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Roger Pettett › Likes
RT @nanopore: London to get £600m chromosome-shaped genetic research complex @TimesScience @markgfh http://bit.ly/5WpqRR - http://twitter.com/setites...
Roger Pettett liked this
Full Text Indexing, CouchDB, and Performance - Bitdiddle's bit twiddlings - http://dionne.posterous.com/full-te...
Roger Pettett liked this
With New NHGRI Grant, Electronic Bio Sciences Focuses on Nanopore Strand Sequencing: The company, which won a four-... http://bit.ly/6IUFUU - http://twitter.com/InSeque...
Roger Pettett liked this
A mesoscale model of DNA interaction with functionalized nanopore http://bit.ly/8CaTjP - http://twitter.com/techfly...
Roger Pettett liked this
Promoting Open Source Science | WalterJessen.com - http://www.walterjessen.com/promoti...
Roger Pettett and Kubke liked this
Masterworks talk on Big Data and the implications of petascale science - http://www.slideshare.net/mndoci...
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OpenSci Info, Anna Croft, Roger Pettett and 3 other people liked this
Thank you Deepak ! Is there a way to listen to your talk ?
- Pierre Lindenbaum
Unfortunately, I don't think there was any video :(
- Deepak Singh
You can always add an audio track in your abundant spare time ;-)
- Neil Saunders
<funny>
- Graham Steel
I recognise a lot of those slides! :)
- Roger Pettett
from twhirl
and, i might add, many of those sequencing figures were from ~18 months ago
- Roger Pettett
from twhirl
:-) yep but the big ones I only know "offline", so not sure I can put them on a slide
- Deepak Singh
Neil, I might just do that some day.
- Deepak Singh
An early birthday present: The Gmail Javascript compiler was just open-sourced! http://code.google.com/closure... (it compiles JS into smaller, faster JS)
Mona Nomura, Uğur Aslan, seyithanyener and 115 other people liked this
We first started work on it almost 8 years ago. It has come a long way since then :)
- Paul Buchheit
Happy Birthday Paul!
- Merry Xmas FFeeders - AJ
Today is actually just my internet birthday.
- Paul Buchheit
Well, thanks :) But for a verbose API I'll stick with YUI :P Have to inspect the power of templating and compiler, though.
- Claudio Cicali ♋
I wonder what happens when you apply it recursively -- can you get down to 1 byte of code that takes no time to execute? ;=)
- Brian Sullivan
Finally! This is great.
- Tudor Bosman
Happy Birthday!
- Robert Scoble
Nice!
- Micah Wittman
Unfortunately it looks like the internationalization features may be missing. I wonder why those were removed? (or if I'm just not seeing it)
- Paul Buchheit
Paul you are my best-friend :`(
- \(*_*)/
if you were starting a new site today, would you use this over jquery (which friendfeed uses)?
- Karl Rosaen
Karl, jquery is a library, this is a compiler. I would use them both.
- Paul Buchheit
well, i mean closure library :) but yeah, they could be used together
- Karl Rosaen
ah, i see this is a link closure compiler, not the broader closure tools.
- Karl Rosaen
Refactoring, JS style.
- Gabe
Now, this is a good news
- Ozkan Altuner
@Paul the Closure project has three components: compiler, library, and template language. Looks like the Closure/library might be competing with jQuery.
- Shakeel Mahate
this is sweet!
- Jay
I think jQuery does a lot of stuff that might confuse the compiler, e.g. iterating over an array of string function names and creating new function wrappers (look at the way the parent/child/next/prev/etc functions get installed) The Closure library is also full of type annotations that help the compiler make better optimization choices, so you're likely to get a better compiled outcome using Closure than jQuery + fixes + compiler
- Ray Cromwell
@paul -- I know you've been wanting this opensourced for a long time. sorry it took such a long time. Nick Santos and the jscompiler team has finally done it! Cheers!
- Jing Lim
Happy Birthday
- ashish
Many happy returns!!
- Лосось норвежской выделки
Happy Birthday, Paul!
