François Dongier › Likes

The basic structure for this part iii of the "what would X look like if invented today" series is in the mind map at http://www.mindmeister.com/3016825... , with background via http://friendfeed.com/search... . Main points: More flexibility in the models of funding, more attention to technological shifts in the way people (including scientists) communicate. Such has also been argued at http://ff.im/9GGRn and http://2020science.org/2009... . - Daniel Mietchen

Planning to submit a proposal for an ESOF 2012 session on "Research funding 2.0" (or so; cf. http://ff.im/EhgP5 ), largely based on the materials collected here. Collaborators welcome! Some more food for thought: http://www.slate.com/id... . - Daniel Mietchen

There was quite a big story in crystallography in 2007 - 5 papers retracted due to small software error (covered by half of science bloggers here, for example Bosco http://boscoh.com/protein... or Hari http://harijay.wordpress.com/2007... ). People suspected for years that something is wrong with these structures, although it took quite some time to find the error. - Pawel Szczesny

I'm now imagining an April Fools joke from Nature, announcing that in the service of science, they are closing down, and all submissions should henceforth be put on the arXiv, and submitted to PLoS One :-) - Michael Nielsen

Wow, that last clip was amazing. - Nathaniel Thurston

Poop. I wanted this to be real because it looked like great fun. - Bill Hooker

Following the remarkable shift in the polls after last week's debate, what fate awaits Gordon Brown, David Cameron and Nick Clegg as they confront each other in the second prime ministerial TV debate tonight?

Suddenly it seems everyone wants to re-imagine scientific communication. From the ACS symposium a few weeks back to a PLoS Forum, via interesting conversations with a range of publishers, funders and scientists, it seems a lot of people are thinking much more seriously about how to make scientific communication more effective, more appropriate to the 21st century and above all, to take more advantage of the power of the web. For me, the "paper" of the future has to encompass much more than just the narrative descriptions of processed results we have today. Here I discuss the idea of the research communication as an aggregation of objects that are linked together into a story by an "editor". This has the potential both to encompass what papers look like today and prepare us for a much more diverse future. At the same time if we built our research communications this way we get the semantic web for research data more or less as a free extra. - Cameron Neylon

Christina, I think even with streams you have discrete objects within them (events) or discrete aggregations of periods. If they are pure streams then using my own criteria, what is it that we want to do _with_ them and how can we make that work. But short answer, I'm not sure. - Cameron Neylon

So great...still laughing. - Alexander Kruel

me niether, haven't got the time, happy to just see the odd highlights - Tristan Hambling

"Serving as an introduction to computational biology, this course emphasizes the fundamentals of nucleic acid and protein sequence analysis, structural analysis, and the analysis of complex biological systems. The principles and methods used for sequence alignment, motif finding, structural modeling, structure prediction, and network modeling are covered. Students are also exposed to currently emerging research areas in the fields of computational and systems biology." - Mike Chelen from Bookmarklet

"A decade after arriving in Princeton, Einstein acquired a walking companion, a much younger man who, next to the rumpled Einstein, cut a dapper figure in a white linen suit and matching fedora. The two would talk animatedly in German on their morning amble to the institute and again, later in the day, on their way homeward. The man in the suit may not have been recognized by many townspeople, but Einstein addressed him as a peer, someone who, like him, had single-handedly launched a conceptual revolution. If Einstein had upended our everyday notions about the physical world with his theory of relativity, the younger man, Kurt Gödel, had had a similarly subversive effect on our understanding of the abstract world of mathematics." - Alexander Kruel from Bookmarklet

"Gödel, by contrast, had a tendency toward paranoia. He believed in ghosts; he had a morbid dread of being poisoned by refrigerator gases; he refused to go out when certain distinguished mathematicians were in town, apparently out of concern that they might try to kill him. “Every chaos is a wrong appearance,” he insisted—the paranoiac’s first axiom." - Alexander Kruel

Either "furchtbar herzig" is some Austrian slang or it's at least half a century outdated... - Alexander Kruel

The rest of this forward was swallowed. Blog post is at http://ways.org/en... (via http://ff.im/gogt1 ). - Daniel Mietchen

Related thread on funding some large vs. many small projects: http://ff.im/h1iVp - Daniel Mietchen

"Just came across this article from Newsweek in 1995. It lists all the reasons the internet will fail. My two favorite parts: The truth in no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works. … Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we’ll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure. If Newsweek is as good at maintaining the journalism industry as they are at fortune telling, they should be around for a long time. The Internet? Bah! Hype alert: Why cyberspace isn’t, and will never be, nirvana By Clifford Stoll | NEWSWEEK From the magazine issue dated Feb 27, 1995" - Spaceweaver from Bookmarklet

Hilarious :-) - Spaceweaver

So much for good journalism :) - Egon Willighagen

Talk given today at the #nfais meeting as part of a panel with James Ingram and Mackenzie Smith. Clay Shirky gave the keynote, hence the "filter failure" riff. Some twitter coverage at the hashtag from @TAC_NISO and @meyercarol and some blog coverage at http://www.web2learning.net/archive... - Cameron Neylon

