Head exploding

Sometimes it's hard to believe all the stuff you find on the Web. I like to think of my self as a cautious utopian, but some people just go a bit too far in either direction for me.

Is the Web Different? by David Weinberger

The question "Is the Web different?" is actually not so much a question as a shibboleth in the original sense: The answer determines which tribe you're in.

The Web utopians point to the ways in which the Web has changed some of the basic assumptions about how we live together, removing old obstacles and enabling shiny new possibilities.

The Web dystopians agree that the Web is having a major effect on our lives. They, however, think that effect is detrimental.

The Web realists say the Web hasn't had nearly as much effect as the utopians and dystopians proclaim. The Web carries with it certain possibilities and limitations, but (the realists say) not many more than other major communications medium.

I think that this is a pretty useful analysis, one that lets us analyse where people are coming from, including ourselves. Like I said, I tend to be a cautious utopian, but perhaps a better description is a contrarian utopian. I tend to try and present the utopian perspective to dystopians and the dystopian perspective to utopians.

Weinberg obviously falls on the side of the most starry-eyed utopians.

But I don't want to leave it at that happy, liberal conclusion because it is, I believe, incomplete. The fuller statement of the conclusion should include: It is vital to have realists in the discussion, but they are essentially wrong.

*snip*

And we need lots and lots of them. There is so much to invent, and the new forms of association that emerge often only succeed if there are enough people to embrace them.

Web realists perform the vital function of keeping us from running down dead ends longer than we need to, and from getting into feedback loops that distort the innovation process. For those services, we should thank and encourage the realists. But we should also recognize that beyond the particulars, they are essentially wrong.

The contention among dystopians, realists and utopians is is a struggle among the past, the present and the future. The present is always right about itself but — in times of disruption — essentially wrong about the future. That's why we need to flood the field with utopians so we can be right often enough that we build the best future we can.

Needless to say, as a pure contrarian I find Weinberger needlessly dismissive and antagonistic here. I firmly believe that utopians should see realists as their natural allies, not their implacable enemies. Calling people that are mostly on your side wrong all the time does nothing to build the kinds of social networks and collaborative webs these utopians seem to want us to think that they're all about. A little humility can go a long way.

We've Got a Monster on the Loose: It's Called the Internet by Dan Greenberg.

Greenberg is the science policy writer on The Chronicle's group blog Brainstorm

Has there been an uptick in bizarre and pathological behavior since the Internet became a common household implement over, say, the past 10 years? There’s no way of untangling the Internet from the many other elements of society. But one might speculate about the soaring consumption of antidepressants, a reported increase in suicides among middle-aged men, and several spectacular mass murders at universities. Violent online games, pornography, and detachment and isolation from human contact come easily to the Internet user. Is there a connection? No one can say for sure, but the possibility can’t be dismissed.

Like all technologies, the Internet is employable for good and bad, and where it is applicable to benign purposes, it can be uniquely useful. But it is easily adaptable to mischief and worse. By many accounts, it has spawned an epidemic of plagiarism among college students — and an ensuing cat-and-mouse game with professors sifting their prose online. Identity theft is another gift to online malefactors. And sheer confusion — deliberate or inadvertent — on important public matters easily flourishes on the Internet.

Holy crap. What codswallop. It's a shame that Greenberg is the closest they have to a science gal/guy. He doesn't generally seem to like science or scientists or the internet or technology of any kind. Couldn't they find, like, a scientist to contribute? Science is part of Higher Education, after all.

The Ultimate Conference Attendee by Will Richardson.

It's great that this new-fangled web can let us share our thoughts and follow the thoughts of other so easily even though they may be georgraphically very far from us. I know that there's very little I enjoy more that audio or video from some far flung conference or meeting that I couldn't attend. I do conference summaries on my blog because I think others might find them useful and appreciate it when others do the same for sessions I couldn't attend.

Now, Will Richardson is a noted thinker in edcational technology, especially in the pedagogical uses of the read/write web. I often find his highly utopian musings provocative and instructive. But...

Wondering what future conference organizer is gonna get smart and only allow attendees who:

• 
  
• Have their own Ustream channels and broadcast live facial reactions of attendees as the session is in progress
  
• Can Tweet out the best quotes, engage in lively back channel repartee, and live blog the session to their own sites at the same time
  
• Create a VoiceThread story of the presentation within 10 minutes of finish by incorporating photos taken during the session and uploaded to Flickr, adding voice over narration to contextualize the event, and soliciting video comments from virtual attendees
  
• Put together a wiki page for the session that collects dozens of various RSS feeds compiled from keyword and tag searches on the presenter’s name, the general topic, del.icio.us bookmarks, YouTube videos and more
  
• Create a Google Map that identifies where all of the virtual attendees live and helps them upload photos of themselves watching the UStreamed, Tweeted, VoiceThreaded, wikied presentation in progress.
  
