Science Library Pad

SciFoo: the conversations continue

How do you transform this

into this

The answer?  SciFoo.

Or perhaps I should say, SciFoo, SciFoo, SciFoo, SciFoo, SciFoo. ...

(Now I'm sure I've triggered Google's spam filter - there goes my PageRank.)

Now, the next question is how to sustain the same transformation in the virtual environment

to

The answer is of course... SciFoo... well, specifically

SciFacebookFoo, SciSecondLifeFoo, and

http://network.nature.com/forum/scifoo

I'll be posting most of my comments in the Nature Network group.
I've started a thread Hacking the Analog: better ways to identify SciFoo sessions.

Mathnet: The Next Generation - engaging the public in science

I liked Mathnet (of course it didn't hurt that I had a bit of a crush on Kate Monday).
So how can we give people a (somewhat) realistic view of the rewards of science knowledge and careers?

On my flight up, I read in Newsweek Math Makeover about Danica McKellar, who was an actress in The Wonder Years.

In between acting gigs, she enrolled as a film major at UCLA. But after taking a college-level math course she realized, "I really was good at this!" She changed her major to math. "I thought it was just for nerdy white guys, but it's not. It turns out lots of different kinds of people like math," she says. She graduated with high honors in 1998. Around that time, she also became the only television actress in America to coauthor a groundbreaking mathematical physics theorem; it was published in the Journal of Physics and bears her name (the Chayes-McKellar-Winn theorem).

Hmm, I'm guessing quite a bit different from the Spears-Hilton-Lohan theorem.

Her book Math Doesn't Suck sounds a bit lightweight, but perhaps it will connect with the target audience.

Another approach that I find quite compelling is competitions.  The Globe had an article on Tuesday

Bright minds find right equation to solve mathematical apathy

These contests have a function beyond simply rewarding budding brains. The country's technology sector - in addition to other industries - relies on young mathematicians as vital intellectual assets. "Recruiting for the tech sector is a huge problem in this country right now," says Thomas Salisbury, president of the Canadian Mathematical Society.

"We need to find ways of encouraging students to stick with math, to actually do more math, to avoid the peer pressure that keeps some students away from it."

Competitions to me have a lot of benefits: you have to do real, difficult work, and you get high rewards in terms of recognition and feeling of accomplishment.

At SciFoo, we heard about high-schoolers who had re-engineered E.Coli to smell good.  Amazing stuff.

We also had a lunch-time (or meal-time anyway, it's all a bit blurred) discussion at SciFoo about engaging the public in science, I said something like "why do they always show scientists in labcoats doing boring things, instead of chatting at the pub, like the scientists I know?"  It's possible this turned into me being paraphrased by Aaron Swartz saying

"Science shows always show us at the university all day," one complains. "How come they never show us at the pub or at meetings like this?"

There was an assortment of discussion around the table, most of which I don't recall (see what I get for not blogging everything?).  I do remember the mention of CSI's popularity leading to courses in forensics at UK universities, despite the fact that 1) it's a US show and 2) actual forensic lab tech work would be meticulous, boring, and you'd be breathing in chemical fumes all day (err, with apologies to any such techs who may be reading).  Dr. Kevin Fong had some good thoughts.  (I can't decide whether I was more intimidated by people like Kevin and Aaron who are young, dashing and accomplished, or people like Freeman Dyson and Sir Martin Rees, who are older, dashing and accomplished.  Pretty much equally, I guess.)

The secret to hard work on screen is, of course, the magic of the montage.

BUFFY: I thought it was gonna be like in the movies. You know, inspirational music ... a montage, me sharpening my pencils, me reading, writing, falling asleep on a big pile of books with my glasses all crooked, 'cause in my montage I have glasses. But real life is slow, and it's starting to hurt my occipital lobe.

One does have to wonder what happens when generation after generation of kids grows up seeing a television world where no adults ever do any actual work.

Perhaps Shuttle Launches and Space Tourists can help, but I'm not convinced.
I said in a different chat that the shuttle is boring, but this was interpreted to mean "uninteresting because it's reliable".  That's not actually what I meant.  The shuttle is a space truck built by ferrari, it's an incredibly complex and expensive piece of engineering that goes... nowhere.  LEO.  Like 100km up.  Like a half-hour ride up on a high-speed train.  THAT'S boring.  I want to go to OUTER space, not the edge of the atmosphere.  The Soyuz (I said Sputnik in the conversation, but I meant Soyuz) is a perfectly actually boring, reliable space transport system.  Let's go to the asteroids.  Not one big mission but dozens and dozens of nanomissions.  Streams of open data from multiple different objects for kids (and adults) to explore and discover.  Let's go OUT THERE in multiple different ways with cheap technology.      

