X2 project blog

At the Perimeter Institute

Alex Soojung-Kim Pang — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 09:08:13 -0700

I'm at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics for the next couple days, at a conference on "Science in the 21st Century." Needless to say, it was impossible for me not to attend.

Last night I did a short brainstorming and mapping event on the future of science. We traditionally do brainstorming events as part of our expert workshops, and so I'm experimenting with doing them in conferences that other people organize. For X2, the virtue is that plugging into workshops that other groups organize, and we just plug into, is easier than doing your own: as anyone who's done it can tell you, organizing a conference is really hard work.

What do conference organizers get out of it? A couple things. First, when we do these workshops at the beginning of an event, they serve a useful social function: they provide an excuse for people to talk and interact. Second, conferences are often implicitly interested in either the future of their fields, or at least are designed by organizers to provide participants with an overview of the current state of the field, but it's often the case that these things aren't addressed explicitly; we can make this functionality visible and public.

Last night's event was interesting, mainly because we had great people participating-- a nice mix of physicists, people from the library community, a couple social scientists or people interested in science policy-- and also because we were using a vast, floor-to-ceiling blackboard that gave us a LOT of space to work with. A real luxury.

Now, though, I have a couple days to just listen, talk to and connect with people, and improve the map.

Wired News link

Alex Soojung-Kim Pang — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 22:48:04 -0700

Alexis Madrigal throws a link our way while talking about GPS-enabled iPhones:

With Steve Jobs' announcement that the iPhone 3G will have geolocation built-in, plenty of people are excited about finding good restaurants near them or worried about the privacy implications of that

But the new capability could be adapted by a different, unexpected crowd: citizen scientists taking the real-time environmental pulse of cities and suburb.

One requirement of this data-gathering effort would be maintaining the integrity of the data input. GPS eliminates the need to accurately report location data, which is a major area of human error. With Apple putting devices with these capabilities into the hands of more and more consumers, scientists could discover a huge untapped data-gathering resource if they can churn out cheap sensors that can communicate with the iPhone.

Interview on ScienceCheerleader.com

Alex Soojung-Kim Pang — Wed, 14 May 2008 10:58:57 -0700

I'm interviewed on Darlene Cavalier's Science Cheerleader blog.

One of the dangers of doing history of science or science studies (both of which I studied when I was in grad school, and taught before becoming a futurist) is that you end up spending time talking to your subjects. Generally, when you're an anthropologist, the people you write about don't closely read what you write about them: monographs on highland tribal manhood rituals or the semiotics of grain exchanges are hard to get through, even if you practice those things. Scientists, on the other hand, are perfectly capable of tracking down your work, and in my experience aren't shy about telling you what they think is wrong with your work.

This isn't entirely a bad thing, by any means: I think it can serve to keep you honest, and of course if you're interested in contemporary science or scientific practice, the scientists you write about can be valuable both as informants and as collaborators.

Darlene is an example of one a trend that I've been interested in for a while: the growing role that amateur scientists (or citizen scientists, as they're also called) are playing in scientific research and public policy. This reverses a broad trend that's played out over the last century of marginalizing non-professional scientists: with the exception of a couple specialties (asteroid-hunting and birding, for example), most science has become increasingly professionalized, costly, and demanding. Public involvement in science devolved: where interested amateurs could participate in scientific research in the late 1800s, a century later public "involvement" was reduced to reading science magazines and paying taxes to support Big Science.

Now, we're seeing the beginnings of new forms of public involvement in science. In the U.K., science policy people are talking less about "public understanding of science," and more about "public engagement with science," in recognition of public demands for a greater voice in policy decisions. Darlene is a writer and producer (and yes, a former cheerleader) who's interested in environmental science and science policy.

