This is my dumping ground for quotes and other stuff relating to the wonderful world of digital & communications.
(via Google exec says web is ‘scarce resource’ | Video | Reuters.com) — hopefully full speech video will come soon, but in the meantime, I found this
In 5-10 years’ time, the way scientists will communicate will be unrecognizable from the way that they have been communicating for the last 400 years, when the first academic journal was founded. The first change will be instant distribution for all scientific ideas. Some sites, such as arXiv, Academia.edu, Mendeley, and ResearchGate have brought instant distribution to certain sub-fields of science recently, and this trend is going to continue to all fields of science. In a few years, scientists will look back and will struggle to believe that they used to exist in a world where it took 12 months to circulate a scientific idea around the world… Bringing instant distribution to science will have a similarly transformative effect on scientific progress.
The future of science: rich media
Historically scientists have written their papers as native desktop content. They have saved their papers as PDFs, and uploaded the files to the web.
Over the next few years, scientific content will increasingly become native web content, and be written natively for the web. Scientific content will be created with the full interactivity, and richness, of the web in mind… Scientists will share content in whatever format makes sense for the piece of content in question. They will share ideas in the form of data sets, videos, 3-d models, software programs, graphs, blog posts, status updates, and comments on all these rich media.
The ways that these content formats will connect with each other will be via the hyperlink, and not via the citation. The citation will look like an ancient concept in a few years.
What goes on at the moment of discovery? Is it a flash or a slow burn? Does it come at the end of a long day of work, or upon waking in the morning? Artists might evade explanation and just call it their “muse“, but what about scientists? Science is supposed to come from a rational source, a set of long equations or a series of dogged experiments. But the truth — to which some of history’s greatest scientists can attest — is far more irrational: discovery is anarchy, inspiration is unexplainable
Matter, which aims to provide a new outlet for long-form science and technology stories, has been backed by 2,566 individuals and businesses on crowd-funding platform Kickstarter, raising $140,201.
These photos are special, and what they show is something that the vast majority of us have not had much exposure to: Images of women (who are not Marie Curie), working in the sciences prior to the 1970s or 1980s.
In a recent work entitled ‘Comment devient-on scientifique?’ (How does one become a scientist?) published by Editions EDP, Florence Guichard indicates the results of a survey undertaken in the Ile-de-France: 60% of scientists over 30 and 40% of scientists under 30 claim, without prompting, that the Palais de la Découverte triggered their vocation. ….
[ANOTHER EG]
A 1998 survey of 1400 scientists, conducted by the Roper Starch organization for the Bayer Foundation and NSF, reported that a respected adult, such as a parent, was the biggest factor in stimulating childhood interest in science. […] a variety of informalactivities had an effect. […] 76 percent said science museum visits
A series of short films featuring the personalities behind the experiments will be posted on the CERN People Google+ Page and YouTube every month, and anyone from professional scientists to interested amateurs will be able to interact directly with CERN’s physicists via comments and Google+ Hangouts
ResearchGate, a small firm based in Berlin… is aiming to do for the academic world what Mark Zuckerberg did for the world in general, by creating a social network for scientists. And it is successful. About 1.4m researchers have signed up already, and that number is growing by 50,000 a month.
In 2009 Field’s medallist Tim Gowers decided to experiment with crowdsourcing a solution to a difficult, previously unsolved, mathematical problem, in something he called the Polymath Project. He posted the problem to his blog along with his initial ideas on solving. Within 37 days, 27 different people had posted 800 substantive comments containing 170k words…. and the problem was solved. ”Gowers described the process as being to ordinary research, as driving is to pushing a car”.
Solve for X: Adrien Treuille on collaborative science (by wesolveforx) … “in the course of 6 months, 30 thousand non-expert EteRNA players got better and better at nano-engineering (through the game), to the point that their worst solution was better than the best computer solution. ”
By playing EteRNA, you will participate in creating the first large-scale library of synthetic RNA designs. Your efforts will help reveal new principles for designing RNA-based switches and nanomachines — new systems for seeking and eventually controlling living cells and disease-causing viruses. By interacting with thousands of players and learning from real experimental feedback, you will be pioneering a completely new way to do science. Join the global laboratory!
About half of the Stanford stat professors have joint appointments with other departments, including economics, human biology and environmental science. “Statistics is unusual,” Mr. Hastie notes. “It’s a service field to other disciplines. It doesn’t rely on its own work. It needs others.
In the three hours following Stargazing Live being aired we saw an almost six-fold increase in sales of telescopes,” (aka the Brian Cox effect)
GalaxyZoo, a citizen-science site, has classified millions of objects in space, discovering characteristics that have led to a raft of scientific papers.
On the collaborative blog MathOverflow, mathematicians earn reputation points for contributing to solutions; in another math experiment dubbed the Polymath Project, mathematicians commenting on the Fields medalist Timothy Gower’s blog in 2009 found a new proof for a particularly complicated theorem in just six weeks.
And a social networking site called ResearchGate — where scientists can answer one another’s questions, share papers and find collaborators — is rapidly gaining popularity.
Hermit crabs don’t make their own shells. They scavenge their homes. And now, hermit crabs are facing a housing shortage… As a community, we can reach out to this vulnerable species and offer our digital design skills and 3D printing capabilities and give hermit crabs another option: 3D printed shells.
…
This is a new frontier of crowdsourced science. Please design shells that you think a hermit crab would like and upload them… (they will then print out and offer to hermit crabs in their test labs to see which work best)
