Make it a pub

by gailf548
Participation Value and Shelf-Life for Journal Articles:
[Via The Scholarly Kitchen]

Discussion forums built around academic journal articles haven’t seen much usage from readers. Lessons learned from the behavior of sports fans may provide some insight into the reasons why.

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The scientific discussions that many researchers have found the most productive are often those sitting around a table in a informal setting, like a pub. These discussions are often wide-ranging and very open. They often produce really innovative ideas, which get replicated on cocktail napkins.

Some of the best ideas in scientific history can be found on such paper napkins. Simply allowing comments on a paper does not in any way replicate this sort of social interaction. But there already online approaches that do. We call them blogs.

Check out the scientific discussions at RealClimate, ResearchBlogging or even Pharyngula. Often the scientific discussions replicate what is seen in real life, with lots of open discussion about relevant scientific information.

If journals want to create participatory regions in their sites, they might do well to mimic these sorts of approaches. David Croty at Cold Spring Harbor has such a site. Although it has not reached the popularity of RealClimate, it is a nice beginning.

I would think that research associations, with an already large audience of members, would have an easier time creating such a blog, one that starts by discussing specific papers but is open to a wide ranging, semi-directed conversation.

Technorati Tags: Open Access, Science, Web 2.0

The eBook revolution

[Crossposted at Path to Sustainable]
by goXunuReviews
Kindle readers beware – big Amazon is watching you read 1984:
[Via LISNews - Librarian And Information Science News]

John Naughton says The ebook reader may have advantages over unwieldy printed tomes, but it has unexpected drawbacks. “You don’t have to be a lawyer to know that this would not be tolerated in the real world of physical objects.Yet it’s commonplace – indeed universal – in the world of information goods. And what makes it possible is the “End User Licence Agreement” (EULA) that most of us click to accept when we first use hardware, software or online services.”

[More]

eBook readers are changing the market. Imagine being able to carry all your college textbooks, with color pictures and movies, on a very small tablet-like device.

Although we are not there quite yet, we are not too many years from that being reality at any American college. Add the interactive aspects of a computer, WiFi and the web and the very nature of seminars will be forever changed.

But there is a possible dark side. Because the companies that offer these eBook readers are in it for the money not for the education. Everyone agrees to a license agreement (EULA) in order to download and read the book.

The Kindle EULA is a good example. Section 3, which deals with “Digital Content” (such as downloaded books), says that “Unless specifically indicated otherwise, you may not sell, rent, lease, distribute, broadcast, sublicense or otherwise assign any rights to the Digital Content or any portion of it to any third party, and you may not remove any proprietary notices or labels on the Digital Content.” In other words, you are forbidden to lend or sell the book you’ve just “bought”. In real-world terms, you can’t lend your copy of 1984 to a friend or donate it to the school jumble sale.

Under the subsection on “Use of Digital Content’, the Kindle EULA says: “Amazon grants you the non-exclusive right to keep a permanent copy of the applicable Digital Content and to view, use, and display such Digital Content an unlimited number of times, solely on the Device or as authorized by Amazon as part of the Service and solely for your personal, non-commercial use.”

Agreeing to a license in order to just read a book! In this case, you do not really own the book and can not loan it to anyone for any purpose. Any markups you make on the text may not be permanent. You may not be allowed to print out any pages. If you want to sell a textbook you no longer need, tough luck.

You ability to do any of these things depends on the kindness of the corporation making the eBook reader.

If you want to do something novel with the text, too bad. You are only allowed to do what the manufacturer allows you to do.

If they decide to wipe your eBook, removing books and notes, they have that ability and you agreed to it. So, they could provide you with a textbook that can only be used for 1 year. You never get access to it again if you need it. And there would really be little incentive for them to reduce prices much.

I could imagine a Fahrenheit 451 future where paper-based books are destroyed, not for censorship reasons, but because corporations do not like the freedom they provide for the user (i.e. freedom to resell, to loan. to read without a license). eBooks give them much more control over the market.

eBooks can change things. That is for sure. But they also put much greater control in the hands of the corporations than any form of publication has before.

I expect some really important battles here as we work through the technology. Particularly the three way tug between publishers, universities and students.

Of course, in this future world, competition comes from totally novel areas – free textbooks. They were never feasible before but because of the Web, they are now a viable alternative. I expect these new market forces will put pressure on the eBook reader manufacturers and keep them from being too abusive with their licenses.

That is, as long a free is available on the Web, which assumes that net neutrality continues to be the norm. Otherwise, large corporations could restrict access to sites offering low cost alternatives to their products.

Truly a Brave New World that have such marvels in’t. And we have front row sets to not only watch this as it progresses but to take part and help determine its course.

Technorati Tags: Education, Open Access, Web 2.0

Fun to read

Book reviews by email. Slate has been doing this while, printing emails and responses about books. This one, dealing with the excellent new book, Denialism, is really very interesting. It reminds me of some of the best correspondence exchanges form the 19th Century.

I have not been a big fan of Mooney’s book, Unscientific American, because I think his focus is misplaced. But his dialog with Spector is quite fun to read. The ‘dueling’ emails, with some really great insights, allowed each other to respond in ways that were not only fun to read but extended the discourse.