- Andrew Terry
Happy Birthday Paul
- Sandeep Kalidindi
Happy B'day Paul! don't be evil :)
- sirishkumar
Congratulations to the team (and @Paul & Jing) -- I know everyone's been waiting a long time for this. For anyone considering whether to use jQuery vs Closure, consider that they're meant for largely different purposes. jQuery's good for enhancing static web pages; Closure's much better at building large apps. And as Ray points out above, Closure the library is going to get much better results from Closure the compiler than an arbitrary js library would, because of all the type annotations.
- Joel Webber
Paul Buchheit has been at the top of my best of pages all month. Rock on, Paul.
- Donald C. Lindsay
Hey HAPPY BIRTHDAY PAUL !!! Cool present!! <insert CAKE> :D
- Susan Beebe
Paul, any comment on this write up? http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs...
- Sachin
That writeup is trolling for traffic IMHO. Nit picking 50 lines out of 200+ thousand (written for readability, which get compiled and optimized), providing no benchmarks for claims, and spending half the time bashing Java, it just seems to be struggling to find something wrong with Closure.
- Ray Cromwell
Sachin: he seems to be commenting on Closure the JS library, not Closure the JS compiler (that Paul's post was about). And he may be a douchebag, but I haven't seen anything I disagree with.
- Gabe
@Sachin: I hate to be too harsh, but that post is pretty much garbage. From what I can tell he's pretty much managed to enumerate some of the worst things about Javascript -- nitpicking the code for referencing "undefined" directly without declaring it as an uninitialized local? That's insane. Following this advice is mostly a recipe for an unreadable mess. Also, look in the comments for several refutations of the idea that some of these are even optimizations.
- Joel Webber
Joel, you're just not man enough to handle a language where 'top' is an implicitly reserved keyword, and 'undefined' which should be, isn't. But it could be worse, 'null' could be something you could override. :)
- Ray Cromwell
RT @kehan Brilliant visualisation of the scale of biology http://learn.genetics.utah.edu/content...
David Bradley, Simon Cockell, Anna Croft and 7 other people liked this
Nice and simple
- François Dongier
great!
- Abhishek Tiwari
Brilliant.
- Bill Hooker
Totally awesome!
- Björn Brembs
Genome Guru : Tim Hubbard interview - http://www.the-scientist.com/article...
Ruchira S. Datta, Roger Pettett, marcin and 2 other people liked this
mendeley_com: Nice! BBC article featuring Mendeley, @f1000 and Google Wave: http://bit.ly/2Rhdkr - http://twitter.com/mendele...
Colby, Roger Pettett, Daniel Mietchen and 2 other people liked this
mendeley_com: Nice! BBC article featuring Mendeley, @f1000 and Google Wave: http://bit.ly/2Rhdkr
- Richard Akerman
Oooh, it has a quote from Cameron as well. Sweet. It seems the general interest in "Science 2.0" is indeed rising. Good news!
- Wobbler
as usual, the general public seems ahead of the curve...
- Björn Brembs
iPhoneUserNews: Google Wave iPhone app with push notifications on the way - http://shar.es/1SUXZ - http://twitter.com/iPhoneU...
Susan Beebe, Roger Pettett, Alex Kapranoff and 3 other people liked this
Extensions are what really differentiate Wave from other group messaging clients. It will be interesting to see this delivered on an iPhone.
- Richard Alberg
activeden: Google Chrome released for Mac http://bit.ly/1J0aMD - http://twitter.com/actived...
Rob Cairns, Yelda Erciro, Richard Chen and 11 other people liked this
One less reason to have a Mac.
- SuezanneC Baskerville
SuezanneC - What's one more reason to have a PC?
- Joel
Using it for the last hour - really enjoy the ultrasmooth scrolling. www.flickriver.com scrolls like butter. BUT when trying to post this comment, it failed. Converted back to FF to post this.
- Mark Interrante
Thanks for this Robert. Been waiting a while. Running it now.
- MASTER OF THE OBVIOUS
Dear WSJ: To Avoid Google Disease, Please Put A Condom On Your Content: @dannysullivan on #w2s journalism panel http://daggle.com/dear-ws... Brill!
Roger Pettett, Elmira Gazizova, Sandeep Kalidindi and webinalina liked this
Bioinformatics and Haskell http://gist.github.com/212507
Roger Pettett and Chris Lasher liked this
Ketil Malte has a BioHaskell project where he is collecting his Bioinformatics work in Haskell (blog: http://blog.malde.org/, darcs code: http://malde.org/~ketil...).
