My fellow Hive Overmind blogger Carl Zimmer just won the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s Kavli Science Journalism Award for writing in large newspaper, specifically the New York Times.
Yay!
Carl Zimmer won in the large newspaper category for a trio of articles he wrote for The New York Times on aspects of genetics and evolution. “I sometimes feel a little embarrassed that I like to write articles about the kinds of basic questions my kids ask me,” Zimmer said. “For the three stories I submitted, the questions were, “What’s a virus?” “What’s a gene?” and “Why do fireflies flash?” I had a marvelous time talking with scientists about the complex answers to those simple questions, and now, thanks to this award, I don’t have to feel at all embarrassed.” Zimmer previously won in the online category in 2004.
And he shouldn’t be embarrassed, because it’s exactly those kinds of questions that should be written about! Engaging the public is what more scientists should do, and if they did it as well as Carl the world would be a better place.
This is great news. Carl is one of the journalists who is not only a great writer but does an extremely good job connecting the world of science with the world the average person inhabits.
However, he has another trait that is even rarer. He makes science interesting to scientists.
Science writing can be very hard. Not only must one be able to synthesize work that one is not necessarily proficient in, one must also make it all worth reading. But what Carl so often does is to also capture why the science is interesting. He presents the excitement of the work in ways that can resonate well with other scientists. He does a wonderful job of exposing the human behind the science.
That is why Carl’s blog, The Loom, has been on my RSS aggregator since we were both writing blogs at Corante. (You can see some of my blogposts at my old Corante blog, Living Code, in the categories at the left)
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.
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.
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.”
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.
I was asked in an interview recently about “open source science” and it got me thinking about the ways that, in the “open” communities of practice, we frequently over-simplify the realities of how software like GNU/Linux actually came to be. Open Source refers to a software worldview. It’s about software development, not a universal truth that can be easily exported. And it’s well worth unpacking the worldview to understand it, and then to look at the realities of open source software as they map – or more frequently do not map – to science.
The foundations of open source software are relatively easy to track. In the beginning, there was free software and Richard Stallman. RMS didn’t just invent the GPL as a legal, he wrote crucial foundational software for writing software, notably the GNU compiler collection, GNU Debugger, and the original Emacs. So from the beginning, there was not only a free legal tool, but tools for coding that were better than other systems at the time.
Simultaneously, we can see that the emergence of microcomputers and ubiquitous access to the internet expanded the number (and interconnectivity) of potential programmers. Suddenly there were tens of thousands of programmers with computers at home and at work. The explosion of the Web saw the creation of infrastructure like code repositories, version control systems, and coding communities. Thanks to object-orientation, software was also very amenable to being broken into defined, modular chunks and tasks. One coder could work on a kernel function, another on a user interface function, a third on an application, and they could be reasonably sure that as long as they all followed the standards, their work would snap together into the growing distribution. The phrase “open source” can sort of be a shorthand for this kind of innovation, which we also see in wikipedia and other community built projects.
Open source, if we view it through a different lens, is really more about a distributed methodology for software development. The burden of creation is widely distributed across a massive community with more-or-less equal access to tools and systems. In this context, the role of the legal tool is more akin to an enzyme. It was an essential piece of a puzzle, but it was not the only piece. In fact, without the rest of the infrastructure (connectivity, tools, and people) the legal tool on its own would not have led us to GNU/Linux.
A really nice discussion of the differences between Open Source approaches in high tech and the need for Distributed Sources in science. There have been an lot of overlap in the development of new high tech tools and those seen in biotech.
Open source has its place but the idea of making a network deal with the needs of science is something that needs to be given careful thought. But it should be possible.
Resistance to Greater Openness
Openness and Open-Access Journals
Digital Repositories
Educating Faculty Members on Their Intellectual Property Rights
Openness and Commercial Support of Research
Access to Government-Funded Research Results
Openness and University Libraries
Openness and Academic Presses
Openness and Technology Transfer
Increasing openness will be required for higher education institutions. Rapid and easy access to information will be a requirement for a successful university. Not only teaching will be changed.
How research is conducted will also change. Access to journals, access information and access to IP will all have to adapt. It looks to be pretty disruptive, at a time when colleges are under severe financial constraints.
How we educate ourselves will determine how well we manage to live. Just one of the many changes going on.
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.
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.
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 byMendeleyor 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.
Well, after updating to Snow Leopard, I had to also update a few of my programs, in particular, my blog editing software, ecto.
I love ecto but the new version, ecto 3, has taken a little getting used to. It has some thing missing from previous versions (nothing major) and some really nice additions (auto saving of drafts, for instance).
Mainly, it has taken me a while to alter my workflow somewhat to take advantage of some of its new bells and whistles. It has some really nice templates for adding stuff to the post.
Like below, I can easily add all the info about what I am listening to on iTunes while I work, with all the links, etc. with just a click of a button. Cool.