Could this really go somewhere? We've got a group on X2 on amateur science, and it's one of the more active groups in the project. Certainly, just as in the past, there are some areas where amateurs are not likely to make much of a contribution (those backyard particle accelerators aren't on anyone's horizon, and not everyone can do tensor calculus), and others in which the divisions of labor and authority between amateurs and professionals will be the subject of tense negotiation. But cheaper instruments (environmental sensors, for example), are starting to lower the economic barriers to doing high-quality data-gathering. The Internet makes it easier for amateurs to find each other, share data, access and analyze large data sets, and keep up with fields they're interested in. In a few areas, professional scientists have recognized that amateurs or local peoples have a lot of knowledge about flora, fauna, and climate that would be useful to them (see the Cybertracker project). Finally, the bad job market for academic science has yielded a generation of highly-trained scientists who don't hold conventional research jobs, but can't be dismissed as mere dilettantes.

I'll leave the last word on the subject to Duke neuroscientist Miguel Nicolesis. The Brazilian-born Nicolesis is doing some pretty amazing work involving direct brain control of artificial limbs, but he's also very involved in improving science education in Brazil. As Scientific American put it:

In Nicolelis’s view, reaching children well before college age is crucial. He believes that science education strengthens critical thinking skills in general, and he plans to use improvements in the children’s regular school performance as a benchmark for the effectiveness of the supplementary classes at institute science schools. If some of the kids become interested in pursuing science and technology careers, they will find plenty of opportunities in the knowledge economy. “Ninety-nine percent of scientific work doesn’t require a Ph.D.,” he insists.

Comments back, by popular demand

Alex Soojung-Kim Pang — Wed, 14 May 2008 10:08:31 -0700

Several people have asked about comments. Comments were originally part of the site, but we took the down in favor of hypotheses and forecasts.

However, became clear that 1) people just expect them, and 2) it seemed too much like we were trying to channel contributions and conversation, at the expense of giving readers the chance to talk to each other. So they're back.

Consider it proof of our willingness to pay attention to our users! I can't promise we'll implement every suggestion, and of course we have a long internal list of improvements, but we are listening...

X2 in Europe, June and July

Alex Soojung-Kim Pang — Thu, 01 May 2008 09:55:00 -0700

One of the Institute for the Future's most powerful research tools is the expert workshop-- events in which a cross-section of experts spend a day brainstorming, creating maps of the future, and developing scenarios that look in depth at possible futures and our responses to them. The Institute has been organizing workshops for years, and has built up a tremendous store of both practical and tacit knowledge around them; and in addition to their being useful research tools, they're a great excuse to spend time with very interesting people.

The X2 project has been organizing workshops in Asia this spring-- I was just in Malaysia and Singapore, and we're going to Korea, China, India, and other places later this year.

I'm now starting to organize a trip to Europe this summer. We're going to be in Budapest at the end of June, and Vienna in early July; I'm also going to a conference at Oxford, and may try to organize an event while I'm there.

Groups

Alex Soojung-Kim Pang — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 10:11:30 -0700

We now have a number of groups set up, which are managed by a combination of X2 project contributors and IFTF researchers.

I think that even in an age of easy tagging and search, groups can serve a useful purpose: namely, they provide a social glue for sites and projects like this, and give a human face to what otherwise would be a bunch of (very interesting) Web pages. We'll see if users agree.

First outside contributors

Alex Soojung-Kim Pang — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 10:02:30 -0700

After being up for less than a week, we now have registered users from the U.S., several countries in Europe, and our first Israeli user (an STS grad student at Bar-Ilan University). And our first signal by a user we didn't personally recruit. Hooray!

Economics of experiments

Alex Soojung-Kim Pang — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 11:01:54 -0700

I recently ran across a post on Deep Sea News comparing the costs of biological research in different locations:

If you want to run a experiment in the intertidal it usually requires $100 of pvc and $100 of a graduate students time (about three weeks). In the deep sea that same experiment will run you that $200 plus another $400,000 for ship and rov/submersible time.

This raises an interesting question. What are the most expensive resources in your work today? and what would happen to your science if that cost dropped by 90% or 99%? One recent historical example that comes to mind is computing. Processor cycles used to be really expensive; now they're trivially cheap. Labor is another thing that has gotten cheaper: tasks that used to take a lot of time-- many kinds of routine lab work, for example-- can be done very quickly and more easily.