• Conduct a live Skype call with other experts who challenge the ideas being presented and scream out provocative and borderline insulting questions
  
• Have their own conference space in Second Life where live video and audio of presentation is being streamed and where they have organized a post session social featuring virtual local microbrews and coffees

Notice how he says "only allow attendees who..." What, so my money isn't good if I'm not on Twitter? Weinberger meet Richardson, Richardson meet Weinberger.

A Call for Slow Writing by Lindsay Waters.

I sort of have the impression I should be agreeing with Waters on this one, but ironically this is one of the most scrambled and unfocused "essays" I've read in a while.

What I’m saying is that the first step to re-establishing the essay as the standard in humanistic writing is to reinvigorate the sentences we write, so that, when one reads an essay, one feels it. One feels it the way one tastes — and here I’m going global — a good curry. It really sets you back. Or maybe forward. Style, maniera, modo is what we readers demand. The humanists of the Renaissance knew the Romans had the ability to put sentences that had concinnitas, but that their ancestors in what we call the Middle Ages had lost that ability. When the Ancients constructed the Arch of Constantine, it stayed together for centuries, even though neglected. Concinnity — what a splendid word!

*snip*

What an outrage! I remember the would-be contributor whom we were demanding more of who said “But I’ve written the perfect New Historicist, feminist, deconstructionist essay. You dare not tamper with my very self and voice. And we dared not tell Professor Polonius that he did not have any writing voice at all. You cannot be comical-pastoral-tragical (I am playing on what Polonius says at Hamlet 2.2.397.) and speak in any tongue in which humans have spoken. We nearly turned down an entry by one of the chief editors of that book. With the Marcus/Sollors I confess to having stacked things towards readability by making one of the founding editors of Rolling Stone be one of the two editors-in-chief of the volume. Guilty as charged. The way I have set up the Marcus/Sollors is all around the essay. The book is a collection of 220 essays that resonate in surprising ways so that the whole is much greater than the sum of the parts, but each individual part is a free-standing essay.In the making of this book I have pursued the essay so strongly that I have made it function in a new way like an individual instrument in Alexander’s Ragtime Band.

I know I'm only a simple science type, but, Huh?

My apologies for the crankiness of today's post. The snow must be getting to me.

Knowing and Doing on putting the Science in Computer Science

Knowing and Doing by Eugene Wallingford is one of my favourite CS faculty blogs. His commentary is always interesting and relevant; a bonus for us librarian types is that he often gives keen insight into the minds of working CS faculty, how they think, the problems they face and mostly, what they're thinking about.

Way back in November (yes, I know, I'm still recovering from all the posting about science books) he published a series of conference reports on the SECANT 2007 Workshop. The workshop topic was Science Education in Computational Thinking, in other words, how computational methods have infiltrated the practice of science at all levels. An important topic and one that I find very interesting and relevant.

Eugene was kind enough to publish a table of contents post of all the workshop-related posts, which I am sort of reproducing below. I've taken his TOC post and to each entry I've added a brief quote from the relevant post. Nevertheless, please visit a couple of Eugene's post and check out the details. As well, what he's done here is really a model for blog-based conference reporting, one of, if not the best, examples I've seen. I am certainly going to try and model my own conference blogging after what Eugene has done here.

Primary entries:

• Workshop Intro: Teaching Science and Computing (on building a community)
  

  SECANT's goals are to build a community that is asking and answering questions such as these:

  • What should science majors know about computing?
    
  • How can computer science be used to teach science?
    
  • Can we integrate computer science effectively into other majors?
    
  • What will the implications of answers to these questions be for how we teach computer science and engineering themselves?

  
  
  
• Workshop 1: Creating a Dialogue Between Science and CS (How can we help scientists and CS folks work together?)
  

  The second speaker was Noah Diffenbaugh, a professor in earth and atmospheric sciences at Purdue. He views himself as a modeler dependent on computing. In the last year or so, he has collected 55 terabytes of data as a part of his work. All of his experiments are numerical simulations. He cannot control the conditions of the system he studies, so he models the system and runs experiments on the model. He has no alternative.
  
  Diffenbaugh claims that anyone who wants a career in his discipline must be able to do computing -- as a consumer of tools, builder of models. He goes farther, calling himself a black sheep in his discipline for thinking that learning computing is critical to the intellectual development of scientists and non-scientists alike.