Didn't recognize that Amiga - don't think I've ever seen a 500 (in person). I had a 1000 and a 2000 (model A). I actually followed a full Commodore path - using (but not owning) both models of PET, followed by owning VIC-20, C64, C128, A1000, A2000. - Richard Akerman

"Filmed in Dubai over 5 days and nights. Shot on the Canon 7D, 2x5DmkII and one Panasonic GF1" - Alexander Kruel from Bookmarklet

"This week at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, MIT professors discussed their efforts to better understand the human mind, the nature of intelligence and the ways in which human and artificial intelligence can be brought together. Tim Berners-Lee, Tom Malone, Rebecca Saxe, Sebastian Seung and Josh Tenenbaum were among the speakers at the forum’s IdeasLab, in which some of the world’s leading intellectuals and entrepreneurs discussed trends in business, technology and society. MIT President Susan Hockfield introduced the speakers." - Alexander Kruel from Bookmarklet

"Take prime numbers, for example, which as far as I’m concerned, constitute a more stable reality than the physical reality that surrounds us. The working mathematician can be likened to an explorer who sets out to discover the world…We run up against a reality every bit as uncontestable as physical reality." - Alexander Kruel from Bookmarklet

"JUST suppose that Darwin's ideas were only a part of the story of evolution. Suppose that a process he never wrote about, and never even imagined, has been controlling the evolution of life throughout most of the Earth's history. It may sound preposterous, but this is exactly what microbiologist Carl Woese and physicist Nigel Goldenfeld, both at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, believe. Darwin's explanation of evolution, they argue, even in its sophisticated modern form, applies only to a recent phase of life on Earth." - Alexander Kruel from Bookmarklet

"At the root of this idea is overwhelming recent evidence for horizontal gene transfer - in which organisms acquire genetic material "horizontally" from other organisms around them, rather than vertically from their parents or ancestors. The donor organisms may not even be the same species. This mechanism is already known to play a huge role in the evolution of microbial genomes, but... more... - Alexander Kruel

Shows that PLoS One has an overall equal rate of citation to PLoS Biology, and that more of One's articles have been published in a recent year. - Mike Chelen

a nice analysis of aggregate citations over time was done in "The Spread of Scientific Information: insights from the web access statistics in PLoS Article-level Metrics Dataset" http://homes.gersteinlab.org/people... (found via http://article-level-metrics.plos.org/#page-t...) - Mike Chelen

amazingly beautiful, thx - Wildcat

Nope - all art is code - it's designed and configure to run for the human perception. - zeroinfluencer

I have it in my favorites on youtube. Makes me smile every time :) - test

Would love to but can't afford the time :-( Not sure I qualify anyway of course but I'd still like to.... - Cameron Neylon

It's possible to attend selected days and from what I can see the entry criteria are a little fuzzy: http://www.dev8d.org/why... - Dan Hagon

"Given what we have today, the Internet could easily become Invisible High School, with a modicum of educational material in an ocean of narcissism and social obsessions. We could, however, also use it as an Invisible College, the communicative backbone of real intellectual and civic change, but to do this will require more than technology. It will require that we adopt norms of open sharing and participation, fit to a world where publishing has become the new literacy." - C.Shirky "We have embodied our rationality within our machines and delegated to them many of our choices, and in this process we have created a world that is beyond our own understanding. Our century began on a note of uncertainty, as we worried how our machines would handle the transition to the new millennium. Now we are attending to a financial crisis caused by the banking system miscomputing risks, and a debate on global warming in which experts argue not so much about the data, but about what the computers... more... - Amira from Bookmarklet

"It's not what you know, it's what you can find out. The Internet has put at the forefront resourcefulness and critical-thinking and relegated memorization of rote facts to mental exercise or enjoyment. Because of the abundance of information and this new emphasis on resourcefulness, the Internet creates a sense that anything is knowable or findable — as long as you can construct the... more... - Amira

"Previous comparable studies of the brain activity associated with semantic stimuli have been based on the presentation of pictorial inputs whose visual forms were being represented in secondary visual processing areas, particularly ventral temporal cortex, and the activation patterns were then identified as being associated with a particular category. Here, by contrast, the stimuli were printed words only. This is the first demonstration of the ability to identify the neural representation of individual words." \\ "In effect, we discovered how the brain's dictionary is organized -- it isn't alphabetical or ordered by the sizes of objects or their colors." It's through three factors: shelter, eating, and physical interaction. #fMRI Gaussian Naïve Bayes #GNB #classifier - Adriano from Bookmarklet

OTOH, I do not understand the machine-language claims particularly well...right off the bat, though, I think such info could be applied almost immediately in gaining reads of TBI survivors which in turn could help researchers better understand the location of injury effect on the brain and health providers target treatment more effectively. - Mickey Schafer

Bumping because it got buried in amongst the old items when it came through. I quite like this. Much of the heavy lifting was done by Dan Hagon and Jon Hunt on a hack day we had at RAL late last year - Cameron Neylon

I think this needs another cycle of development to make something really useful and there are some issues with the current code (two key things, adding the new feed just appends it to the bottom of the menu, should either replace or be included sorted by date, and I need to put a filter on it as well, also be able to cope with more data and re-size images automatically...the _three_ key things are ...) But we're getting there I think at least on a conceptual basis. - Cameron Neylon