributions a scientist can make on a blog – outreach, education, and research? These are not easy questions to answer. Yet they must be answered before scientific blogging will be accepted as a valuable professional scientific contribution.
    • making many more types of content available than just scientific papers; allowing creative reuse and modification of existing work through more open licensing and community norms; making all information not just human readable but also machine readable; providing open APIs to enable the building of additional services on top of the scientific literature, and possibly even multiple layers of increasingly powerful services.
    • The adoption of the journal system was achieved by subsidizing scientists who published their discoveries in journals. This same subsidy now inhibits the adoption of more effective technologies, because it continues to incentivize scientists to share their work in conventional journals, and not in more modern media.
    • From the outside, scientists currently appear puzzlingly slow to adopt many online tools.
    • Nature’s 2006 trial of open commentary on papers undergoing peer review at Nature. The trial was not a success.
    • The contrast between the science comment sites and the success of the amazon.com reviews is stark.
    • there is a marked reluctance among researchers to offer open comments
    • In 1999, Garry Kasparov, the greatest chessplayer of all time, played and eventually won a game of chess against a “World Team” which decided its moves by the votes of thousands of chessplayers, many rank amateurs; instead of the easy victory he expected, he got the most challenging game of his career, a game he called “the greatest game in the history of chess”.
    • Wikipedia is a second example where scientists have missed an opportunity to innovate online.
• 19 Aug 09
  

  stefanomizzi
  • priority
  • scientific culture which to this day rewards the sharing of discoveries with jobs and prestige for the discoverer
  • 40 more annotations...
  • • The culture of science had changed so that a discovery not published in a scientific journal was not truly complete
    • Today, when a scientist applies for a job, the most important part of the application is their published scientific papers
    • scientific journal system
    • This system has changed surprisingly little in the last 300 years
    • The process of scientific discovery – how we do science – will change more over the next 20 years than in the past 300 years
    • How can the internet improve the way we do science
    • greatest change in the creative process since the invention of writing
    • With the exception of email, few of the new social tools have been broadly adopted by scientists
    • major cultural barriers
    • several organizations have created comment sites where scientists can share their opinions of scientific papers
    • there are few incentives for people to write such comments
    • It’s no wonder people have little inclination to contribute to the online comment sites
    • scientific culture is so closed that people will not publicly share their opinions of scientific papers
    • something we need to understand and change
    • In the early days few established scientists were involved. Just as for the scientific comment sites, to contribute aroused suspicion from colleagues that you were wasting time that could be spent writing papers and grants.
    • scientists show a surprising reluctance to share knowledge that could be useful to others
    • the journal system is perhaps the most open system for the transmission of knowledge that could be built with 17th century media
    • inhibits the adoption of more effective technologies
    • incentivize scientists to share their work in conventional journals
    • open scientific culture
    • extreme openness
    • Creative Commons
    • free and open source software
    • projects in online science often focus mostly on building tools, with cultural change an afterthought. This is a mistake
    • Scientific institutions reward scientists for making discoveries within the existing system of discovery; there is little place for people working to change that system
    • achieving cultural change
    • top-down strategy
    • open access (OA)
    • people building the new online tools to also develop and boldly evangelize ways of measuring the contributions made with the tools
    • bottom-up
    • imagine you’re a scientist sitting on a hiring committee
    • scientific blogging
    • arXiv and SPIRES
    • Is it possible to scale up this conversational model, and build an online collaboration market [4] to exchange questions and ideas, a sort of collective working memory for the scientific community?
    • free and open source software
    • market in scientific problems and solutions can be established
    • In economics, it’s been understood for hundreds of years that wealth is created when we lower barriers to trade, provided there is a trust infrastructure of laws and enforcement to prevent cheating and ensure trade is uncoerced.
    • science currently lacks the trust infrastructure and incentives necessary for such free, unrestricted trade of questions and ideas.
    • An ideal collaboration market will enable just such an exchange of questions and ideas. It will bake in metrics of contribution so participants can demonstrate the impact their work is having. Contributions will be archived, timestamped, and signed, so it’s clear who said what, and when. Combined with high quality filtering and search tools, the result will be an open culture of trust which gives scientists a real incentive to outsource problems, and contribute in areas where they have a great comparative advantage. This will change science.
    • send a blank email to the.future.of.science@gmail.com with the subject “subscribe book”.
• 17 Aug 09
  

  Joy Runyon
  • Why write a comment when you could be doing something more “useful”, like writing a paper or a grant? Furthermore, if you publicly criticize someone’s paper, there’s a chance that that person may be an anonymous referee in a position to scuttle your next paper or grant application.
  • broader view, if you believe science is about discovering how the world works, and sharing that understanding with the rest of humanity
  • 2 more annotations...
  • • in April 2008 the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) mandated that every paper written with the support of their grants must eventually be made open access.
    • How could you measure the different sorts of contributions a scientist can make on a blog – outreach, education, and research?

Public Stiky Notes

• 
  Cochin Blogger on 2009-10-06
  A marvellous introduction!

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