What I said at the chat around the table was that one of my friends engaged his science class by having them repeat the exploding Mentos-Coke demo on YouTube... and then of course the school district told him to take the videos off of YouTube.

Is there hope?  Well, I don't think we'll be seeing scientists on magazine covers any time soon, at least in Canada about the only one anyone would recognize is Dr. David Suzuki, who is known enough to show up in environmental ads without needing to be explained

somewhat singaporean has some more thoughts in Make Mathematics Sexy, Smart and Desirable

Despite the show Numb3rs, which features a mathematician using mathematics to solve high-profile crimes, it nevertheless portrays the protanganist as socially awkward (but hey, then again, he gets the girl). This follows in the same vein as A Beautiful Mind and Good Will Hunting. The result is a job in which people envy for its social status ("he's such a genius, I wish I was as smart as him"), but is simulatenously not desirable ("oh, I don't want to seem like such a freak").

Greg Bear did say that almost any time Jeff Goldblum portrays a scientist, he makes it interesting.  I can certainly vouch for the scientific entertainment value of Buckaroo Banzai (my 2nd favourite movie of all time).  Maybe the solution is to have Jeff Goldblum on the covers of more magazines.

Maybe Danica and Dr. Suzuki should come to the next SciFoo and tell us what they think...

Blogging 101

This post lists a few basics about blogging (and feeds) and the tools that I use, it also serves as an example of why I blog: sure I could send this as an email, or bookmark links for my own use, but if I'm going to that effort, I might as well just share it with everyone.

Peter Murray-Rust showing his blog

John Santini had the perhaps-misfortune of asking Peter Murray-Rust and I about both the reasons for and the mechanics of blogging, we proceeded to outgeek one another with dueling laptops showing the following:

www.typepad.com is what I use for a blogging platform, you have to pay but that does have the benefit of separating your site out from the unfortunate profusion of spam blogs on

www.blogger.com Google's free blogging platform

To prevent the flood of spam comments that inevitably flow to all blogs, Peter has a filtering system plus moderation, and I use TypePad's CAPTCHA system and moderation.  It's unfortunately not possible to filter trackbacks in this way, although you can moderate them.

To track get a full picture of your visitors, you need to track both web hits and (RSS) feed hits.  I use StatCounter for my web hits, plus both Peter and I use FeedBurner (now owned by Google) to track our feed hits.  Google Analytics is another web hit tracking option, but it's more for high-volume sites.  All these tracking tools are free.

You can also track references to your blog through Technorati and other blog/feed search tools, e.g. here are links to Peter's blog:

http://www.technorati.com/blogs/wwmm.ch.cam.ac.uk/blogs/murrayrust/?reactions

Peter uses Feed Reader to read RSS feeds, I use Bloglines (you can see what I read at http://www.bloglines.com/public/rakerman ).

In terms of reasons and other meta-blogging areas, I blog mainly to have online searchable notes of stuff that I am sure to forget, and also to connect into the library technology community, which I entered only a few years ago.  If making connections like that is important to you, make sure to be generous with your outbound links.

John asked about how much of your identity you have to reveal online, you have every choice ranging from fully anonymous to complete disclosure.  Depending on your topic, revealing at least your work title may help to establish your position in the community for people who are reading yoru blog.

That's about it, it's quite easy to start blogging and through the magic of linking and Google, if you write it, they will come.

Peter has blogged some of his thoughts on the topic in scifoo: blogsession.

the peer review logo

In the session "Reinventing scientific publication (Web 2.0, 3.0, and their impact on science)" led by James Hendler at SciFoo, one of the items was an idea from Geoffrey Bilder, for publishers to provide a "peer review logo" that could be attached to (at this point I am interpreting based on my own understanding) e.g. blog postings, some sort of idea of a digital signature to indicate peer reviewed content.  (I know the list well since I'm afraid my major contribution to the evening, despite having thought about this topic a lot, was transcribing the list).