Another answer

Gen-F Scientists Ignoring Social Networking

[Via Sciencebase Science Blog]

A quick analysis of online social networks, such as LinkedIn and Xing would suggest that a mere 1 in 7 research scientists use such tools as part of their work. This contrasts starkly with the business world where uptake is up to 88%. In other words almost 9 out of every ten employees in the commercial world are using online networking.

This is an odd finding, according to Richard Lackes of the Department of Business Information Management at Technische Universitaet Dortmund, Germany. He points out that scientific research is essentially a communication-driven process and that most of its participants are young and part of what we might refer to as the Facebook generation (Gen-F, you might say). Members of the business world have a much more even spread of ages and differences in internet acceptance, and yet, it is business users who are much more committed to online social networking.

There are, of course, many networking sites around aimed specifically at scientists and have been since the heady days of ChemWeb.com and BioMedNet.com in the late 1990s (two organisations with whom I worked for many years). Today, there are dozens of general science networking sites, academic networking sites, and specialist, niche sites. However, if we are generous and suggest that the top ten of those have on average 50,000 members and that they overlap in membership to say 20%, then we are still left to account for millions of other researchers who are simply not using these services.

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This post provides a much more in depth discussion of specific online services for researchers. Some of the quotes say the same thing I wrote below – the sites have to provide a useful tool for scientists and the social aspects are secondary.

I don;t think it is simply a matter of waiting long enough. The sites have to provide something useful right off the bat in order to get busy researchers the reason for finding time to use the new tool.

Short answers to simple questions

[Crossposted at SpreadingScience]

by Nima Badiey

NIH Funds a Social Network for Scientists — Is It Likely to Succeed?

[Via The Scholarly Kitchen]

The NIH spends $12.2 million funding a social network for scientists. Is this any more likely to succeed than all the other recent failures?

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Fuller discussion:

In order to find an approach that works, researchers often have to fail a lot. That is a good thing. The faster we fail, the faster we find what works. So I am glad the NIH is funding this. While it may have little to be excited about right now, it may get us to a tool that will be useful.

As David mentions, the people quoted in the article seem to have an unusual idea of how researchers find collaborators.

A careful review of the literature to find a collaborator who has a history of publishing quality results in a field is “haphazard”, whereas placing a want-ad, or collaborating with one’s online chat buddies, is systematic? Yikes.

We have PubMed, which allows us to rapidly identify others working on research areas important to us. In many cases, we can go to RePORT to find out what government grants they are receiving.

The NIH site, as described, also fails to recognize that researchers will only do this if it helps their workflow or provides them a tool that they have no other way to use. Facebook is really a place for people to make online connections with others, people one would have no other way to actually find.

But we can already find many of the people we would need to connect to. What will a scientific Facebook have that would make it worthwhile?

Most social networking tools initially provide something of great usefulness to the individual. Bookmarking services, like CiteULike, allow you to access/sync your references from any computer. Once someone begins using it for this purpose, the added uses from social networking (such as finding other sites using the bookmarks of others) becomes apparent.

For researchers to use such an online resource, it has to provide them new tools. Approaches, like the ones being used by Mendeley or Connotea, make managing references and papers easier. Dealing with papers and references can be a little tricky, making a good reference manager very useful.

Now, I use a specific application to accomplish this, which allows me to also insert references into papers, as well as keep track of new papers that are published. Having something similar online, allowing me access from any computer, might be useful, especially if it allowed access from anywhere, such as my iPhone while at a conference.

If enough people were using such an online application then there could be added Web 2.0 approaches that could then be used to enhance the tools. Perhaps this would supercharge the careful reviews that David mentions, allowing us to find things or people that we could not do otherwise.

There are still a lot of caveats in there, because I am not really convinced yet that having all my references online really helps me. So the Web 2.0 aspects do not really matter much.

People may have altruistic urges, the need to help the group. But researchers do not take up these tools because they want to help the scientific community. They take them up because they help the researcher get work done.

Nothing mentioned about the NIH site indicates that it has anything that I currently lack.

Show me how an online social networking tool will get my work done faster/better, in ways that I can not accomplish now. Those will be the sites that succeed.

Changing the culture

[Crossposted at SpreadingScience]

Loose coupling and biopharma:
[Via business|bytes|genes|molecules]

A few days ago, via the typical following of links that is typical of a good search and browse section on the interwebs, I chanced upon a discussion about a presentation given by Justin Gehtland at RailsConf. The talk was entitled Small Things, Loosely Joined, Written Fast and that title has been stuck in my head ever since. Funnily enough, what was in my head was not software, and web architectures, cause today, I consider that particular approach almost essential to building good applications and scalable infrastructures, and most people in the community seem to understand that (not sure about scientific programmers though). What I started thinking about was if that particular philosophy could be extended to the biopharma industry.