What would happen to space research if, for example, the costs of putting an experiment in space dropped to a penny or two per payload kilo? What would happen to deep sea research if it cost $100 to put something on the bottom of the ocean, rather than $400,000?

Working with RSS feeds

Alex Soojung-Kim Pang — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 14:51:30 -0800

Recently Mike Love set up a very nice new feature for creating signals from RSS feeds. I've found it immensely useful in creating new signals-- I can do 10 an hour, where previously I was lucky to do 10 a day. Below are instructions about how to set up your own feeds.

SETTING UP YOUR FEED

This is pretty straightforward. Find a source you think is worth drawing on-- an interesting blogger, a scientific journal or society, etc. Look for an RSS feed icon on the site, or a URL (these often end in .xml). Copy that URL.

Now go to http://sciencex2.org/en/node/add/feed. This is the page that will let you create a new feed. Fill in the title of your feed, as many tags as you think will be useful, a brief description, and paste in the URL . You can also set the feed to discard unread items after a certain date, and to update the feed at certain times, but you probably don't need to mess with these.

When you're done, scroll down to the bottom of the page and hit "Submit." You'll then be taken to a new page (URL of http://sciencex2.org/en/node/XXXX) with the title of your new feed.

GETTING THE SIGNALS

This page will show the tags that will show up on signals made from this feed, expiration and refresh information, and at the bottom of the page, three links to

Add new comment View feed items Refresh this feed

Before you can get to work, you still need to fill your brand-new feed with content. Click on "Refresh this feed."

Drupal will then go out and grab a bunch of posts, and load them up for you. It'll also tell you how many points you've earned by creating the signals.

When you're ready to look at the signals, click on "View feed items," and you'll be taken to a new page (http://sciencex2.org/en/feeds/XXXX).

EDITING YOUR SIGNALS

This page will have a list of the signals that were just created, along with a little extract from the RSS feed.

If you do nothing, all these signals will disappear in a week (and you'll lose the points you just made). So when you find a signal that you want to preserve, you need to edit it. Underneath the signal, you'll see a line of commands--

Add new comment Read more [name of feed] Source Edit Delete

if you click on "Edit" (I recommend opening the page in a new tab or window) you'll be taken to the editing page. I recommend opening both the signal itself, and the source document. An RSS feed often just includes the first couple lines of an article, so it's often helpful to do a quick scan of the source document and grab another paragraph or two. However, DO NOT COPY AND PASTE THE ENTIRE DOCUMENT. This is pretty straightforward copyright violation, and when we go public, we don't want to go to jail.

Also, have a look at the tags on your signal-- they're the same signals that your feed has. (To get geeky, this means that that your signal inherited this property from the feed.) Chances are, you could make the signal a LOT more useful by adding more targeted signals. About 80% of the time I've got to kill off the generic signals and add completely new ones. The more tags you put in, the better-- tags are a major way we find content when we create new forecasts.

ONE MORE IMPORTANT THING. When you're finished tweaking the content, you still have to change the "Discard item older than" setting to Never. Otherwise, your signal will be automatically erased later. Now click "Submit," and you're done. Congratulations! You've just added to the future of science!

If you got back and reload your feed page, you'll see that the signals whose expiration dates you've set to "Never" now have Expires: 0 sec. You can quickly run through the page and see if you've forgotten to change the expiration date on any of your edited signals.

Visualizing gaps between signals and forecast coverage

Alex Soojung-Kim Pang — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 19:11:14 -0800

One of the more useful visualization tools editors and stewards could have is a comparative map of the subjects covered in signals and forecasts. In particular, we'd want to be able to do the following things:

Gap analysis of signals-- show subjects that are heavily-represented in the forecasts, but under-represented in the signals (an indicator of the need for more signals on that particular subject).

Gap analysis of forecasts-- show subjects that are covered by lots of signals, but not discussed by forecasts (an indicator of the need for more analysis of that particular subject).

Signals that aren't liked to forecasts.