12 JAN 2012 by ideonexus
More Scientific Papers are Published Than Can Possibly be...
We should admit in theory what is already very largely a case in practice, that the main currency of scientific information is the secondary sources in the forms of abstracts, reports, tables, &c., and that the primary sources are only for detailed reference by very few people. It is possible that the fate of most scientific papers will be not to be read by anyone who uses them, but with luck they will furnish an item, a number, some facts or data to such reports which may, but usually wi...
1 We must accept, therefore, that most work will go unnoticed and unacknowledged.
29 MAR 2011 by ideonexus
We Have No Book That Captures the Basic, Most Important R...
As individuals, we are amazingly ignorant and incapable. How many of us, alone in a wilderness, could make a flint knife? Is there anyone now alive who knows even a tenth of everything there is to know in science? How many of those employed in the electricity industry could make any of its components, such as wires or switches? The important difference that separates us from the social insects is that they carry the instructions for nest building in their genes. We have no permanent ubiquitou...If civilization were to collapse, we would have no book by which to rebuild our scientific knowledge and how we came to it.
23 JAN 2011 by ideonexus
Smaller Fragments of Information Command Attention
I do find that smaller and smaller bits of information can command the full attention of my over-educated mind. And not just me; everyone reports succumbing to the lure of fast, tiny, interruptions of information. In response to this incessant barrage of bits, the culture of the Internet has been busy unbundling larger works into minor snippets for sale. Music albums are chopped up and sold as songs; movies become trailers, or even smaller video snips. (I find that many trailers really are be...
1 Kevin Kelly describes how he his attention is grabbed by smaller bits of information and his mind more active as a result.
23 JAN 2011 by ideonexus
Written Worlds May Not be Memes
Think of the number of things you are likely to say to someone else today -- or the number of words you will hear other people speak. You might listen to the radio, watch television, have dinner with other people, help your children with the homework, answer the phone to people far away. Most of what is said in these conversations will never be passed on again. Most of it will not reappear as 'Then he said to her...' or 'And did you know...' Most will die at birth.
Written words may not fare ...Folksonomies: memetics
Folksonomies: memetics
1 
notes
notesSome examples of ideas that won't become memes, with the surprising inclusion of books.
02 JAN 2011 by ideonexus
Information Retrieval is an Arms Race Between Algorithms ...
IR is the focus for an arms race between algorithms to extract information from repositories as those repositories get larger and more complex, and users' demands get harder to satisfy (either in terms of response time or complexity of query).
One obvious issue with respect to IR over the Web is that the Web has no QA authority. Anyone with an ISP account can place a page on the Web, and as is well known the Web has been the site of a proliferation of conspiracy theories, urban legends, tr... 1 notes
notesAs the web gets larger and data grows more complex, less trustworthy in many regards, algorithms will need to grow more sophisticated to adapt to it.
01 JAN 2010 by ideonexus
An Antiquated Observation on Computer Memory Storage
The first thing to face is that we shall not store all the technical and scientific papers in computer memory. We may tore the parts that can be summarized most succinctly--the quantitative parts and the reference citations--but not the whole. Books are among the most beautifully engineered, and human-engineered, components in existence, and they will continue to be functionally important within the context of man-computer symbiosis. (Hopefully, the computer will expedite the finding, deliver...MemexPlex stores summarized data for convenience, just the memes, but this author believes storing all published information would be impossible. In his time, it was.