Without making direct analogies, but without suspending too much disbelief, one can imagine a world where drug development is not done in today’s model, but via a system consisting of a number of loosely coupled components that come together to combine cutting edge research and products (drugs) in a model that scales better and does a better, more efficient job of building and sustaining those products. One of the tenets of the loose coupling approach to scalable software and hardware is minimizing the risk of failure that is often a problem with more tightly coupled systems and in many ways the current blockbuster model is very much one where risk is not minimized and one failure along the path can result in the loss of millions of dollars. I have said in the past that by placing multiple smart bets, distributed collaborations and novel mechanisms (like a knowledge and technology exchange), we can reboot the biopharma industry, reducing costs and developer better drugs more efficiently. I don’t want to trivialize the challenge, the numerous ways in which the process can go wrong, and the vagaries of biology, but resiliency is a key design goal of high scale systems, and is one we need to build into the drug development process, one where the system chooses new paths when the original ones are blocked.

How could we build such a network model? I know folks like Stephen Friend have their ideas. Mine are ill formed, but data commons, distributed collaborations, and IP exchanges are a key component especially in an age where developing a drug is going to be a complex mix of disciplines, complex data sets and continuous pharmacavigilance. I can’t help but point to Matt Wood’s Into the Wonderful which does point to some of those concepts albeit from a computational perspective

[More]

Designing great and awesome tools for researchers to use will be critical for successful drug development. But there also has to be a cultural change in the researchers themselves and the organizations they inhabit.

One is that the tools have to work the way scientists need them to, not what works well for developers. This is actually pretty easy now and many tools are really starting to reflect the world views of researchers in biotech, who, more times that expected, are somewhat technophobic.

This leads to the second area- researchers often need active facilitation in order to take up these sorts of tools. They need someone they trust to actually help convince them why they should change their workflows. Most will not just try something new unless they can see clear benefits.

Finally, the last thing is better training for collaborative projects. Most of our higher education efforts for training researchers makes them less collaborative. They are taught to get publications for themselves in order to gain tenure. Plus, with the competition seen in science, letting others know about your work before publication can often be harmful Large labs with many people often can quickly catch up to a smaller lab and its work.

Like in the business world, being first to accomplish something can be overtaken by a larger organization. So, many researchers are trained to keep things close to the vest until they have drained as much reputation as possible form the work.

But many of the difficult problems today can not be solved by even a large lab. It can require a huge effort by multiple collaborators. Thus, there is a movement towards figuring out how to deal with this and assign credit.

Nature just published a paper by the Polymath Project, an open science approach to the discovery of an important math problem. They addressed the problem of authorship and reptation:

The process raises questions about authorship: it is difficult to set a hard-and-fast bar for authorship without causing contention or discouraging participation. What credit should be given to contributors with just a single insightful contribution, or to a contributor who is prolific but not insightful? As a provisional solution, the project is signing papers with a group pseudonym, ‘DHJ Polymath’, and a link to the full working record. One advantage of Polymath-style collaborations is that because all contributions are out in the open, it is transparent what any given person contributed. If it is necessary to assess the achievements of a Polymath contributor, then this may be done primarily through letters of recommendation, as is done already in particle physics, where papers can have hundreds of authors.

We need to come up with better ways to design useful metrics for those that contribute to such large projects. Researchers need to know they will get credit for their work. As we do this, we need to also help train them for better collaborative work, because that is probably what most of them will be doing.

Technorati Tags: Open Access, Science, Web 2.0

Do it the way Charlie did

by Smabs Sputzer

100 years of Big Content fearing technology—in its own words – Ars Technica

[Via Ars Technica]

It’s almost a truism in the tech world that copyright owners reflexively oppose new inventions that do (or might) disrupt existing business models. But how many techies actually know what rightsholders have said and written for the last hundred years on the subject?

The anxious rhetoric around new technology is really quite shocking in its vehemence, from claims that the player piano will destroy musical taste and the “national throat” to concerns that the VCR is like the “Boston strangler” to claims that only Hollywood’s premier content could make the DTV transition a success. Most of it turned out to be absurd hyperbole, but it’s interesting to see just how consistent the words and the fears remain across more than a century of innovation and a host of very different devices.

So here they are, in their own words—the copyright holders who demanded restrictions on player pianos, photocopiers, VCRs, home taping, DAT, MP3 players, Napster, the DVR, digital radio, and digital TV.

[More]

A great article showing the Big Content always fears technology and always says that it is the end of the world, with Armageddon right around the corner if things change.

Well, it may be a big change for the people who make money off of content but not for the creators of such content. As I showed the other day, it is extremely easy for someone to create great content without the need for any Big Content companies.

As with previous technology changes, the really disruptive change is who makes money and how it is made. At one time, player piano roll companies were charged with copyright infringement. Just recently, MP3 players were viewed an inherent vehicles of infringement, simply for existing.

I think there should be a recognition that the best way to make money is on the things that can not be replicated digitally – the performer. At the moment, a novelist goes on a book tour to promote a book. A more likely scenario would be that the book is free for a PDF, cheap for a bound version but where the author makes money is from a tour where people pay to listen.

The article even makes a hint at this observation:

Content owners aren’t always wrong to say they’re being unfairly harmed (one thinks of writers like Dickens and Tolkien whose works were reprinted in the US without payment, though it did help fuel a lucrative lecture business for Dickens), and lobbyists and trade groups would be derelict if they didn’t conjure up worst-case scenarios and try to keep them from happening. Unfortunately, though, as we look over the statements above, the total result of this resistance to new technology is clear: it limits (or attempts to limit) innovation.