I decided to make the links go to iTunes rather than the default Google search. It is a little easier to connect with the songs that way. At least for me. Some of my songs may not be on iTunes but most will. Let me know what you think.
But all this is possible because of the ability to mashup my aggregator (NetNewsWire) to ecto, using URLs, which takes you to iTunes. Then my posts get moved over to Facebook or Twitter. So, a few minutes of mashing and I get lots of things posted and linked.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
So the Fall Health 2.0 2009 conference in San Francisco at the Concourse Exhibition Center is over. The bunting is down, the cocktails are drunk, and everyone can get back to the sanctity of the WiFi enabled office or home. (Yes, we’re sorry about that problem and need to stress that it was NOTHING to do with AT&T who graciously sponsored the conference but were NOT providing Internet access).
But it doesn’t detract from the fabulous experience of seeing perhaps the most amazing line-up of health technology ever in one hall together–not to mention some of the biggest names in the Health IT world going toe to toe. Health 2.0 had over a hundred speakers and nearly 80 live demos and technologies on display on stage–not to mention 30 more in the exhibit hall. We featured Health 2.0 Tools for doctors, ePatients telling us what they needed, and a stirring address from CTO of the US, Aneesh Chopra. Then there was some remarkable integration over unplatforms in the tools panel–(I don’t know how often Esther Dyson gives standing ovations but that was great to see). And there was so much more.
Congrats to Remedy Rx Ventures and Unity Medical–joint winners of Launch! But honestly we believe that everyone who presented had something important to show and say. Thanks to everyone who came, demoed, sponsored, spoke, volunteered and worked so so hard (especially the volunteers who stayed late on Wednesday to move tables and chairs).
We had a great time and we made a difference. There’ll be videos and more up here next week. For now, take the weekend off!
My more detailed comments are below the fold.
The Ugly: The WiFi came from the sole source vendor attached to the venue. There is no permanent WiFi or Internet in that building. In Fall 2008 we had a maximum of 200 simultaneous users and our attendee numbers were similar this year. We contracted for an average of 300 simultaneous users with the ability to handle several hundred more and paid a large extra fee for “over-engineering” in case of last minute requests. The Internet was set up on Monday afternoon and the WiFi only worked spottily. At that stage there were only about 15–20 computers in the building. The vendor told us that because the network was open multiple people outside were on it. We were also told that interference from other equipment was the problem and the only option to was to get a completely different vendor in to build a new network, but that might still not work. We then made the changes that you saw on Tuesday morning (more channels, passcodes, etc) and it failed again. Upon further conversation with the vendor it was determined that no amount of extra work or money could guarantee us securing adequate WiFi by end of day Tuesday, so we then made the strategic decision to protect the podium links, the sponsored Twitter lounge, the press area and the exhibitors as much as possible and laid down a whole new set up for them over the next 24 hours at a very substantial extra cost. We did that because we figured that people wanted to see the demos on stage more than they wanted to read their email or surf the web, especially given that most people have got a data plan that keeps them in touch on their cell phone.
It is really nice to see what problems arose and how they were deal with, even if without success. Reading about the decision process not only helps those who were present but is useful for any group putting on a big conference.
Read the whole thing. I think every conference should have such a fresh review. It provides a wonderful insight into the entire process, something so often invisible for attendees.
My RSS reader, NetNewsWire, that is distributed by Newsgator, has gone thought a new upgrade. And instead of being synched at the newsgator site, it is now being synched through Google Reader.
It is still the great bit of software it always was but there were some hiccups with Google Reader since, essentially, everything needed to be re-synced between my laptop, desktop and iPhone.
So, instead of having about 1000 feeds to go through, I had 24,000 unread items the first time. Fun.
I am working my way through all my feeds to make sure they are up to date, etc. I am now down to about 15,000, I should be done by this afternoon.
Then it is back to the fun times that are using Net NewsWire.
The Global Development Network has published a Toolkit on Disseminating Research Online that I recommend to anyone who is planning a research project or has findings to share. The annotated resources are full of practical suggestions, analysis of different approaches, and research into different strategies and tactics.
There are some very valuable links here that recognize the difference between reading a printed paper and reading something online. We need to do a better job raining scientists for online distribution of their work.
Best known as the oxygen-carrying component of hemoglobin, the protein that makes blood red, heme also plays a role in chemical detoxification and energy metabolism within the cell. Heme levels are tightly maintained, and with good reason: Too little heme prevents cell growth and division; excessive amounts of heme are toxic.
It is tough being someone who writes press releases about research. They have to take very complex topics and distill them into forms that are understandable by others. It is not easy to do it well.
My pet peeve is when the release adds a little too much of the old time snake oil peddlers pitch whose elixir could cure anything. This is going to fight obesity, diabetes, cancer and who knows what else.
This press release details some really interesting science behind the control of heme production in a cell. It helps us understand how heme levels are kept in a very narrow range. Overall, a pretty nice demonstration of a metabolic feedback loop.