  
  
  
• Workshop 2: Exception Gnomes, Garbage Collection Fairies, and Problems (on a hodgepodge of sessions around the intersection of science ed and computing)
  

  This list tied well into the round-table discussion that followed, on what computational concepts science students should learn. I didn't get a coherent picture from this discussion, but one part stood out to me. Bruce Sherwood said that many scientists view analytical solution as privileged over simulation, because it is exact. He then pointed out that in some domains the situation is being turned on its head: a faithful discrete simulation is a more real depiction of the world than the closed-form analytical solution -- which is, in fact, only an approximation created at a time when our tools were more limited. The best quote of this session came from John Zelle: Continuity is a hack!

  
  
  
• Workshop 3: The Next Generation (what scientists are doing out in the world and how computer scientists are helping them)
  

  From these two talks, it seems clear that domain scientists and computer scientists of the future will need to know more about the other discipline than may have been needed in the past. Computing is redefining the questions that domain scientists must ask and redefining the tasks performed by the CS folks. The domain scientists need to know enough about computer science, especially databases and visualization, to know what is possible. Computer scientists need to study algorithms, parallelism, and HCI. They also need to take more seriously the soft skills of communication and teamwork that we have encouraging for many years now.

  
  
  
• Workshop 4: Programming Scientists (should scientists learn to program? And, if so, how?)
  

  And, yes, I do think that science students should learn how to program, for two reasons. One is that science in the 21st century is science of computation. That was one of the themes of this workshop. The other is that -- deep in my heart -- I think that all students should learn to program. I've written about this before, in terms of Alan Kay's contributions, and I'll write about it again soon. In short, I have at least two reasons for believing this:

  • Computation is a new medium of communication, and one with which we should empower everyone, not just a select few.
    
  • Computer programming is a singular intellectual achievement, and all educated people should know that, and why.

  
  
  
• Workshop 5: Wrap-Up (on how to cause change and disseminate results)
  

  On how to cause change. At one point the discussion turned philosophical, as folks considered more generally how one can create change in a larger community. Should the group try to convince other faculty of the value of these ideas first, and then involve them in the change? Should the group create great materials and courses first and then use them to convince other faculty? In my experience, these don't work all that well. You can attract a few people who are already predisposed to the idea, or who are open to change because they do not have their own ideas to drive into the future. But folks who are predisposed against the idea will remain so, and resist, and folks who are indifferent will be hard to move simply because of inertia. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

  
  

Ancillary entries:

• A Program is an Idea (going farther on why scientists, and everyone else, should learn to program)

  A scientist can communicate an idea to others with a program, but they can also think better with a program. Graham captured this from the perspective of the software developer in the article I quoted earlier:
  
  Your code is your understanding of the problem you're exploring.
  
  Every programmer knows what this means. I can think all the Big Thoughts I like, but until I have working a program, I'm never quite certain that these thoughts make sense. Writing a program forces me to specify and clarify; it rejects fuzziness and incoherence. As my program grows and evolves, it reflects the growth and evolution of my idea. Graham says it more strongly: the program is the growth and evolution of my idea. Whether this is truth or merely literary device, thinking of the program as the idea is a useful mechanism for holding myself accountable to making my idea clear enough to execute.

  
  

New science carnivals

Two newish science carnivals for your attention:

• Philosophia Naturalis is a monthly carnival that's been going since September 2006. Here's the story:

  Philosophia Naturalis will take the physical sciences and technology as its focus. The physical sciences include physics, astronomy, cosmology, chemistry, mathematics, computer science, and Earth sciences. And just as medicine is applied life science, technology is applied physical science, including such topics as nanotechnology, robotics, artificial intelligence, alternative energy, and quantum computing. We also intend to be generous about considering "borderline" topics for inclusion.

  
  As they mention, this is really the first carnival to cover the non-life sciences. The most recent is #6 at Science and Reason.
  
  
• The Carnival of Mathematics also is filling a gap in carnival coverage, as there hasn't been one covering math exclusively before. The story:
  

  Biology bloggers have Tangled Bank. Medical bloggers have Grand Rounds. Neuroscience bloggers have Encephalon. And now math bloggers have the Carnival of Mathematics. If you have anything to blog about that’s related to math, it belongs here. Possible topics include,
  
  - Proofs of theorems and formulas, whether in pure or applied math;
  - Explanations of mathematical concepts, as basic as those on ScienceBlogs’ basic concepts series;
  - Anything related to math education, from complaints about innumerate students to long-winded theories of how to teach math;
  - Debunking bad math, especially when used to bolster bad science, bad economics, or bad politics;
  - How to apply good math to other fields like physics, economics, computer science, and ;
  - Math in popular culture: the TV series Numb3rs, the movies Pi and Proof, any book by Simon Singh, and so on.
  