I have an old copy of the Times (from London) published on April 17, 1861. Right smack in the middle of the front page is this news item:

Mr. CHARLES DICKENS To-morrow, for the last time at St. James’s-hall, Piccadilly, will read the STORY of LITTLE DOMBEY and the TRIAL from PICKWICK. Stalls, 4s: balconies and areas, 5s: gallery, 1s : at Messrs. Chapman and Hall’s, 123, Piccadilly; and at Mr. Austin’s, ticket office, St. James’s Hall.

Quite a nice thing. This was right in the middle of his serialization of Great Expectations. His serials were probably driving his speaking engagements. Even if he was paid just a few hundred pounds for the stories, his personal appearances were bringing in the big bucks. You can see what the program would have looked like from a similar reading tour a few years earlier.

Now Dickens worked really hard at giving engaging readings. He developed a whole set of prompt copies to help him. By all accounts he was a real master, altering the presentation on the fly, creating an extemporaneous presentation more like a one man show than a simple reading.

Dickens continued to give quite a few of these at St. James’s Hall, ending in 1868, with his Farewell Readings for which he was paid 8000 shillings. This would be about £238,908.79 today.

And the cost of admission is not too different from today. 5 shillings then would be about £150 today. And the base price would be about £30. Whitney Houston’s 2010 tour of England has tickets ranging from £50 to £100. Not too different.

The St. James’s Hall held a little over 2000 seats. Say the average seat was 2 shillings. A sold out Hall would gross 4000 shillings which would be £200 or £118,954.40 today. For one date, and Dickens contracted for 100!

He had been doing readings since at least 1858 pulling in quite a bit of money. In 1859, he was clearing 500 shillings a week (about £16,829.91 today). I would wager that he was making substantially more from these readings than from the books themselves. And others who managed the tour were making quite a bit also.

Dickens had fought his whole life against people who stole his work outright to publish it.  America in particular would print and sell copies of his works without paying him any money at all. He tried to convince us to stop in his first visit in 1842. He did not succeed. He tried again to convince America to abide copyright when he visited again in 1867.

But this time, he got his revenge. He also spoke, netting £17,000 (which would be about £10,111,123.61 today). Not a bad haul. He also was a little more politic, selling exclusive access to early drafts of his works to the highest bidder, often getting publishing houses to pay a lot of money to become his ‘authorized’ publishers.

Giving readings could be a pretty lucrative business. Perhaps it will be again.

Scientific narratives

by jurvetson
Stories Can Change The World:
[Via BIF Speak]
[Crossposted at SpreadingScience]

“Facts are facts, but stories are who we are, how we learn, and what it all means.” My friend Alan Webber, Co-founder of Fast Company and author of Rules of Thumb, has it exactly right. Storytelling is the most important tool for any innovator.

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Scientists may not always realize it but they are always telling stories, providing narratives to illustrate the point to their research. This is often missed because the form the narrative takes is so structured that it does not appear like any story most of us have read.

But a story it is. It may be “Here is something no one has ever seen before and we don’t know what is going on.” Or “After years of work, we have completely delineated how this disease progresses.” Or “Here is an important piece to the puzzle that has been giving us fits for such a long time.” Or, sometimes, “What everyone else has written before is completely wrong and we show why!”

As a graduate student, I first ran across the expression, when putting a paper together, was “What story do we want to tell?” Few non-scientists really understand that every paper is simply a narrative. The best ones are incredible stories.

The structure of a paper throws many people off. There is an abstract, background, materials and methods, results and conclusions. It does not look like a standard text, it is presented in a stilted fashion and it has a structure that is unfamiliar but it actually does have a beginning, middle and end.

The abstract acts like a blurb on the back of a book, telling us whether the paper is worth reading. The background and methods act like a preface, giving us informative background.

The results are the meat of the story. Most start small, building up the knowledge as they move to data that have greater and greater ramifications. This leads to the climax of the paper, where they can state what it is they have now proven.

The conclusions often function as a denouement, recapitulating the action and providing context. It can also set up the action for the sequel.

Anyone reading Watson and Crick’s classic paper on the structure of DNA can see that it is a story. In fact, it compresses much of the normal scientific narrative in order to provide one of the classic “We figured it all out before everyone else!” stories.

It starts off with what others have proposed, continues with their model, demonstrates just how much better this fits all the data, and then ending with these words, setting up everything for the next series of papers:

It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggest a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material.

Full details of the structures, including the conditions assumed in building it, together with a set of co-ordinates for the atoms, will be published elsewhere.

Science papers have an unusual format but they follow some of the standard things we see in any story. There has to a point to the paper. Why would anyone want to read the paper? It ca not just be a collection of random facts. The paper has to lead to some firm conclusions, including possible ramifications for current studies..

It must be focussed. It cannot meander through a lot of side streams. A science paper has to be kept on a very tight leash.

In every paper I have written, I have had to toss out very good experimental data, data that have no problems, because that they really do not fit the narrative that drives us to the conclusion. A well written paper focuses on the point and does not provide side trips into other areas.