I love the science in it. That is written up fairly well in the release. As a researcher I wanted to know more. But the added hype of a cure for cancer or diabetes or obesity seemed almost add-on boilerplate for me. Doesn;t everything seem to be useful for fighting one of these three things, nowadays?
But, to me, it is a long, long way for anything dealing with obesity to be developed, with so many ifs in there as to be almost unthinkable. As I mentioned yesterday, it is very hard to get a useful drug to market.
The belief that manipulating this feedback loop could affect metabolic processes is a worthwhile scientific hypothesis. But there is no molecule mentioned that could to this. This is hard part #1.
Even if such a molecule could be found to work on the isolated parts of the system itself it might not work on a whole cell. Hard part #2. Then it might not work on a whole animal. Hard part #3. Then it might not be deliverable to a human being (who does not usually put up with the delivery systems a mice will). Hard part #4.
The it might not have the pharmacokinetics that would make it useful (i.e. you would have to take pills every hour for it to be effective). Hard part #5. Then it has to be found safe for human use. Hard part #6. Then it has to be found effective in human use. Hard part #7. Then it has to be found to have few or minimal side effects. Hard part #8.
Then it has to be manufactured in a reproducible manner at a cost that can be justified. Hard part #9. Then it has to be effectively marketed in order to get doctors to use it. Actually, this is probably the easiest part, if the drug has made it this far. Something like 1 in 10,000 do.
It could be 20 years before a drug directly based on this work makes it to market. Yet press releases all the time make some sort of connection to obesity, heart disease, hair loss, or sexual dysfunction in order to provide a little more juice to the release so that it will hopefully be picked up by major media to publicize the school and its research.
The original release states:
Now the question is, can this pathway be exploited in the clinic. Lazar’s team showed that downregulating heme stifled cell division and metabolism, while upregulating heme enhanced them. It therefore is possible, Lazar says, that by pharmacologically “tickling” Rev-erbα or its other cellular partners to believe the cell has more or less heme than it actually does, researchers may be able to either boost or suppress metabolism accordingly, opening the door to potential therapies for cancer and obesity.
It is possible but then many things are possible.It is also possible that ‘tickling’ the protein will also result in cell death. There is just so much work that will have to be done to answer these really interesting questions.
Maybe this is necessary. Hype is a big part of the world. It brings in money and it helps keep research going but it also does two things. First, it demeans the wonderful work for its own sake. This is a pretty nice construction of how a negative feedback loop can control metabolism. This sort of work adds to our total understanding of the cell in ways that could be very important for our understanding of many sorts of drugs. But perhaps only indirectly.
It directly points not to a cure for diabetes or obesity, other than in a very general and nonspecific way, but to a greater understanding of how the cell works, how it is able to function. A fuller understanding of this will have much greater ramifications than most anything else.
Hype also makes the public think that a cure for whatever is just around the corner, when it may be 20 years away. This constant bombardment of the public with releases promising so much more than can be delivered in a reasonable time could make people more cynical about a cure for anything being produced.
But that is just me. Now I’m going to continue watching the movie. ‘Song and Dance‘ is another one of my favorites. (It is much more fun when you know his goblet contains poison.) UPDATE: I’ve embedded a better version of the entire scene.
I’ve been getting myself onto twitter slowly. I really don’t have a lot of free time to just post there so I am looking for other ways to double my results.
One is Twitterfeed, that will take my blog postings and put them on my twitter page. Maybe this will work. Let’s see. that way I can get more bang for the buck. I already do this for Facebook and LinkedIn.
Google Wave’s underlying technology will not only enable collaboration with other people, it also make it possible for bots to interact with what you’ve written. I think this is going to change the way we work. E.g., all applications which require a significant amount of typing will benefit from the statistical auto-correction provided by the Wave app Spelly. In effect, Spelly goes over the text as you’re typing it and correcting the obvious mistakes, just as you would do a bit later.
In a similar vein, the proof-of-concept bot Igor is watching out for inserted references and automagically converts them to a citation and a reference list. When writing papers, I usually insert reminders: “REF Imming review”, “REF PMID 16007907“. If I adjust this convention a bit and provide a bit more detail, Igor can figure out by itself which paper is meant and fetch the citation. Google Wave and Igor save me the tiresome going back-and-forth between a reference manager and the editor to insert all the citation, and they remove distractions from the process of writing and editing the paper.
I’ve been having a hard time getting my head around Google Wave. Perhaps if I actually watched the 80 minute video I’d have a better idea.
Anyway, this is pretty neat since dealing with citations in a scientific paper is such a pain. Here, the friendly bot goes out and does it for you. It is still pretty simple so far but a great start. collaborative documents are, I think, going to be a big part of how people create really rich, synthetic works that will be incredibly useful.
Now if schools will just move towards collaborative work, they might be able to enter the new era of learning.
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.
