User:OpenScientist/What would science look like if it were invented today/Old text bits

Further old stuff

 * toll-access literature.

mendeley, ontology paper rate some ground-braking paper and perhaps some curiosities from the scholarly wiki table


 * aggregating knowledge in ontologies
 * Play? / baseline funding
 * Mention few-to-many to many-to-many transition?


 * http://www.academicevolution.com/2009/03/intellectual-apartheid.html: "This is one of the great secrets of academic publishing-–it is not at all in the service of transmitting knowledge generally; it is in the service of making money (for the publishers) and making reputations (for the scholars). So long as these two conditions are being met, academia could care less about whether anything its scholars do actually makes a difference in the world, except for the occasional puff piece to show to contributors or alumni. Reaching out to the whole world is the stuff that convocation speeches and university mission statements are made of, but in the day-to-day world of academia, actually reaching the world with one’s refined knowledge is not rewarded. In fact, it is often punished. Generalists, such as those who are using blogging to actually talk to the public about their ideas, are threatened with lack of tenure or advancement if they waste their time in anything but publications oriented towards their disciplinary peers."

More on Google Wave


 * use aspects of the GW protocol for a new and open standard of impact metrics, incl. grant proposals, research funding etc.

The basic steps:
 * Give each research contribution a unique ID and non-unique tags
 * Give each contributor to research a unique ID and the option to tag and rate contribution IDs (perhaps as a function of overlap between the contribution's tags and those on their own expertise)
 * Aggregate the ratings over contributions, contributors, tags and combinations thereof

Open scientists make their work transparent in the world wide web, e.g. by: discussing own research ideas, methods and results with others in the internet keeping a public lab notebook making their teaching open to public discussion blogging about their scientific activity and while doing this not only reflect about their own action, but also encourage others making problems public they are actually working on and thus giving other the chance to participate actively in the problem solving process submitting articles to publication institutions which have set up a public review process assessing articles for publication institutions which have set up a public review process making raw data and analytical tools (on which their works are based) publicly accessible

Q: is there a word for the process of structuring knowledge? Learning? Epistemology?


 * feature request: offline archiving, selective download (ideally in an automated fashion, like with "saved searches"), rating of individual contributions, and analysis of contributions via an adaptation of PageRank

Google Wave Federation: decentralized interactions via the wave protocol Google wave and implications for science : http://wwmm.ch.cam.ac.uk/blogs/murrayrust/?p=2032

Google Search Google Scholar Google Earth Google Docs Google Mail Google Chat Google Images Google Knol Friendfeed

Part I: Inventing science funding basis: http://ways.org/en/blogs/2009/may/24/implementing_fantasy_science_funding focus on transparent reputaion system beyond the Journal Impact Factor

Part II: Inventing scientific collaboration basis: http://ways.org/en/blogs/2008/dec/28/the_journal_scope_in_focus_putting_scholarly_communication_in_context (rethink in terms of waves) and the blog3 proposal

Sidenotes: translations, if harvested from a web corpus, will only work well if there is a large corpus containing the relevant phrases, which is certainly a problem for scientific topics

But it is hard to imagine how these two parameters would not improve in the more transparent and more easily adaptable

cloud computing

baseline funding would allow even low-rated ideas to be pursued until preliminary data are available, or further if several researchers combine their respective funds.

OK, you might say, but what about peer review then? --cite examples from Cameron's letter, or better, on it performing only slightly better than chance alone, and given the costs involved, it is certainly not an effective way of quality assessment.

--needs incentives, not present in the current system

--possibility to invest in selected projects initiated by others is perhaps even better a form of assessment than classical behind-the-doors peer review

adoption of a "posting-in-public" attitude reaches a threshold, the incentives will be on the sides of those who post their stuff immediately (though provisions should be made for some special cases, e.g. concerning the privacy of personal data from human subjects and patients).

--not designed to detect fraud. Nor is wiki-based communication, but it facilitates to detect fraud.

I'm sure you will have noticed, but I feel I should mention it nonetheless: this blog post was inspired by Google who posed the question "What would email look like if it were invented today?" last Thursday and answered it during the same impressive presentation with Google Wave (briefly announced in my previous post) - a tool.
 * the above paragraph could also go into the lead (rephrased)