  Despite the mathematical inclination of the carnival, theoretical computer scientists and theoretical physicists are welcome to submit posts about their fields. Both disciplines are highly mathematized, and when it comes to such subfields as Lie theory, logic, and complexity theory, it’s hard to pinpoint where one discipline ends and other begins.

  
  This one's planned for every two weeks. The first one is up at Abstract Nonsense.

Of course, I would be remiss in having a carnival post without mentioning our own revitalized Carnival of the Inforsciences. The most recent is at Libraryola, the next is scheduled for February 19th at Innovate .

Hey there Nerac, Revisited

You may recall from mid-December I mentioned that I was getting a lot of hits from an organization called Nerac. I asked if someone from Nerac might be interested in dropping me an email or making a comment to let me know what had piqued their interest. Well, I didn't hear anything for a while and the whole thing sort of slipped to the back of my mind. A couple of weeks ago I did get an email from Michael Mahoney, Business Development Manager of Nerac, and he graciously agreed to answer a few questions about Nerac and their interest in my post on the future of A&I databases.

Thanks, Mike!

Q. Would you mind describing Nerac a little bit and how it relates to the scitech world? Do you have mostly corporate clients or also academic institutions & research groups?

Nerac, Inc. is an innovative research advisory partner for industry and consumer goods organizations. Our clients turn to us for scientific, technical intellectual property and business decisions. The majority of our clients are corporate, however we do service many university technology transfer departments.

Q. Do you employ and people with library backgrounds as researchers or customer liaisons? How about people with science & engineering backgrounds?

Nerac employs over 100 analysts with a variety of backgrounds in science, technology and business. Many have advanced degrees including several with MLS degrees. We also have patent attorneys and licensed patent agents on staff.

Q. What kind of research tools do you use? Obviously Google, USPTO and other free search engines, but how about Dialog, patent databases, Scopus, Web of Science and other for fee products?

Nerac uses whatever resources it needs to find the information needed to fit the research needs of our clients. The resources listed below are just a few that the staff uses regularly:

A&I and full text patent databases that are load on our in-house proprietary search engine.

Aggregated hosts - STN, Questel, Newsbank and Westlaw.

Value add resources – Knovel, ADIS, Hoover’s and BioPharm Insight.

Free resources – Google Scholar, Google Books, Web search engines, and content found on the invisible web.

Our own direct experiences in research fields.

Telephone networking with experts in the field.

Q. How about journals and other scholarly content -- IEEE, ACM and other scitech publishers? Or mostly on the trade journal side of things?

We do have corporate agreements with a few of the major publishers of Sci-Tech journals for in-house use of their content. If we need papers from the other publishers we order them on behalf of our clients.

Q. Finally, it was my discussion of the future of A&I databases that got this whole thing going. Where do you see that business (and related content businesses like journal publishing) going in the next few years?

Primary content will always be around in some form. There has been some movement toward open access, but it will be interesting to see how that plays out in the market.

Years ago it was enough to send raw premium A&I to a client. The patron could select and read a few papers and hopefully solve their problem. We detected that a shift in secondary content was going to occur a few years ago due to all the free content. We changed our business model to deliver deeper analysis of the problem at hand and offer an opinion on the solution. Both information professionals and information companies need to be aware that you can’t compete with free and stay in business. Ultimately, the value these professionals and companies offer is analysis, advice, and opinion.

That was fun. I certainly wouldn't mind trying out some more interview-style posts here in the future, perhaps with some fellow scitech librarians, bloggers or people in the publishing world.

Ten Tech Companies That Blew It in the Past Two Decades

David Louis Edelman has compiled a list of the top 10 tech companies that have blown some sort of technical or business advantage in the 20 years or so. It's a very interesting and instructive list:

1. Atari
   
2. Netscape
   
3. Palm
   
4. America Online
   
5. Apple (before Steve Jobs returned)
   
6. Sony
   
7. Gateway
   
8. Compaq
   
9. Intuit
   
10. Real Networks

The article is definately worth reading. His closing quote:

So there we have it: ten tech companies, ten high-profile failures. The main causes? Seems to me they are failure of nerve, failure to innovate, excessive greed, excessive litigiousness, and overwhelming fear of Microsoft. Am I missing anything?

I think that there are a lot of lessons to learn from this list. First of all, the price to pay for our own organization for these failures of nerve, innovation and fear. In particular, for academic institution, failures of nerve seem particularly dangerous. For a lot of reasons, it's just too easy to sit still sometimes. Lack of money, lack of personnel to take on new projects, committee paralysis, the list is endless. The other lesson to learn is not to put our eggs in one corporate or technological basket too quickly. The companies we rely on to keep us running may just as easily fall victim, leaving us holding the bag. Via SFSignal.