Always an element of fun…

‘Always an element of fun’ – couldn’t agree more with the Woz.

And ‘everyone has a contribution to make’.

And ‘it was not so important what I taught, it was more important that I motivated them to learn. [...] Get them to want to learn, to enjoy it.’

Smart guy, that Woz…

Privacy is a currency

Privacy is the core currency of the social web, and like any other type of currency system there’s an exchange rate. In this case, the equation boils down to how much privacy the user is willing to give up in exchange for the features and functionality a site provides. It’s a tricky equation, and the answer varies for every user and for every site.

via mashable.com

Most of us give up our location to our phone company in order to receive calls on our mobile.
Most of us give up our buying habits to our supermarket in order to receive a minimal discount through our loyalty cards.
I’m sure that you can think of additional examples?

The cost of failure

43 Folders – Interview with “Linchpin” author, Seth Godin

Submitted by Merlin on January 26, 2010 – 4:45am.

43 Folders – Interview with “Linchpin” author, Seth Godin (audio mp3, free on iTunes)

I talk with Seth Godin, whose new book, Linchpin (Kindle, Hardcover, Worldcat, ISBN), comes out today. Topics include, “The Lizard Brain,” Bob Dylan, protecting the well, and beating back the fear and resistance that drive mediocrity.

via 43folders.com

“The cost of failure has never been so low” – exactly right!

PDF as the MP3 for science?

As I was preparing a talk on Science2.0 for the JTEL Winter School, it struck me that, in many respects, PDF is the MP3 of science.

Songs can be captured in MP3, articles in PDF.

We used to buy song in packages called records. We used to read articles in packages called books, journals or proceedings.

We no longer go to a record shop, but download individual songs. We no longer go to libraries, but download individual articles.

We can listen to our music any time any place. We can read our papers on screen or printed, any time any place.

Yet, examples of the snowflake effect in research are much less mainstream than examples in music. We do not have an iPod for research. And we do not have an iTunes store for research. I’m not sure we’ve even had a research napster yet…

I wonder why?

Happy 85th – carrying the torch…

This what I wrote to Doug Engelbart yesterday, on his 85th birthday… More wishes at posterous, where mine doesn’t seem to have appeared yet…

Dear Doug,

I was 3 years and 3 months old when you did the mother of all demos. Some twenty years later, I saw the recording and was blown away. (How many demos keep that power after 20 years? Or, now, after more than 40 years?)

I was not just blown away by the demo, but even more so by what you said. What you expressed so clearly and showed in action resonated with what I intuitively felt but had not understood clearly until then – THIS is what technology is meant to do: to augment the human intellect and raise collective intelligence.

Your guidance and clarity of vision has been the basis for what I try to do in my own work. (There is a little voice in my head that often raises the “I wonder what Doug would think about this?” question. That voice has often helped me stay on target, even when off course.)

Some seven years ago, I was fortunate to discuss your ideas with you and a small group of likeminded colleagues over video-conferencing. My then three year old daughter joined us after the session had ended. With no other common language than body language, you pointed and waved and smiled to one another on the screen. It was one of the most valuable and moving uses of technology that I have ever witnessed.

I cannot begin to express how thankful and proud I am that I can help pass on your ideas and work, from your generation to that of my daughter’s…

A very happy birthday from both my daughters, my partner and me!

– Erik Duval
http://erikduval.wordpress.com

‘Just Kids,’ by Patti Smith

not all youthful vainglory is silly; sometimes it’s preparation

via nytimes.com

Exactly right!

(Note the “sometimes” though…)

PaperCube – Peter Bergström

via papercube.peterbergstrom.com

This is a cool science2.0 visualization of citation networks – much along the lines of what we are working on in stellar…

Are you indispensable? | Daniel Pink

PINK: Stop treating people like horses and start treating them like human beings. Instead of trying to bribe folks with sweeter carrots or threaten them with sharpen sticks, how about giving them greater freedom at work, allowing them to get better at something they love, and infusing the workplace with a sense of purpose? If we tap that third drive more fully, we can rejuvenate or businesses and remake our world.

via danpink.com

Well there’s a thought that applies to learning: maybe we should focus a bit more on purpose rather than rewards like points on a test?

(Thanks, Wayne for pointing me to this!)

JSUR | Journal of Serendipitous and Unexpected Results

Successful research often leads through reasonable yet unsuccessful approaches and unexpected discoveries. Indeed the history of science is rife with examples of important discoveries arising from such results. In particular, two of today’s most fruitful areas of research, computational sciences and life sciences, have no major venues in which such intermediate results can be discussed. It is our belief that a forum for and dialogue on serendipitous and unexpected results in these areas will provide valuable insight and inform modern research practices.

via jsur.org

How true

Very similar in goal to the What Went Wrong Workshop I co-organized more than 2 years ago…

(Thanks to scottbw for pointing this out!)

Stellar Science2.0

I spent the last two days in the Alpine town of Grenoble to discuss how we support science2.0 in Stellar. It seems clear from these discussions that there are quite diverse views of what constitutes science2.0.

In any case, I believe that sharing is at the heart of science2.0. This can involve

• data: For instance, we can share experimental data, so that colleagues can verify our analysis or add their own. Or we can share attention metadata for recommendation algorithms: when we develop new such algorithms, we can compare them more easily if we have a reference set of observations – much like the Netflix challenge. (Disclaimer: this is the topic of a recent proposal we submitted.)
• services: In an open research infrastructure, we can mash up common services for a specific purpose. We can configure feeds to remain informed of new publications or events that are relevant to us. Or professionals and amateurs alike can take pictures of the sky remotely through services for remote telescope operations. In Stellar, we will be setting up a directory of such services (à la programmableweb), so that you can share and find more easily what you have or want…
• applications: Shared applications like for instance the visualization tools at gapminder or manyeyes make it easier to apply sometimes quite sophisticated analysis to our data – as we recently did to analyze the growth of repositories of learning material (warning: takes extremely long to load!). Widgets are a specific kind of such applications that run in web browsers - a very early example of such widgets for science2.0 in Stellar is under development: we’ll be setting up a widget store, much like the apple iphone store, where you will be able to find and use widgets for notification of new publications, tracking citations, etc.

Another perspective on science2.0 is to focus on how generic web2.0 tools can be used by researchers, so as to scale up and make more efficient how we work together and get notified of new developments in our fields.

As an example of that perspective, I find it somewhat mind-boggling that trackbacks and other techniques notify my whenever someone blogs about me, comments on a blog post I’ve done, tweets about my work or retweets what I’ve tweeted, adds a bookmark (if I subscribe to his feed), etc. whereas it may take months or longer before I am aware that someone cites my work in a publication. That is very awkward, as the act of making such a citation is more complex and as we spend much more time and effort at making these citations ‘trustworthy’ and ‘complete’. Surely, we must be able to make citing a more lightweight and transparent process? Of course, that is what mendeley, citeulike, bibsonomy, etc try to address…

For me, all of this is yet another example of the “Snowflake Effect” at work: we need to make the research tools and environments hyper-personalized, so that what we do in research is more scalable and transparent!

BTW, if you have any good examples of science2.0 tools, practices or … whatever, then please do let me know: I will be presenting on this topic at the JTEL Winter School next week and would appreciate any help I can get. 

(You can follow what I find relevant for Science2.0 on my delicious feed and my posterous microblog.)