http://zope.cetis.ac.uk/members/scott/blogview?entry=20090601115357 http://thinkvitamin.com/dev/six-ways-that-google-wave-is-going-to-change-your-business-career-and-life/ http://blog.openwetware.org/scienceintheopen/2009/05/30/omg-this-changes-everything-or-yet-another-wave-of-adulation/ http://bjoern.brembs.net/news.php?item.521.3 http://www.suntimes.com/business/1606282,ihnatko-google-wave-060309.article http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/indepth/38904 http://howpublishingreallyworks.blogspot.com/2009/06/guest-post-google-wave-by-david-h.html http://forum.citizendium.org/index.php?topic=2706.msg21441#msg21441 http://pathtosustainable.wordpress.com/2009/06/02/talking-science/ http://www.endesha.com/blog/on-google-wave-part-1-architecture/
 * Google Wave Widgets
 * Six reasons why it may become important
 * Cameron's initial comments
 * http://blog.openwetware.org/scienceintheopen/2009/06/08/google-wave-in-research-the-slightly-more-sober-view-part-i-papers/
 * Bj√∂rn's initial comments
 * Chicago Sun Times
 * Michael Nielsen: Doing science in the open
 * Google Wave, by David H Burton
 * Transclusion gets the wiki close
 * Going Beyond a Public Understanding of Science to Give the Public a Voice
 * A series of five blog posts:

http://stackoverflow.com/faq
 * Voting/ reputation scheme implemented:

http://www.onlinecourses.org/2009/06/09/100-awesome-open-source-tools-for-writers-journalists-and-bloggers/
 * 100 Awesome Open Source Tools for Writers, Journalists, and Bloggers

http://cameronneylon.wikidot.com/head-in-the-clouds-automated-experimentation
 * Cameron Neylon: Head in the Clouds: Re-imagining the experimental laboratory record for the web-based networked world

http://friendfeed.com/the-life-scientists/ce7887f1/hi-all-please-have-look-at-this-almost-completed http://wiki.okfn.org/wg/science/1#
 * Poster pre-conference review
 * organizing meetings via IRC

http://www.infoworld.com/print/38839
 * Programming: 10 principles that will guide the evolution of scripting languages in the future

http://friendfeed.com/the-life-scientists/41fa74f8/vision-of-traffic-international-journal
 * TRAFFIC in 2020

A possible fourth component would be the communication of selected details of the approach to other members of the scientific community (usually separately for each component - as grant proposals, publications, and control experiments in related studies, respectively). The decoupling of this fourth component from the other three, however, is simply a trait contemporary science has inherited from the paper-based era, and in most cases not a technical necessity today.

Currently, we do this chiefly by means of publishing journal articles or monographs and by giving talks or presenting posters at conferences.

(1) identification of a gap in existing knowledge

(let us call them "research" and "learning" here)

system whose only input are verifiable observations and whose output is in which existing and newly created knowledge

in which the creation and maintenance of knowledge are intimately integrated with one another and based on verifiable observation (be these empirical, experimental or theoretical).

any coherently organized system of knowledge attained by verifiable observation or logical vindicatio

that creates and provides knowledge in a way that both processes can effectively feed on each other. integrated

our leaders had judged our current knowledge system to be approximately coherently structured but in dire need of a wholesale revision of its interface to observations: research. They added three more points:
 * The observations should initially feed on the existing knowledge system but easily adapt as the system changes.
 * The knowledge system, in turn, should feed exclusively on verifiable observations, but easily, quickly and transparently adapt as the system changes.
 * You are in charge.

procedural knowledge

The point here is to make use, right from the start, of the most appropriate technologies available on our planet today (ignore, for the time being, where these may have come from, or imagine, for simplicity, that they were given to us by an alien civilization to which we have lost contact).

Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778)[1] [2] established for the first time a widely acceptable and fruitful set of principles for classifying plants and animals into the groupings we know

that the interface should make use of the most appropriate technologies available today, that it should only allow verifiable observations

you were charged with a wholesale redesign (and thus basically the invention) of an evolving structured knowledge system that feeds on and into verifiable observations. Knowledge in this context includes procedural knowledge like drawing, singing or programming skills, and observations may well be abstract, e.g. concerning the behaviour of a mathematical function when it approaches a singularity. Suppose further that an acceptably coherent knowledge system were already existing (ignore, for the time being, where it may have come from, or imagine, for simplicity, that it was given to us by an alien civilization to which we have lost contact) but it is rather static - what is missing is the interface to observation, something that feeds both on and into the knowledge system: research.

Citizendium: Science is "any coherently organized system of knowledge attained by verifiable observation or logical vindication".

Me: the cyclic process of verifiable observation that feeds on and into a coherently structured system of knowledge.

To me, "observations" includes abstract notions like observing the behaviour of a mathematical function when it approaches a singularity.

Definitions: scientists:  One who works on scientific principles. http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/50215801?query_type=word&queryword=science&first=1&max_to_show=10&single=1&sort_type=alpha

science: 5 b. In modern use, often treated as synonymous with ‚ÄòNatural and Physical Science‚Äô, and thus restricted to those branches of study that relate to the phenomena of the material universe and their laws, sometimes with implied exclusion of pure mathematics. This is now the dominant sense in ordinary use. http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/50215796?query_type=word&queryword=science&first=1&max_to_show=10&single=1&sort_type=alpha