Home
Joel Liu's Library tagged → View Popular, Search in Google
-
Five years ago, most newspaper editors would have laughed at the idea that blogs might one day offer serious competition. The minicomputer companies laughed at the early personal computers. New technologies often don’t look very good in their early stages, and that means a straightup comparison of new to old is little help in recognizing impending dispruption. That’s a problem, though, because the best time to recognize disruption is in its early stages.
-
An early sign of impending disruption is when there’s a sudden flourishing of startup organizations serving an overlapping customer need (say, news), but whose organizational architecture is radically different to the conventional approach. That means many people outside the old industry (and thus not suffering from the blinders of an immune response) are willing to bet large sums of their own money on a new way of doing things. That’s exactly what we saw in the period 2000-2005, with organizations like Slashdot, Digg, Fark, Reddit, Talking Points Memo, and many others. Most such startups die. That’s okay: it’s how the new industry learns what organizational architectures work, and what don’t. But if even a few of the startups do okay, then the old players are in trouble, because the startups have far more room for improvement.
You are not alone. Physicists have long struggled to understand what time really is. In fact, they are not even sure it exists at all. In their quest for deeper theories of the universe, some researchers increasingly suspect that time is not a fundamental feature of nature, but rather an artefact of our perception. One group has recently found a way to do quantum physics without invoking time, which could help pave a path to a time-free "theory of everything". If correct, the approach suggests that time really is an illusion, and that we may need to rethink how the universe at large works.
-
When we first put the mouse-brain atlas online free, it was met by the research world with suspicion. People wondered what the catch was. Scientific research has long been a solitary endeavour—one researcher, one microscope. Findings are protected so that discovery credit can be clearly defined and awarded. This is a successful model and will continue to be.
However, the Human Genome Project demonstrated a different path: multiple teams working collaboratively towards a common goal. I believe a real acceleration in progress and innovation comes from the open sharing of ideas and collaboration. We wanted the mouse atlas to be free and available for all to use as the basis for foundational research and discovery.
-
Clearly the model of providing a freely accessible database is a successful one. In a sense, we have challenged other researchers to offer greater access to their findings. Will they take the challenge? My bet is that over the next 18 months we are going to see more open access and more collaboration.
Some people have said that single photons can be seen and quote the fact that faint flashes from radioactive materials (for example) can be seen. This is an incorrect argument. Such flashes produce a large number of photons. It is also not possible to determine sensitivity from the ability of amateur astronomers to see faint stars with the naked eye. They are limited by background light before the true limits are reached. To test visual sensitivity a more careful experiment must be performed.
-
In fact the most successful systems that humans have been able to design are ones in which most of the design effort goes into letting the system be able to grow in a fashion that detects and corrects the error, so that the system doesn't come apart. The Internet is a good example of that, because it's something that didn't require any central control and wasn't constructed, the way a clock is constructed. Another good example is the American Constitution, because the people who designed it realized that it would be very difficult to write laws for how people should live 50 years from their time and place, so they wisely made most of the Constitution a way of dealing with error situations that would come up and a way of keeping bad things from propagating. They didn't try to tell people how they should live over the next two centuries.
-
The reason our group has been successful is that our whole development system is designed to allow us to late-bind things that we discover along the way, things we would not have to find out along the way if we had a real engineering discipline.
- 4 more annotation(s)...
-
I had to admit that the science I loved so much was powerless to answer questions such as "What is the meaning of life?" "Why am I here?" "Why does mathematics work, anyway?" "If the universe had a beginning, who created it?" "Why are the physical constants in the universe so finely tuned to allow the possibility of complex life forms?" "Why do humans have a moral sense?" "What happens after we die?" (Watch Francis Collins discuss how he came to believe in God
) -
I have found there is a wonderful harmony in the complementary truths of science and faith. The God of the Bible is also the God of the genome. God can be found in the cathedral or in the laboratory. By investigating God's majestic and awesome creation, science can actually be a means of worship.
-
- Search Examples:
- Single word: education
- Phrase: "White House"
(add quotes around exact phrases) - Wildcard: educat*
(will match educate, education, educat or ...) - Multiple words/phrases: "White House" AND education
- More search tips...
- Single word: education
Selected Tags
Related Tags
Top Contributors
Groups interested in science
-
Assignment 3: History of Western Astronomical Thought
A summary of Western astrono...
Items: 8 | Visits: 207
Created by: James Linzel
-
Science Resources
A list of resources for Scie...
Items: 169 | Visits: 216
Created by: Dianne Krause
-
Biology
focus on science of living t...
Items: 118 | Visits: 1907
Created by: Sheryl A. McCoy
Diigo is about better ways to research, share and collaborate on information. Learn more »
Join Diigo