- Brad Chapman
Oh, we finally found a GREAT use for Google Wave! Holy shitake! RT: @Orli: Awesome video!! http://www.youtube.com/watch... #googlewave
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imabonehead, Chris Lasher, Todd Nilson and 47 other people liked this
and I thought I had to much time on my hands........
- Cjay
Hehe!
- Kol Tregaskes
pure genius!
- Loc
Is this wave pulp fiction mockup real? Now that I have a wave account, can I see it in Wave?
- SuezanneC Baskerville
Oxford Nanopore VP of Research John Milton interviewed by Kevin @bioitworld http://bit.ly/3RmI82 - http://twitter.com/nanopor...
Roger Pettett liked this
#NIH Nanopore project wins $1.1 million NIH grant - UC Santa Cruz http://bit.ly/3YpyR7 - http://twitter.com/SciSolu...
Roger Pettett liked this
Didn't know this yet: IBM to join the DNA sequencing game http://news.bbc.co.uk/2...
Roger Pettett liked this
Whadda ya say NOW Apple fanboys? Dell laptop brings wireless power. This was the laptop I saw back in July. http://gizmodo.com/5369472
Alex Scoble, andy brudtkuhl, Wade Dorrell and 8 other people liked this
Really? That was all that it was? I'm not impressed.
- Peter Kruit
I actually think that is pretty cool. Looks like I've finally found a good replacement for my MBP which runs Windows :)
- sean percival
This isn't wireless power. The wireless dock has to be plugged in. So. Wires. And it's a $200 extra. Not quite the revolution is it. I don't think Apple or anyone else has anything to worry about at the moment.
- Gilbert Harding
So you have a dock with a wire going to the power outlet, what's the difference? This is the same as saying that any device that can receive a charge trough a dock has wireless power. My old handheld vacuum cleaner has a charging dock. My guess is that charging docks actually is an older way of charging then through a wire. Look, now your device don’t have to be stuck at one location while it is charging. To me this Dell dock is a step backwards.
- Asgeir
Not quite the same as your old handheld vacuum. This is an inductive system. However there are still wires from the dock to the wall outlet so no real difference between that and having the laptop plugged into the same outlet. And what if you don't pony up the additional $200? Do you get a conventional charger as well?
- Gilbert Harding
but does it have a wheel?
- michael sean wright
I like the design and specs of the laptop - wires or not. It's just one detail.
- Jemm
very cool
- andy brudtkuhl
How to build cheap cloud storage (67 terabyte 4U servers for $7,867) - Backblaze Blog - http://blog.backblaze.com/2009...
Nick Mutton, Marco Willemse, David Berrebi and 173 other people liked this
Amazing level of transparency and detail about their custom storage servers. HN discussion at http://news.ycombinator.com/item... (discusses why this is appropriate for backup, but perhaps not generic storage needs)
- Bret Taylor
from Bookmarklet
Put me down for two.
- Jason Shellen
45 drives per unit and many units means they must be constantly replacing failed hard drives - just due to the sheer quantity of them in use
- Jacob Old
It wasn't entirely clear to me from the blog post what you have to do to replace a drive. Looks like at minimum you have to remove the unit from the rack, and I don't see any drawer guides or similar to assist with that. And do they have to take the unit offline to replace a single drive?
- Jason Wehmhoener
Geez. Back in 1998, Microsoft was bragging about their 1 TB cloud... :-) Millions of $ then I think.
- Mitchell Tsai
One happy Backblaze customer checking in.
- Russellreno
sounds neat - now what to do with 67 TB of storage...
- Matt Ellsworth
Seriously Matt! Lots and Lots and Lots of video? HD video!
- Rick Cogley
So, they store their data "securely" in Palo Alto? That makes me scared.
- Jonas S Karlsson
Quoted from blog- "Backblaze Storage Pods are building blocks upon which a larger system can be organized that doesn’t allow for a single point of failure." They have indicated an amazing amount of cost savings.
- Wins Fern
$117k for a petabyte of storage. Wow.
- Nicholas James
Petabyte schmetabyte.
- Rick Cogley
Mitchell: I don't think 1TB was "millions of dollars" in 1998.