The DNA paper did all this in one page. It left the detours for another time.

Most scientists realize at some level that a paper has to tell a story. But they do not realize that a scientific presentation at a conference really must do the same. There needs to be a beginning, middle and end. There has to be a point to it all, providing context to the data and its place in Nature.

Too many scientists forget this. They provide no frame for the discussion, leave needed background out and dump in all the data that was not fit for the focussed needs of a papers. Thus, most scientific presentations are unfocussed and boring. No structure and no real point.

The best presentations, the ones we all remember, use the data to provide a narrative, to help us understand just what story they are trying to tell.

We all tend to learn the needed tools to write a good science paper, incorporating the idea of a proper narrative. But few are provided any real tools to apply to presentations before a group of people. Most never learn the proper tools and simply give boring talk after boring talk.

Learning how to tell better stories, not just write good narratives, is something al researchers should learn how to do. But, whereas there is a real premium put on writing good papers, there is little pressure to speak well before a group.

That is why the best places to be at scientific conferences is usually not at the presentations but at the bars and pubs frequented by the conference goers. We get the real story there because every human being knows how to trade stories with others, even when the group is just a bunch of researchers.

Now if we could just get more researchers to adopt this approach to their public speaking trips, we might affect some real change.

Technorati Tags: Science

Card sharks are like scientists

by Plutor
In which Orac defends Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum…:
[Via Respectful Insolence]

I realize that I’m possibly stepping into proverbial lion’s den with this one, but a man’s got to do what a man’s got to do. As you may recall, former ScienceBlogs bloggers Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum (and current Discover Magazine bloggers) recently released a book called Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future. As you may also recall, the arguments and assertions that Chris and Sheril made in their book ruffled more than a few feathers around ScienceBlogs, chief among them the big macher of atheism around here, P.Z. Myers, who really, really didn’t like what Chris and Sheril had to say and has spent considerable verbiage trashing them (in particular Chris) wherever they’ve appeared promoting the book and getting in flame wars with Chris, who (foolishly, in my opinion)responded in kind. It became personal. Or maybe it was personal before the book was ever released. Of course, P.Z. wasn’t the only one who really, really didn’t like what Chris and Sheril had to say; almost overnight the science blogosphere in general and the science blogosphere in general appeared to become divided along the lines of those who agreed with Chris and Sheril’s thesis and those who were really, really hostile to it.

[More]

Yes, Orac pulls a head-fake but provides a very good dissection of how denialists just do not seem to understand how science works and appear to hold onto myths long after they have been disproven.

When the myth is a supposed fake moon walk, no one is really hurt. When it is a vaccine, many in society can pay the price.

I guess this shows that denialism of science, of reality, when it is inconvenient for one’s personal beliefs is a human trait and not a conservative/liberal one.

A scientist actually likes being wrong (because we are so often!) because it often leads to the truth about Nature much more rapidly. Eliminating the possible means the real is arrived at faster. They are reality-based.

Denialists react to being wrong by hugging their myths even closer, by creating conspiracy theories of ever increasing complexity. As each theory is shown to be incorrect, they launch theories that are harder and harder to falsify.

As Orac mentions:

Yet, as I have explained time and time again, personal experience and anecdotes are inherently misleading. As Richard P. Feynman so famously said, “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself – and you are the easiest person to fool.” That’s lesson number one in the scientific method, but those who are not steeped in doing science often find this warning hard to accept, even though the ease with which all humans–you, Ginger, and, yes, I–are fooled is the very reason science is necessary.

Humans often deal with the world by so-called ‘rules of thumb’ or heuristcs. It is often easier and safer to follow some of these than to actually think. Unfortunately, in a complex world, some of these rules of thumb are flat out wrong because our brains did not evolve to really deal with that problem. Math is one area where many rules of thumb are incorrect and higher orders of thought and reason need to be used.

A successful lottery is based on the inability of most people to understand the math of probability. No one makes consistent money at roulette, because it is an individual against a machine, and the odds favor the machine. But one can make a living playing cards. Professional poker players make money based on the inability of most people without significant training to properly understand the odds.

Scientific training provides us with similar advantages that untrained people do not have. It helps us learn how to more accurately identify our own bias and determine real evidence, not just what we hope to find. It provides us with a process to remove ourselves from the heuristics that can mislead us. It gives us reason, not feelings, in order to understand the world around us.

Few would go up against a card shark head-to-head without a lot of practice and training in order to understand the task at hand. Because they would lose a lot of money.

But denialists do this all the time with science. It can be, in fact, a lucrative field, one where people can parlay their views into book deals, think-tank positions, etc. There really is little negative payback for people who cater to denialist thought, who feed the incorrect heuristics used by many, many people

Remember, heuristics may be based upon hardwired connections. It can be tremendously difficult to alter them without a huge, directed effort. Logic, or other higher ordered thought processes, just do now easily work.

Using a more primitive, deeper hardwired approach can. Social pressures have been know to be effective. Ridicule could be used. It has reduced the Flat Earthers to a negligible group, as well as the Moon Walk deniers.

