General 14 May 2008 08:54 am
“Quantum cryptography not yet perfectly secure, researchers say” is the title of this piece in Australian IT News, based on a recent paper in IEEE Transactions on Information Theory. This old post seems quite relevant.
General 13 May 2008 10:50 am
The invention of the scientific journal in the 17th and 18th centuries helped create an institution that incentivizes scientists to share their knowledge with the entire world. But scientific journals were a child of the paper-and-ink media of their time. Scientific papers represent only a tiny fraction of the useful knowledge that scientists have to share with the world:
Enabled by a new media form, the internet, the last few years have seen a modest expansion in the range of knowledge that can be published and recognized by the scientific community:
The most obvious examples of this expansion are things like video and data.
However, there are many other types of useful knowledge that scientists have, and could potentially share with the world. Examples include questions, ideas, leads, folklore knowledge, notebooks, opinions of other work, workflows, simple explanations of basic concepts, and so on.
Each of these types of knowledge can be the basis for new online tools that further expand the range of what can be published by scientists:
It’s fun to think about what tools would best serve the needs associated with each type of knowledge. This is already starting to happen with tools and ideas like open notebook science, the science exchange, SciRate, and the Open Wetware wiki.
Some people will object that this kind of expansion is not desirable, that the last thing scientists need is an expansion in the range of information they deal with. Surely we are already overburdened?
Underlying this apparent problem is an opportunity to develop tools to assist scientists in finding relevant information, and to ensure that what they publish — their questions, ideas, and so on — is seen by those people who will most benefit. Ideally, the result will be not only a great expansion in the range of what is published, but also a great improvement in the quality of information that we encounter.
(This is, incidentally, a good argument in favour of strong open access, namely, that building high-quality information-finding tools will require open access to the entire scientific literature. In a gated web, Google Search and similar tools could not function, for they rely on the collective intelligence of the entire community of people publishing on the web. By accepting closed journals, scientists are condemning themselves to relatively low-quality information management tools.)
There are, of course, major cultural barriers to acceptance of these new tools. At present, there are few incentives to make use of new ideas like open notebook science. Why blog your ideas online, when someone else could be working on a paper on the same subject? This isn’t speculation, it’s already happening, and sometimes the blog posts are better - but try telling that to a tenure review committee.
What this means is that in addition to building new tools for each of these kinds of knowledge, we also need to provide ways of incentivizing the use of those tools, so scientists are motivated to move information out of their heads and labs, and onto the network, where it can catalyse new tools and new discoveries. This means measuring the contributions made with those new tools, and working on legitimizing those measures within the scientific community. This will take time, but it can be done. Visionary computer scientist Danny Hillis has pointed out that problems which seem impossible over two years are often trivial over fifty - I suspect this is how we’ll look back at the current changes going on in how science is done.
General 12 May 2008 06:53 am
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General 09 May 2008 06:53 am
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General 05 May 2008 06:53 am
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General 02 May 2008 06:53 am
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Library & Conferences 29 Apr 2008 09:30 am
Growing up, I thought of libraries as places you went to get books. That’s before I got a salary, and discovered amazon.com.
In the last few years, I’ve realized that idea of libraries is totally wrong. Libraries are where the librarians are, and librarians are people who understand information and how to organize it better than almost anybody. That makes libraries and librarians incredibly interesting. So it’s with much interest that I see the announcement for the “One Big Library” unconference, forwarded by John Dupuis:
Announcing the One Big Library Unconference
http://onebiglibrary.yorku.ca/
E-mail: onebig@yorku.ca
When: Friday 27 June 2008, 9:00 am to 5:00 pm.
Where: The Centre for Social Innovation, 215 Spadina Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
“It seems like there are lot of different kinds of libraries: public libraries, school libraries, university libraries, college libraries, law libraries, medical libraries, corporate libraries, special libraries, private libraries. But really there’s just One Big Library, with branches all over the world.”
The One Big Library Unconference is a one-day gathering of librarians, technologists, and other interested people, talking about the present and future of libraries.
It’s organized and sponsored by York University Libraries and members of the YUL Emerging Technologies Interest Group: Stacy Allison-Cassin, William Denton, and John Dupuis.
In an interconnected world, all physical and virtual libraries can really be thought of as branches of One Big Library. We would like to get together and explore that concept. Areas of interest:
- The future of libraries
- Collaboration on building One Big Library collections and services
- Uses of social software in libraries
- Tools to support and extend the One Big Library
Our goals are:
- Bringing people interested in the future of libraries together with the hope of sparking collaboration and cooperation
- Starting conversations between people in different kinds of libraries, and people inside and outside libraries
Robot 29 Apr 2008 06:40 am
Via Marc Andreessen, whose title, “Don’t fool yourself - they’re coming for us”, seems spookily appropriate.
General 28 Apr 2008 06:53 am
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General 26 Apr 2008 10:24 pm
How can Google search be beaten? Google’s edge is to do search better than other companies, i.e., they have access to knowledge about search those other companies don’t, in part because they place a high premium on developing such knowledge in-house.
What happens if Google’s understanding of search starts to saturate, and further research produces only small gains in user experience? The knowledge gap to their competitors will start to close. Other companies will be able to replicate the search experience Google offers. The advantage will then shift to whichever company can manage the operations side of search (e.g., maintaining large teams, large data centers and so on) better. Google’s culture - all those clever people improving search - will then become a liability, not an asset.
This is the classic path to commodization. A new industry opens up. In the early days, the race is to those who develop know-how quickly, providing an edge in service. As know-how saturates, everyone can provide the same service, and the edge moves to whoever can manage operations the best. The old innovators are actually at a disadvantage at this point, since they have a culture strongly invested in innovation.
In Google’s case, there’s another interesting possibility. Maybe search just keeps getting better and better. It’s certainly an interesting enough problem that that may well be posible. But if our knowledge of search ever starts to saturate, Google may find itself needing another source of support for its major business (advertising).
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