- Steve de Mena
Nice idea. Pity that it only supports a HTTPS interface, not surprising at that cost though (the software that runs the filesystems on the NetApp and other devices isn't exactly cheap to write). Anyone see if they quoted transfer speeds? I'm wondering what impact the four SATA cards each with SATA multipliers on them has when it comes to access speeds.
- Russ
Steve: according to http://www.littletechshoppe.com/ns1625... disk cost ~$0.08 / mb in 1998, which comes out to >$800,000 for 1 TB or just over a million bucks in todays dollars. so maybe not millions, but a million!
- Karl Rosaen
Russ: It runs Debian. If you were rolling your own (and they don't sell these units), you could turn on NFS or some other protocol (CIFS, iSCSI). They only use HTTP because it's cloud storage. NFS license is a major expense on NetApp, but all the major Linux distributions can act as NFS servers, CIFS servers, and probably iSCSI targets.
- Andy Dustman
Andy: I know that you could do that on them but it leaves the problem of what to do with the storage. You could merge the 3 volumes into an LVM VG but the performance could become an issue with any load on it. It seems I wasn't the only one to question the performance, while the views of a Sun engineer aren't exactly unbiased it does highlight some of the downsides: http://www.c0t0d0s0.org/archive...
- Russ
Russ, great find, thanks.
- Jason Wehmhoener
Fascinating article; but more questions: "In rough terms, every time one of our customers buys a hard drive, Backblaze needs another hard drive." -- so what happens when a drive fails; how much redundancy is there? What happens when a meteorite destroys the whole building; is there off site backup too? (I know this *is* the off-site backup, but still...) I wonder how much data flows in and out over time. Maybe I should just read their website.
- Rob Fisher
Rob: they mention using 15 drive RAID6 volumes that can lose up to 2 drives before failure
- Mike Chelen
The worst part about this cluster design is the fact that I couldn’t shut up about it for the first couple days after finding out about it. It was the solution I proposed to every problem. There were complaints.
- A Mitchell
IMO RAID6 is not that great. Granted, it's highly unlikely to lose 3 drives at the same time, but there's still possibility. Besides, for write-intensive app, parity calculation is quite time-consuming. I personally prefer RAID 10 (striped array of RAID1 pairs). Yes the effective usable space is less than half total capacity, but for backups -- which will sooner or later be used to restore something -- I prefer data integrity over usage efficiency.
- Pandu ● IT Optimizer
from fftogo
IMO RAID6 is not that great. Granted, it's highly unlikely to lose 3 drives at the same time, but there's still possibility. Besides, for write-intensive app, parity calculation is quite time-consuming. I personally prefer RAID 10 (striped array of RAID1 pairs). Yes the effective usable space is less than half total capacity, but for backups -- which will sooner or later be used to restore something -- I prefer data integrity over usage efficiency.
- Pandu ● IT Optimizer
from fftogo
YouTube - Web2ExpoSF 09: Jeff Veen, "Designing for Big Data" - http://www.youtube.com/watch...
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Roger Pettett liked this
iPhone meets Genome, at Illumina: http://www.apple.com/iphone...
Jan Aerts and Roger Pettett liked this
A Quick Note On Copyright « Genetic Inference http://www.genetic-inference.co.uk/blog...
Roger Pettett liked this
At Singularity U., big brains meet the future | Geek Gestalt - CNET News - http://news.cnet.com/8301-13...
Roger Pettett liked this
"The number of such companies emerging from the program should only increase in future years, as Singularity University will expand from 40 students to 120 next year. But despite a larger class, there's still no way that everyone who wants to take part will be able to attend. And with that in mind, Ismael said, the program is considering how it can share its content with the world at large. One possibility is a the Ted conference model, in which lectures and discussions may well be posted online for all to see, free of charge. For now, though, it's all private, and to the students who managed to get in, an extremely valuable experience. To a person, they seem acutely aware that they have been granted access to what could be one of the most exclusive technology clubs in the world, and one that will almost certainly bear important fruit in their careers. "Creativity is about mixing and matching different building blocks together to build something new and powerful," Lem said. "I've never before been in a place where there are so many building blocks that you can move around.""
- Attila Csordas
from Bookmarklet
Tweeting :)
Itachi, Alfredo, gmarketer and 270 other people liked this
Funny!