But it is a multiple-edged sword and one that can push back in harmful ways. Spending significant time and effort providing real training for each of these individuals might be useful for some but many would rebel against what they saw as ‘brainwashing.’

Denialists may just be a part of the landscape. Their thinking may be based on hardwired processes so altering the frame could just be impossible.

As a scientist, I can only believe that continuing to provide real facts that accurately describe the real world will eventually alter things for the better. Because I know for sure that denialists will never accomplish that.

Ultimately, denial of reality is a failure heuristic. It may not be as maladaptive as before (‘There is no lion there.’) but eventually its negative aspects will cause it to fail. It just may take a long, long time.

Technorati Tags: Health, Science

Innovative research comes from where?

Where Drugs Come From, and How. Once More, With A Roll of the Eyes:
[Via In the Pipeline]

I linked yesterday to a post by Megan McArdle about health care reform. And while I realize that everyone got into a shouting match in the comments to my own post on the subject – and people sure did in…

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Some discussion on whether academia or industry are better at innovation. My experience in industry and academia suggests that a drug does not often become a successful human therapeutic without a large number of innovations – in basic research, translational research and drug development.

This is because each drug represents a totally new process. Even me-too drugs represent possible innovative targets when it comes to pharmacokinetics or manufacturing. Pickering about which one does more is not very useful.

The question should be how can we make the process less artistic and more assembly line? How can we reduce costs and speed development? What bottlenecks are there in translating basic research into drugs? Are there entirely new entities than the academia/pharma dichotomy that could be useful?

Are there ways to support a culture of innovation across all the steps needed?

I worked at Immunex and was on the Enbrel project when it was an early basic research project, one where we were just trying to produce enough of it to examine in animal models. I was there through all the trials (including the failed trial for septic shock). And you know what I think was the most innovative thing of the whole process, the one that allowed Enbrel to change the world?

It was designing a device that permitted self-iinjection of the drug, something I never considered when we were doing the research on the drug.

As mentioned in the comments of the linked post, injection is tough because of the possibility of misadventures. Then think about doing that for someone with arthritis!

Other similar drugs had to be given in a doctor’s office by infusion. Enbrel can be administered at home, in a way that is safer for the patient. There have been several different iterations of this sort of self-injector with the newest one coming on the market a few years ago.

This is not to neglect the huge number of innovations, that started with a couple of what if conversations, was informed by outside collaborators, required a huge amount of work finding ways to produce the biological, determine the dosing regimen that would be efficacious and develop a manufacturing process to produce the drug.

Innovation comes from where it must.

Technorati Tags: Science

Something to think about

The Worn Grooves of Disciplinary Research:
[Via Science Progress]

Is pathbreaking science the product of interdisciplinary groups or the interdisciplinary thinking of foresighted individuals? In a commentary in PLoS Computational Biology, Sean Eddy, a Howard Hughes investigator, argues that “roadmap” thinking from the National Institutes of Health for building teams of specialists to tackle complex problems in modern research is flawed, because it encourages work in the worn grooves of existing, and perhaps outmoded, disciplines.

Rather, Eddy looks back to the birth of molecular genetics, as scientists stepped out of their research comfort zones and did the work necessary to understand fundamental problems in the study of cell biology. “We think of Watson and Crick as molecular biologists, not as an ornithologist and a physicist,” he writes, “The first molecular biologists were a motley crew of misfits and revolutionaries with no particularly relevant training, many of them ex-physicists.”
Image: Science Photo Library
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The worry is that interdisciplinary teams would still occupy silos that only intermittently connect. Having worked at this, I’m not sure I fully agree with Eddy’s point. But I certainly see what he means.

The beginning of molecular biology can be seen as the influx of physicists from outside the field. The insights they brought were not strictly due to being interdisciplinary individuals. They also brought a very different point of view. They believed that the same approaches that had captured the atom and put it to humanity’s yoke could be applied to biology.

Schrodinger’s book What is Life? convinced many that biology and life were just applied chemistry and physics. He convinced them that life could be understood in the same why that physics could, that the complexities of life could be reduced to specific physical laws.

These physicists brought a theoretical simplification to the field. Their reductionist views led to a revolution in the approach to studying biology. Instead of being mostly observational, it was made experimental in highly analytical ways. In fact, ritualized analysis is exactly what they brought to the field.

Isolate a specific biological molecule in a test tube and then try to understand exactly what it does. That is what Watson and Crick accomplished. It was not that they were simply from another discipline They were amongst those that formulated a revolutionary approach to biology. It is what drove biology for 50 years. Reductive analysis changed the world.

To me, the important changes that were discovered were not simply done by the innovative individuals. There were lots of innovative individuals already in the field. It was the altered point of view, the innovative idea of reductive analysis that led the field. Once recognized many who were not multidisciplinary could follow the process.

Different or novel viewpoints often drive innovation. Finding and nurturing people who strive to move into new fields should be an important things to do. And many of these people will create very innovative things. I agree with Eddy that we need to work at supporting these people because they provide something very important – novel ways to try and solve problems.

Now, the criticism of interdisciplinary groups is that they will not really have any truly interdisciplinary people and stay stuck in the same points of view that they currently have.

