24 DEC 2013 by ideonexus

 Science Generators

Conway’s Game of Life is perhaps best viewed not as a single shorthand abstraction but rather as a generator of such abstractions. We get a whole bunch of useful abstractions—or at least a recipe for how to generate them—all for the price of one. And this points us to one especially useful shorthand abstraction: the strategy of Looking for Generators. We confront many problems. We can try to solve them one by one. But alternatively, we can try to create a generator that produces solutions to ...
Folksonomies: science hypotheses
Folksonomies: science hypotheses
  1  notes

Nick Bostrom on the possibility of looking for scientific concept generators, similar to the way Conway's Game of Life is a pattern generator, rather than looking for random scientific problems to solve.

10 DEC 2013 by ideonexus

 The Scientific Worldview

The term “scientism” is anything but clear, more of a boo-word than a label for any coherent doctrine. Sometimes it is equated with lunatic positions, such as that “science is all that matters” or that “scientists should be entrusted to solve all problems.” Sometimes it is clarified with adjectives like “simplistic,” “naďve,” and “vulgar.” The definitional vacuum allows me to replicate gay activists’ flaunting of “queer” and appropriate the pejorative for a position I am prepared to defend. ...
Folksonomies: science two cultures humanities
Folksonomies: science two cultures humanities
  1  notes

Steven Pinker defends the "scientism" against critics in the humanities.

21 JUN 2012 by ideonexus

 The Importance of Peer Review

Nobody knows more than a tiny fragment of science well enough to judge its validity and value at first hand. For the rest he has to rely on views accepted at second hand on the authority of a community of people accredited as scientists. But this accrediting depends in its turn on a complex organization. For each member of the community can judge at first hand only a small number of his fellow members, and yet eventually each is accredited by all. What happens is that each recognizes as scien...
Folksonomies: science peer review
Folksonomies: science peer review
  1  notes

Each of us can only understand a small portion of science, thus we need a collaboration of mind to determine truth.

14 APR 2012 by ideonexus

 Petitionary Prayer

I was raised in a culture of petition, inculcated from an early age with a repertoire of formulaic prayers addressed to God, his angels, or his saints. All of the prayers assumed a response: Here I am, Lord, deserving of your attention, favor, heating, forgiveness. Never did it pass my mind that my prayers were not heard. My education was hemmed about with a huge body of stories affirming God's intervention in human affairs. Had not every religious person experienced firsthand the power of pr...
Folksonomies: science prayer
Folksonomies: science prayer
  1  notes

Chet Raymo describes his experiences with prayer and reevaluating it after encountering science later in life.

03 SEP 2011 by ideonexus

 How Peer Review Hurts Science

In my considered opinion the peer review system, in which proposals rather than proposers are reviewed, is the greatest disaster visited upon the scientific community in this century. No group of peers would have approved my building the 72-inch bubble chamber. Even Ernest Lawrence told me he thought I was making a big mistake. He supported me because he knew my track record was good. I believe that U.S. science could recover from the stultifying effects of decades of misguided peer reviewing...
Folksonomies: peer review
Folksonomies: peer review
1   1  notes

An interesting argument that the peer review process hurts science because ideas are evaluated by themselves, while the track record of the scientist should be considered.

These are general notes summarizing comments from audience members and speakers for this session:

  • Taking pdfs extracting text and semantically marking them up, hyperlinking reference lists to their source articles.
  • Mendeley http://www.mendeley.com/
  • http://www.mendeley.com/research-papers/computer-and-information-science/
  • Citations have no meaning the way we use them now.
  • Most papers aren’t cited, long tail graph (zitiny  ziphian curve graph?)
  • Citation Graph, collaborative filtering,.
  • Citations need context. How will that happen? Need to know why something was cited (ie. Disagreement).
  • We don’t disagree with papers, we disagree with claims made in papers. Why can’t a citation point at a place in the article?
  • Question: Is reference extraction beyond the scope of any non-commercial company? Mendeley is a company.
  •                Answer: There’s no single source of open bibliographic data.
  • Sage, SocialSciences,Crossref, webofscience, google scholar, etc – how useful are these sites. They provide metrics and recommendations, but not much more than going directly to the journal.
  • Social Networking in article recommendations, connect content to people, conversations around papers, systems don’t encourage conversations, people don’t want to participate.
  • Criticism of Mendeley: algorithms shoudl be open, academics should be able to define their own algorithms
  • Mendeley's plan is to extract reference data and make it publicly available and machine readable.
  • Criticism: academics need an open bibliographic data set.
  • Need to explain type of citation: positive vs. negative citations, valence terms, sentiment analysis/machine vs. human curated
  • Ontologies don't capture all reasons someone is citing something (ie. "Cited because I work for this journal." "Cited because Darwin will make you think I'm smart." "Cited because teacher required five citations.")
  • References are separated into their own section, removing them from the text. Unlike links, which are immediate.
  • Peer Review: example of a reviewer rejecting a paper because it didn't cite his own paper.
  • People need to make use of the REL attribute in HREF tags.
  • Citations can be used in a tribal sens, citing people in our camp and excluding others.
  • Description of citations as "frozen footprints in the snow"
  • Why do we need 1,000 citation styles?
  • Librarian: Questions about citations styles from students are constant and frustrating.
  • Orchid: cross-company effort to standardize citations.
  • Let people write citations however they want, but add an identifying number.
  • Mendeley is developing an open-source citation style editor.