- Robert Scoble
too true
- James Miao
Hey, I can tell those Mark Zuckerberg prongs haven't started working yet. ;-)
- Robert Scoble
A good reminder that it could have been a lot worse.
- Christopher Galtenberg
Heh
- Charlie Anzman
Hey! I resemble that remark!
- Chris Messina
funny and true :)
- Ali
Very clever.
- Nicholas Kreidberg
LOL
- Steve Chou
from fftogo
apparently you can trade some symbols and numbers for letters and it's FFing
- Katy Barrilleaux
I love that!! :D
- Susan Beebe
from iPhone
ReTweet what the middle one said 4/5 WooHoos
- Zax Stevens
LOL :D
- zsafwan
That is *exactly* why FF will become more mainstream than twitter.. try explaining how to tweet to your parents (who are finally comfortable with email)!
- Chris Myles
Go Chris!
- Charlie Anzman
ROFL!
- Darren Heydon
Haha! I have this on my facebook :)
- Joe Dawson
from iPhone
: D
- Taylanov
Awesome!
- Ladybug Heather
Haha!
- muratt
ahahha! brilliant
- Jacque
That's about right.
- Josh Haley
thats funny lol.. where did u find it
- Nicholas Skinner
that's *agent_x* cartoonist from sunny queensland, aus ~ http://twitter.com/agent_x :)
- Peter Renshaw
I just noticed you posted my comic. Thanks. I keep them all here if you are interested - http://www.agent-x.com.au/
- agent x
agent x, I like you. Bookmarked.
- Dennis Jernberg
Ridiculous Bioinformatics - http://www.fejes.ca/2009...
Chris Miller, Ruchira S. Datta, Jan Aerts and 2 other people liked this
My theory is that in CS if you have all the data, you know what to do with it and what it means. In biology you can have all the data, not know what to do with it and not know what it means :-)
- Neil Saunders
Nothing new there. Next?
- Paulo Nuin
Oh my this video of Hitler discovering FriendFeed's sale to Facebook NAILS it. Hillarious. http://www.youtube.com/watch...
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testbeta, Mohamed J, Phil Ashman and 83 other people liked this
Whoever did that was on FriendFeed a long time. Appreciate all the humor!
- Robert Scoble
We still have Plurk, ha!
- Michael Ryan
This was originally form Mark Trapp: http://friendfeed.com/itafrom...
- Matt Mastracci
F'ing fabulous!!
- Larry Hawes
Plurk is just as worthless, especially with the hole Karma Bullshit.
- Matt Ruiz
Thank you, thank you: I'll be here all week! Be sure to tip your waitress; try the veal!
- Mark Trapp
The inside jokes are great, was LOL this morning.
- Willem (@wim66) ☠
Abso-effing-lutely hilarious :-)
- Ritesh Lal
Damn.
- MaryB, BrandingBroadOfFF
"We still have Plurk" haha
- Patrik Johansson
I have seen this vid with so many different sub titles, and its always hilarious.
- Jordan Patterson
OMG! Great!
- Jason Miller
"We Still Have Plurk!" Hahahahahahahahha!
- Hugh McCallion
Hysterical! (At first I thought this (FB swallowing FF) was bad for Twitter - but maybe Twitter will end up the real winner. (Such a depressing thought.)
- Matthew Blaisdell
Laughed so hard I cried.
- Erica OGrady
If FriendFeed got big independently, you would have FriendFeed spam just like you get poked or you get trash messages on Facebook. It's the nature of the beast.
- Michelle
Thanks for the humor. I needed to laugh today.
- Jeunelle Foster
Mark, I forwarded this to a friend - film school graduate, not a Friendfeed user. He loved it. Great job.
- John Craft
Ahahah excellent !
- Jacque
this meme never gets old
- Victor Barriga
hahahah
- Sinan İŞLER
Hahahaha!! That is hilarious!
- zephyrlily
Matthew and Sarah Battle Over the iPhone, Giving Into Steve Jobs' Plans - http://www.youtube.com/watch...
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Milton Ramirez, Charlie Anzman, professor daddyo and 18 other people liked this
baby wrassling!