Could be but then I do not think they will be very successful at solving interdisciplinary problems. Why? Because the revolution that gave us Watson, Crick, Delbruck, Gamow and others was extremely successful. Analysis solved so many of the really interesting and tractable problems. Cutting edge research seldom deals with analysis. It deals with the opposite of analysis, synthesis.

Today we are mixing all the molecules back together because we have realized that examining them in isolation only tells us part of the story. Biology is how they all interact together. The new point of view is that a biological system requires a synthetic systems approach , not a reductive analytical one.

Groups that focus too much on individual analysis instead of interdisciplinary synthesis will not be able to solve these complex biological problems that the revolution of the last 50 years has now left us.

The interdisciplinarians that revolutionized biology 50 years ago changed the point of view to an analytical one. The revolutionaries today are those that have a synthetic point of view.

So, to me, it is not so much what the individuals bring, although they obviously bring a tremendous amount. It is about how the group synthesizes the information. I think it is possible for groups to accomplish this without having to have a really unusual person like Crick involved. It just takes the right group dynamics.

Collaborations that synthesize each others data will succeed. Those that continue to only analyze their own will fail. We should realize that simply putting together groups will not automatically succeed. The groups need to be managed to synthesize that data.

I think it will be the innovative ways to manage the group dynamics that will help us to use synthetic systems approaches to solve our complex problems, not simply multidisciplinary individuals.

Technorati Tags: Science, Technology

NIce story on science and laptops

The Digital Textbook Case:
[Via Science Progress]

Abel Real attributes his transformation from likely high school dropout to nursing student at East Carolina University to classroom technology. Real, a self-proclaimed success story from poverty-stricken Greenville, North Carolina, shared his experience with a school laptop program that introduced him to the power of technology before the House Committee on Education Labor yesterday at a hearing on “The Future of Learning: How Technology is Transforming Public Schools.”

When Real was 13, both his parents were incarcerated and his two older brothers had already dropped out of high school. By sophomore year, Real was so distracted by his torn family that he was sure he would repeat his brothers’ mistakes. However, when a health care teacher introduced him to technology and his school gave him a laptop, his life began to turn around. Even when “home life was a mess,” Real could instant message his classmates and teachers after school to work on projects and ask questions through his computer, he said. The laptop program was a “portal to a new life,” in his words.

He used the laptop to access information ranging from virtual university tours to career options to how to tie a necktie. Before his school system incorporated technology into classrooms, the average college attendance rate was 26 percent, but when Real graduated in 2008, 94 percent of his class moved on to college. “Technology is not a luxury in society; it is a necessity,” he said.

This is a nice story and an incredible statistic. The ability to create sustaining social networks using online tools will be an important part of education.Saving some people who would normally fall through the cracks is a key feature.

It will completely change how classes are taught. In fact, it already is.

When Governor Tim Kaine challenged a panel of scientists and engineers to evaluate Virginia’s physics, chemistry, and engineering curriculum in 2007, they found that topics such as simulation and nuclear physics were missing from their textbooks. About a dozen authors subsequently volunteered to write ten chapters on the topics in an open-source wiki to supplement traditional textbooks. Albemarle County schools purchased the virtual chapters, bundled as a “FlexBook,” along with low cost “netbook” computers for each physics student, Chopra said. Pooling teachers’ knowledge in supplemental chapters is more cost effective than purchasing new, updated textbooks. The flexibility of the virtual books allows teachers to choose content based on experience. As long as states “rigorously review” the content in an objective way, the marketplace can determine the best way to select and distribute the material, Chopra said.

Textbook publishers have to fear this. Actual scientists volunteering to write chapters that are free using Web 2.0 technology. But it may actually be the best way to keep things up to date and to fill in the spots that textbooks often hedge on, such as evolution. OPen Access approaches to textbooks could at the least have an effect on textbook pricing. This will be an interesting development to watch.

Lisa Short, a science teacher at Gaithersburg Middle School in Maryland, uses a different tool to engage her students. After using an interactive whiteboard for one year, Short can no longer imagine attempting to captivate her students with a plain blackboard. She demonstrated how the whiteboard incorporates various learning styles—visual, auditory, tactile, kinesthetic—in one lesson for the committee. The whiteboard allows Short to embed video and audio clips, build maps, and record notes without wasting paper. On top of that, every student wants to go up and participate at the board, she said.

I’ve seen such boards in action and they hold tremendous promise, not only in the classroom but in the boardroom. It requires a whole new approach to using the ‘chalkboard’ and a creative, multimedia approach to presenting. This all requires intensive training for the presenters to become proficient.

The difficulty with all of this is that these groups are the early adopters, the ones at the cutting edge. How difficult will this be to incorporate in the majority of classrooms? I think that it could be awfully slow without a lot of facilitation of the process.

Educating the educators will be paramount.

Technorati Tags: Education, Science

Laggards for change

by striatic
NoTube:
[Via crosscut.com : Crosscurrent]

Just like in the old TV series The Outer Limits, I am about to lose control of my television set. As a consequence of a government mandate to switch to digital broadcasting by Friday, June 12, my analog set is about to go blank. Like millions of others folks, I haven’t bothered to buy a converter box, a new digital TV, or subscribe to a cable or satellite provider. I’ve been warned for months, but each time I’ve ignored preparing for the inevitable. The talking heads explaining it all just seemed like one more infomercial. Click.

