Richard Akerman › Likes

Personally, am not convinced of some of the assumptions, e.g. "...Both are unfortunate, but are parts of the current culture [reference to sharing early lab results]. Any network that hopes to succeed must adapt to the culture of the community, rather than trying to rewrite it." First, though likely rare, I think there are instances where culture gets "re-written" -- another perspective is that this form of communication provides an alternative to established routes. That is, does not replace them but adds to the diversity of communication means. - Mickey Schafer

Jenny: it might be better to gauge usage based either on features such as address book management or by traffic metrics such as size of audience - Mike Chelen

I haven't tried it myself, but some dissatisfaction from my colleagues when they did. Safari on the iPod touch seems to do a reasonable job with Wave (ignore the warnings and click through), but lacks notification of course. - AJCann

This week seems to haveagain seen a significant increase in Wave users. I can now reach a lot if not most Science 2.0 people via Wave. I have a few Wave invites left, please drop me a note if you still need one. - Martin Fenner

Stunning video of a brand new city built in China, for one million people, but standing empty. Starts about 1:10 in. - Michael Nielsen

Wow. Just... wow. - Bill Hooker

On a slightly smaller scale, I had a similar feeling while working in a similarly recent town in South Korea - projected for perhaps half a million, inhabited by a few tens of thousands when I was there in 2007 and had been a village until a few years before. - Daniel Mietchen

How can I not like this :-D - Lars Juhl Jensen

In addition to "Literature, Sequence, Structure...", how about "Expression" with a link to BioGPS? just a thought... ;) - Andrew Su

"So what are we proposing? We will phase out project and programme grants and instead, extend the model of fellowship support to researchers who are salaried by their university or research institute. " - Daniel Mietchen

It's interesting how explicit that is in the China case. The spending of money to speed development as well as to bring people back to support this. Building a new campus expected to house 20,000 scientists in a five year timeframe just doesn't seem to bother them. At the same time the heirachical and top down nature of the society and organization of their science doesn't seem to support radical developments. Will be very interesting to watch though. - Cameron Neylon

Many of you know I've been working with Mendeley as a sort of ambassador/community liaison. I started this because I've always felt a little shut out from contributing to open science/open access/open data because I don't work for a publisher, don't really write code, and wasn't in a job where I could openly share data. This was a way to influence how things develop by promoting the people who "get it". - Mr. Gunn

Yes, I got the one you sent and I really appreciate it. I do plan to follow up when I get back into town. - Mr. Gunn

Make that a 'like, like, like' :-) - Graham Steel

Applying for a research grant entails an elaborate folie á deux between applicant and funding agency. The applicant describes in meticulous detail a programme of work, half of which has already been completed and the other half which probably never will be, at least not in the way that is proposed. The more original and important the research question, the more likely it is that this future half will never reach completion, because there is no road map into the unknown. There are of course exceptions, such as clinical trials, sequencing projects, epidemiological studies and genetic analyses, where it is reasonable to expect that what is proposed will be carried out. The current peer review process reinforces this approach to the funding of science. Referees and panel members are complicit with applicant and funder in judging the work of fiction that characterises many grant applications. - Duncan Hull

Question and answer site that brings to it a ready-made community: the community around O'Reilly media. Looks a bit too broad to me, but it'll be interesting to watch develop. - Michael Nielsen

flashbacks to dancing - JSNFLMNG from Blip.fm

Thanks Stephen, Richard: I'll have to check that one out, thanks ;P - JSNFLMNG

Oh, the humanity! - Steve is older than ever

Seems like a cruel joke to give a creature feathers and wings but not the ability to fly. Actually that sounds like a hazing, come to think of it. - vicster

"However, data-driven science becomes more messy, methodologically and conceptually, when generation and testing of hypotheses are both based on the same, enormous data sets, and when the hypotheses to be tested are products of an automated search for patterns. Thousand-to-one odds in favor of a hypothesis (based on the usual kind of analysis) don’t mean much when a million hypotheses were screened to find it — but the evidence is the same, so what is the problem? In other words, What is so special about starting with a human-generated hypothesis? Bayesian methods suggest what I think is the right answer: To get from probabilistic evidence to the probability of something requires combining the evidence with a prior expectation, a “prior probability”, and human hypothesis generation enables this requirement to be ignored with considerable practical success." - Michael Nielsen

from the comment section (by Drexler): "Human knowledge is a great web of densely connected parts, not a stack of blocks with a bottom that must rest on something else. It has central and peripheral regions, perhaps, but not a top or bottom." I like that conceptualization a lot. Many of the metaphors we use about knowledge relate to volume which implies a container which in turn implies... more... - Mickey Schafer

Lengthy, fascinating remarks from the editor of the New York Times, Bill Keller. - Michael Nielsen

hah! give 'im hell, Mark! - D0r0th34

See, I *knew* someone would be on top of this. Or several someones. Thanks! - laura x

#qotd Computer Science Major "WTF, Man. I just wanted to learn how to program video games" - Duncan Hull from Bookmarklet

Too true of computer science majors these days. - Andrew Lang

I like abstractions - Richard Akerman from BuddyFeed