- Yolanda
Our twins were fighting over our iPhones at 18 months. They are 3 and a half and each has an iPod touch. Quite amazing how fast they pick it up. Bonus is the educational apps.
- Alan Ashley
from iPhone
Alan: yeah, my 20 month old already has his own. He doesn't like it, though, knows our 3GS is better.
- Robert Scoble
Robert, do others look at you strangely when you tell them they have their own touches. I know we see our share of the you are fools. Now I'm waiting for them to design an app of their own.
- Alan Ashley
from iPhone
Alan: I really don't care what other people think. My sons soak in the computer world and so far it hasn't hurt them.
- Robert Scoble
I think I need some clarification from Alan and Robert Scoble. Do the children actually have iPod Touches dedicated to them?
- Rishabh Mishra (p248)
I just downloaded a few toy phone apps for JJ - he loves pushing the buttons and having animal and car sounds coming from the phone.
- Jesse Stay
Robert, I feel the same way. I know that if anything it will give them a head start in what is becoming a more technology dependent world.
- Alan Ashley
from iPhone
Oh wait - I see - you're just trying to make up for the JJ walking videos from yesterday ;-)
- Jesse Stay
Alan: I couldn't stop Milan from playing with one anyway. He cries if he doesn't get to play.
- Robert Scoble
Yes, Jesse. Always a contest. You do see Matthew walking in this one, right?
- Louis Gray
Rishabh, yes both of my 3 and a half year old girl twins each have their own. We taught them that it's not a toy. So they know to care for it or else it gets taken away. They also know to if it in. It has exposed them to items I would not have thought a 3 year old would even know about. Amazing educational tool in addition to proper parenting.
- Alan Ashley
from iPhone
Nice!
- pea
Louis, yes, I saw - 3 months earlier than JJ, too :-/
- Jesse Stay
Interesting parenting technique, Alan. Some parenting circles believe that children should reach a certain level of maturity before having such technological devices, though personally, I think your way is more fun for the children. :D
- Rishabh Mishra (p248)
Rishabh: most parents wouldn't approve of what I do with my kids. But then when Patrick was 14 he was arguing about porn and censorship with an FCC Commissioner, so there.
- Robert Scoble
Rishabh, I know I grew up without such devices and I can see that in todays world with these devices, how much more prepared my kids will be. We tend to parent as we parent and not to the masses. They have also reached a stage were they put it away without us having to ask them to, just so we can have tech free time and interact together. Which they prefer over tech anyway. And yes it is fun for them.
- Alan Ashley
from iPhone
Reality TV at it's best!!!
- Russ Jackson
Very funny Erlang, key/value store riff: http://browsertoolkit.com/fault-t...
Roger Pettett liked this
Geoff Wozniak, Claus Metzner, Juvenn Woo and 14 other people liked this
The feedback that I've received regarding "being multidisciplinarian" is that it's not good. Specialization is wanted and required. So what is it, specialized or polyvalent?
- Ricardo Vidal
The academic-librarian analogue is: be a change agent, be versatile, be techie -- but don't expect to be respected or rewarded for any of it.
- D0r0th34
There is a need both for dedicated specialists and for "multidisciplinarians" acting as bridges between specialties. Unfortunately, we're better at employing and rewarding the former in science than the latter. I think that will change.
- Shirley Wu
I'm always interested in how benign the explanations are for resistance to boundary crossers. Specialists often successfuly seek rent for holding territory. C. Hitchen's technical definition of a warlord is simply "Someone who controls a stretch of road". Food for thought .....
- Eric Weinstein
@Ricardo - iGoogle's quotes of the day include: "Try to learn something about everything and everything about something." - Thomas H. Huxley -- so, both?
- Deborah Fitchett
@Deborah - Mr. Huxley either had a lot of time on his hands or there was a lot less to learn about back then... :-)
- Ricardo Vidal
Or divided up "everything" into just a few very large categories. :-)
- Deborah Fitchett
My heart is always with the multidisciplinarians, but it always reminds me of a talk I remember reading the transcript of by Richard Feynman. A biophysicist gives a talk to the biologists and they say "boy that biophysicist really knows a lot about physics." The same biophysicists gives a talk to the physicists and they say "boy that biophysicist sure knows a lot about biology." Now what you take away from Feynman's story, _that_ is a different question!