2) ID, logoing, review status tag, trust mechanisms
- other peer review status

I wonder if we should make a wiki where we list all of the grand (and not so grand) challenges of web science communication and discovery, and then people can pick off projects.  The SciFoo prototypes list is one angle on this.  Of course, in the perpetual-beta web world, it's probably faster to just create a wiki, than to try to start a discussion about whether one should be created.  It's in that "just do it" spirit that I'm pleased to find there is already a peer review logo initiative in the works, although the angle is to indicate that you're writing about a reviewed work, not that your work itself has been reviewed.  From Planet SciFoo:

Cognitive Daily - A better way for bloggers to identify peer-reviewed research, by Dave Munger

[we] have decided to work together to develop such an icon, along with a web site where we can link to bloggers who've pledged to use it following the guidelines we develop

via Bora Zivkovic, via Peter Murray-Rust

(it's strange and also good to be blogging now about people that I've finally met)

UPDATE: I do have a vague idea in a similar space, which would be a "repeatability counter".

As I have learned more about peer review, I have understood that it has many aspects, but preventing fraud is not one of them.  Peer review can help to create a paper that is well-written and has "reasonable" science, but it can't stop a determined fraudster.  (This isn't my insight, but comes from a presentation I saw by Andrew Adrian Mulligan of Elsevier - "Perceptions and Misperceptions - Attitudes to Peer Review".)  What does address fraud, and keep science progressing, is falsifiability: someone else does the experiment and sees if they get the same results.  Now I realise there are many different classes of results, but it's interesting that many of these are not publishable, and are maybe not captured in the current system:

• We tried to repeat the experiment, but it failed because we didn't have enough information on the protocol
• We tried to repeat the experiment, but it failed and we think the paper is in error
• We successfully repeated the experiment
• (probably more scenarios I haven't considered)

So I think it would be interesting to have a sort of "results linking service" where you would click and you would get links to all the people who had tried to reproduce the results, and indications of whether or not they succeeded.  We use citation count as a sort of proxy for this, but it's imperfect, not least of which because there is no semantic tagging of the citation so you don't know if it was cited for being correct or incorrect.  I think this kind of experiment linking might add a lot of value to Open Notebook Science and to protocols reporting (whether in the literature like Nature Protocols, or in a web system like myExperiment).  Otherwise I worry that the amount of raw information from a lab notebook makes it hard to extract a lot of value from it.

UPDATE: Christina in the comments rightly chides me on my loose use of "falsifiability".  Basically I'm trying to get at two aspects of testability: 1) is there enough information in the paper to test the author's claims?  2) What are the results of such a test?

carbon offset for my scifoo flight

flight from: Ottawa, ON [Macdonald-Cartier International Airport], Canada, YOW
flight to: San Francisco, CA [San Francisco International Airport], USA, SFO
return, economy
flight distance: 7865 km
flight passengers: 1
CO2 Emissions: 1,771 t (that's European notation, so 1.771 tonnes)
SFr 71 (equals $62 Canadian)

I use MyClimate.

I should probably offset the long taxi rides to and from the airport, as well as the fairly long bus ride plus I'm fairly sure the bus was idling as it waited for enough people to arrive.  But I'm not so keen on offsetting automotive sins as I have never owned a car and live downtown so that I (almost) never have to drive anywhere.

I was surprised that Google had bottled water.  I don't know whether it's true that it takes "3 liters of water to produce one liter of bottled water" (Pacific Institute) but it certainly can't be good to raise a generation of people who think it's better to drink branded water out of a throwaway plastic bottle than to fill a glass from a tap or bend over a water fountain.

linking Flickr to Upcoming - SciFoo 2007 example

If you add the magic tag

upcoming:event=202683

to your Science Foo Camp photos, Flickr will automatically show a link that says

    Taken at Science Foo Camp.

and the photo will appear on the Upcoming event page as well.

I guess you just grab the number from the Upcoming page URL - in my case, I just noticed this feature and copied the info from Duncan Hull.

SciFoo wrapup

The easiest explanation I can give to describe the SciFoo 2007 unconference is to borrow something I think I overheard, which is that at many conferences the best discussions take place in the hallways between sessions and at the bar afterwards, so SciFoo is designed emphasize those informal discussion opportunities.  Which of course, means there was a FooBar.