I’m technologically lazy too. I’ve never been able to get my rabbit ears to work very well, so I’ve just gotten used to fewer channels or watching the evening news through a blizzard of electronic snow. Buying and hooking up a converter seems like one chore too many. If the federal government wants to do something for me, how about sorting my recycling or vacuuming the dust bunnies from under the bed?

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I’ve discussed the 5 step process for adopting new innovations and the 5 groups people find themselves in. Here is a great example of the laggard group (recognizing that some are laggards by choice and some by situation). Long after most people has moved to cable or satellite, laggards still get their TV by broadcast. And even after having been warned for 6 months that they will need a convertor box because innovation will happen, even if they do not adopt it.

Some of them may get cable, some may get the convertor box, and some may just stop watching TV. As usual, the laggards isolate themselves from the rest of the group by refusing to follow them as things change.

Sometimes this can be very useful, as laggards retain knowledge that might become important again. Other times it just separates them from the shared connections that the rest of the population shares.

Technorati Tags: Knowledge Creation

No lines between disciplines

by woodleywonderworks
Science Without Boundaries:
[Via AAAS News - RSS Feed]

AAAS Southwestern Meeting in Tulsa Explores Science Without Boundaries

The 2009 AAAS Southwestern and Rocky Mountain Division Annual Meeting will convene in Tulsa, Oklahoma., on 28 March for four days of events including a two-part special topic symposium on the climate and ecology of the Cross Timbers and South Great Plains.

The meeting—to be held on the campus of the University of Tulsa—will feature symposia on rainforest natural history, motor speech disorders, and alternative energies; along with student poster sessions and science communication workshops.

David Nash, executive director of the division, said this year’s meeting will emphasize the importance for science to transcend traditional boundaries.

“The largest problems facing society are so large and burdensome that no one scientific discipline, institution, or research method can find solutions,” said Nash. “This year’s meeting is going to show why scientific collaboration is vital to the scientific process.”

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More meetings should be on exactly this same topic. Well, maybe not the same topic but the same underlying premise. Innovative research, and the underlying solutions that drive technology, can not be done anymore in silos of scientific disciplines.

The answers will be less and less likely to arise from a Department of Biochemistry or Oncology alone. It will take work across disciplines to find the answers.

It will require systems thinking and synthesis of information. Not reductionist approaches and analytical deconstruction.

The faster that organizations realize this and actually to something positive about it, the faster we will solve these problems. AAAS has recognized this as have several other organizations. Now if we can just change the ship of grants that is the NIH and then redo how research universities are put together we may get somewhere.

Baby Steps.
[Crossposted at Path to Sustainable and SpreadingScience]

Technorati Tags: Science, Social media, Sustainability, Technology

Would you like to play a game?

by hellosputnik
[Economic_Sciences] Behavioral experiments on biased voting in networks:
[Via Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences current issue]

Behavioral experiments on biased voting in networks
Open Access
Michael Kearns, Stephen Judd, Jinsong Tan and Jennifer Wortman

Edited by Ronald L. Graham, University of California at San Diego, La Jolla, CA, and approved December 5, 2008 (received for review August 19, 2008)

Many distributed collective decision-making processes must balance diverse individual preferences with a desire for collective unity. We report here on an extensive session of behavioral experiments on biased voting in networks of individuals. In each of 81 experiments, 36 human subjects arranged in a virtual network were financially motivated to reach global consensus to one of two opposing choices. No payments were made unless the entire population reached a unanimous decision within 1 min, but different subjects were paid more for consensus to one choice or the other, and subjects could view only the current choices of their network neighbors, thus creating tensions between private incentives and preferences, global unity, and network structure. Along with analyses of how collective and individual performance vary with network structure and incentives generally, we find that there are well-studied network topologies in which the minority preference consistently wins globally; that the presence of “extremist” individuals, or the awareness of opposing incentives, reliably improve collective performance; and that certain behavioral characteristics of individual subjects, such as “stubbornness,” are strongly correlated with earnings.

So they took groups of people and would pay them if the whole group reached consensus on red or blue in one minute. Then to mix things up, they would offer some people extra if they could get the group to move to a particular color. But no one was paid if no consensus was reached.

Cool. Much better that Global Thermonuclear War.

Then, just to make it really interesting, they networked the people, so they could see if different social network designs affected the results. Each individual could see what colors were chosen only by those ‘close’ in the network.

The most interesting results were that a small minority of very highly connected people could not only drive the group to consensus (24 out of 27 times compared to 31 of 54 for other network structures) but all 24 of the successful experiments resulted in the color that the minority preferred.

In addition, by making it really worth some people’s while to pick a certain color (by changing the incentives) they could drive consensus very successfully, usually to the color that gave the best payout, even if only a small number in the whole network actually received the enhanced earnings.

So, a small group of well connected but passionate people can drive a much larger group to consensus, especially when the entire group has a need for a successful outcome (i.e. make a decision).

Technorati Tags: Science, Social media