- Dave Bacon
Multidiscipline work creates new connections, which increases complexity of management. Specialization is simpler in this regard, which may be why it's so popular.
- Geoff Wozniak
from iPod
Ever since I started studying, people have been saying that multidisciplinarity is the big thing to come. By now, it has been the big thing to come for almost 20 years. The feedback I get from funding agencies and search committees is that they don't know what I am, lol :-)
- Björn Brembs
To be multi/interdisciplinary is to abandon the concept of disciplines altogether and become someone who deals only in "information". Hard to grasp if you're wedded to an informational niche.
- Neil Saunders
Industry (corporations) get very hung up on demonstrable productivity, as does academia. Measuring the effectiveness of an interdisciplinary liaison, a good communicator, cross-pollinator, etc, requires metrics that just don't exist... as far as I know.
- Naomi Most
It was the initial keynote plea of #singularityu a week ago today that got my gears turning about this. Vital multidisciplinary forces are needed to Save the World (literally). The world is lacking access to the talent in terms of its cultivation in academia and its support in industry. The thrust of Singularity University seems to be to incite students to for-profit entrepreneurial...
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- Naomi Most
So is it just our obsession with "objective" measurement that puts us in this bind? Or is it the timeframes we measure over? The advantage of commercial/entrepreneurial approaches is that because you're pricing in risk/reward and timeframes you can justify the longer term effort as long as the resources are available (e.g. Google can devote teams of people to two year projects on...
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- Cameron Neylon
@ Cameron: As for grants, I think the way to go is http://fundscience.org/ or similar - exposing proposals in public to comments from multiple perspectives (or disciplines) - in combination with stable baseline grants according to transparent (and rather discipline-independent) eligibility criteria. See also http://friendfeed.com/search... .
- Daniel Mietchen
Cameron - I don't think it's the measures so much as it is straightforward academic politics. As a concrete example: lots of University physics departments are very keen for quantum computing researchers to be hired... but only if it's into the CS department. Similarly, lots of CS depts are very keen for quantum computing researchers to be hired... but only into the physics department....
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- Michael Nielsen
I'm not so sure that its pure politics as inability to determine the risks. If I stick with the pricing analogy neither CS nor physics departments can reliably price the risk of making a tenure track appointment in quantum computing (or bioinformatics, or biological modelling, or....) because they have no basis to make the judgement on. I guess I'm wondering whether hiring decisions are...
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- Cameron Neylon
How can we have a knowledge economy without multidisciplinarity?
- Ant Beck
Cameron: "I agree that this translates into politics but I guess I'm arguing that even a well meaning and apolitical committee would probably come to the same misguided decision". Very interesting argument. I've never really looked beyond the political argument before - in actual cases that I'm familiar with, it was enough of a factor that I didn't think beyond it - but your argument suggests the problem is quite a bit worse :-(
- Michael Nielsen
That was precisely my fear...I can see myself sitting on one of those committees with the best will in the world and coming to the same decision. But the only obvious option is to bring in external committee members to champion specific areas which means you are deliberately biasing your decision (which may not be a bad thing but means you're not necessarily picking out the best balance of risk vs potential)
- Cameron Neylon
In the spirit of crazy ideas meant purely as stimulus (i.e., I'm not serious, although I think there's something worth thinking about here): I recall Phil Agre pointing out that the best way to identify emerging areas is to ask the absolute elite undergrad students - the type who sail through Harvard / Caltech / etc with 4+ GPAs, writing sole author papers etc - what they're interested...
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- Michael Nielsen
Interesting idea. And arguably we could test our good our teaching of students is by how good they are getting these kind of things right.
- Cameron Neylon
I think it is best if academics are first studying a "pure" subject in depth. Later, after they reach some degree in that subject, they can move into a multidisciplinary field and learn what they need about the other fields. I have not a very good experience with people who studied one of these new mixed subjects, from the start.
- Claus Metzner
But who gets to decide what is "pure" and what is "mixed". I have pretty bad experiences with people who have training in biology or chemistry but no understanding of fundamental concepts in the other. Is biophysics a pure subject? I wonder whether our current "core" subjects, even if we could agree on what they are, really have any more specific coherence than the interdiscplinary...
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- Cameron Neylon
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