There was lots of cool stuff.  Seeing science fiction genius author Neal Stephenson whiteboarding in a session he was presenting with Jaron Lanier and Lee Smolin on the philosophy of the nature of time was something I can't imagine in any other venue.  The fact that Martha Stewart was sitting in the front row watching the session was an added element of extraordinaryness.  Getting a chance to talk with SF author Greg Bear, whose work I have enjoyed for years, was also awesome (see books of his in my LibraryThing).

How's that for name dropping?

In case it all sounds shiny, I was so nervous talking to Chris Anderson that I told him I had reviewed his book The Wisdom of Crowds (which he didn't write), when of course it was actually The Long Tail I reviewed for Nature.  I'm fairly sure everything I said to him following that gaffe was quite daft as well.

I was a bit hesitant to put myself up on the session board, but then I figured what the heck, I'm here, might as well go up.  So I did a small session (about 6 people) on E-Science and library services yesterday, and a similarly small session on web tools for science today (the idea being that people would get a chance to share their favourite tools - I mainly talked about LibX and then went around the table getting the other participants to talk about their fave tools or projects).

Saw a really cool talk about the LSST, which should be an absolutely amazing telescope, they have the minor problem of 30 TB of data per night, quite the computational challenge - lots of opportunities for people to come up with clever algorithms and techniques.

Also saw a cool NASA talk but I can't tell you what it was about (the SciFoo blogging rules are much more open this year, but there were a few things we were asked not to share).

I only managed a few pics, I'll try to upload them in a day or two.

Duncan Hull took lots including the session boards and participant boards.

There were lots of opportunities to discuss possible web tools for science, and also lots and lots of discussion of the popular topics of open access, peer review, Death to the Impact Factor, scholarly publishing 2.3.0 and all that good stuff.

Some of the discussions in these areas reminded me of the material covered in the ICSTI conference on peer review and research quality assessment, unfortunately the presentations and videos aren't up on the site yet, but you can read my ICSTI2007 conference notes, including my presentation.

@ SciFoo 2007

UPDATE 2007-08-14: You can see any other postings I have made on this topic in my SciFoo2007 category. ENDUPDATE

Very hectic schedule.
No blogging time.
Silicon Valley language
only three words

More on Twitter

http://twitter.com/scilib

NOTE: Twitter is just very short comments as I move from session to session.  Any longer analysis is in later postings here in my blog.

SciFoo 2007 and conference communication

I normally start these with "I'm pleased to announce", this time more accurate would be...

I am surprised and somewhat terrified to announce that I will be attending Science Foo Camp 2007 in August, about two months from now.

The main conference site isn't up yet, but I have created a discussion group on Nature Network

http://network.nature.com/group/scifoo

I've also been having a bit of discussion back and forth with Peter Murray-Rust in the comments of his posting Who’s going to FOO 2007?  I've thought a lot about conference communication issues and how both conference organizers and participants can find ways to plan and discuss together.

The library conference community I think has very quickly gotten quite adept at this, with conference wikis, blogs and tag-based communication (postings, photos etc.) fairly commonplace.  It's quite an amazing leap from when I first created a post-conference wiki for Internet Librarian in 2004, through a great deal of effort by individual librarians like Meredith Farkas, to official ALA conference wikis in 2007 (e.g. ALA Annual 2007).  Sidenote: You can amuse yourself with the mysterious mind of Google and its view of "ala conference" wiki view:timeline 2000s.

In my opinion, an agreed-upon tag (I'm using scifoo2007) is a central tool for discovering discussions.  However, while we all enjoy individually blogging our various opinions, a central site like a wiki or discussion group can be valuable as an information resource about area amenities, airport and travel arrangements, and other such topics that benefit from the wisdom of conference crowds.

I would like to see conferences providing information in more standard ways, even if it's just in creating a "Here's the page for machines" output of semantically-harvestable information about CFPs, dates, times, locations, tags, discussions, etc.  It seems instead every conference (and every list of conferences) still has its own, hand-crafted, custom pages, without any microformats or other easy-to-parse semantic information.  Automatically generated maps, calendars, and itineraries should all just take one click, but I still find myself doing all that work manually.

Steven Cohen points to Walt Crawford's past and current thoughts on conferences in the latest C&I (PDF).

My July 8, 2006 posting conference tag goodness with HitchHikr provides links to most of my other postings on the topic of conference communication.