Twitter has been one of the big game changers in social media on the web in recent years.  Those who know me are aware that I’m an active tweeter. In fact, those of you who know me through this blog are very likely to have found me through Twitter. I have statistics to tell me that, it’s rather neat.

So much has been written about the pros, cons and dangers of Twitter in general or in the context of science specifically, I feel this post is moot – but I’ve promised several times to write about Twitter and astronomy,  and it’s about time I delivered on that. I should start off by saying that most of the things I like about Twitter are not related to astronomy per se – I’m sure non-astronomers have a very similar experience. I’ll also concentrate on the person-tweeter, rather than the institute-tweeter or telescope-tweeter – those are whole other topics. So here’s what I think.

At its very simplest, twitter is the ultimate vehicle for ultra-rapid dissemination of information. It’s no different with science. I’m so much better informed about science news from around the world than I ever was before: whatever new instrument comes online, new discovery is made, or funding body goes into crisis, one of the 200-odd scientists I follow on twitter is likely to tweet about it in the space of a couple of hours, before it ever appears on an official channel.

Even better, a few people might have a conversation about it that I can follow, which I can join, or just follow to learn about the significance of the news item.

Social networking, you may be surprised to learn, is all about networking. We take networking very seriously in career development, why do we look down on online social networking as something juvenile and frivolous? Networking via social media like Twitter is even easier than real life networking. You don’t have to do it while you’re standing awkwardly with a glass of wine and some finger food, trying to keep your jetlag at bay. You can have engaging conversations with peers or influential people in your pyjamas on the sofa.

Online social media also break down the fence of affiliation or seniority. Top-dog astronomers on Twitter aren’t scary Professors anymore. They’re @e_astronomer, @defjaf and @telescoper. Sometimes they tweet about the weather, their kids, or that they cried over a cartoon. For highly competitive careers like science, full of (let’s be honest) snobbery and hero-worship, a medium like Twitter breaks down the social barriers and brings back a bit of much-needed humanity.

Plus, twitter gives you the opportunity to mingle with colleagues from other fields, whom you may not otherwise meet at conferences. If you don’t have the funds to attend conferences, twitter allows conference participants to keep all the rest of us in the loop with what’s happening. Several large astronomy conferences in recent years have had a significant twitter presence, such as the AAS, the Herschel first results conference in Noordwijk in May 2010 or the UK National Astronomy Meeting. Others, like .Astronomy, almost certainly thank a big part of their success to an online social media presence.

There’s a broadly held feeling that scientists tweeting leads them to engage with the public. It certainly has that potential, but I’m not sure that that actually happens. As with many forms of social media, the hard outcomes and benefits are not routinely and systematically studied, and the little research that does get published on the subject sometimes misrepresents or misinterprets the history and relevance of science in the social media (if you know of something good, please talk about it).

Where engagement clearly has occurred, however, is between scientists from different fields, and between scientists and the media. It’s allowing researchers from niche sciences like astronomy to embed themselves in the broader research landscape. The funding cuts currently being inflicted on the British astronomy and nuclear and particle physics communities were widely discussed on Twitter (here’s an archive and my post), first by a small group of physicists and astronomers, but quickly by a broader group of tweeting scientists. In the run-up to the British elections in May, those scientists participating in the  #stfc debate became active proponents of the #scivote movement that aimed to bring attention to science and engineering policy.

Even traditional media, often slow to adopt new technologies, these days have many twitter feeds for diferent subjects and types of content. Some excellent science writers, such as Mark Henderson of The Times or Dutch astronomy writing legend Govert Schilling, actively take part in conversations about science via twitter. That can only lead to a more trusting and mutually beneficial relationship, and better science reporting. Just this week, the Guardian launched a science blogs section that brings together several well-respected science bloggers – more about that later.

A lot of twitter-sceptics seem to think that twitter is one more source of background noise to destroy our abilities to focus on our work. I’m pretty sure that twitter hasn’t negatively affected my productivity or my attention span. I spend just as much time browsing the web as before twitter, only that now I have more interesting content to read while I’m taking a break. And when I’m really busy, I just switch my twitter client, along with my email inbox, down for the day.

There are some caveats. The style of twitter is very colloquial, chatty and laid-back. That doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to tweet everything you’re thinking or would say to your friends. If you want to take twitter seriously as a networking tool, you have to treat it as such. And as twitter feeds are generally public, you have no control over who reads what you say.

Twitter, like any other web-based medium, attract herds and mobs, and is perfect for spreading misinformation.

Finally, twitter takes some time. I found that it took me about 6 months of not-quite-getting-it, before I’d found the people whose content I was interested in. And just maybe it’s not for you, which is fine too. But before you make up your mind, do give it a try (a great intro guide to twitter here, find scientist friends here). Don’t be that person who bitches about twitter without having tried it. We tweeters really don’t like them.

SPIE, the somewhat bizarrely acronymed International Society for Optical Engineering, is a household name for astronomy instrumentalists. Organiser of the biggest global conference on telescopes and instruments, SPIE publish a number of decent journals and some very useful books. I’m a particular fan of their Field Guide series, which are small spiral-bound quick-reference booklets on topics like adaptive optics,  spectroscopy or optical testing. I recently saw that SPIE have now released a free iPhone app for their Field Guide to Geometrical Optics, by John Greivenkamp.

SPIE have released a number of iPhone apps. I tried their conference planner earlier this summer, at the San Diego Astronomical Telescopes conference. That was not a success due to the unfortunate timing of the iOS4 release just before the conference and the updated iOS4-compatible app being held up by the app store. That was bad luck, so I was keen to give them another go, and I’m glad I did.

The Field Guide goes through all the standard formulae for reflection, refraction, optical path length, magnification, etc, as well as aberrations and optical systems, and the information is presented very legibly in the app. There are some great added-value features too: some of the key equations are tappable, which allows you to perform the calculation described in the equation with values of choice, like so:

Key graphs can be viewed bigger, without surrounding text. There is a separate listing just for the equations, and you can also record notes.

I’m really impressed with  this application, it looks nice and has some excellent features, and I think the Field Guides lend themselves really well to viewing a mobile device. Best of all, it’s also free! Get it in the app store here.

(click to enlarge)

The Hertzsprung-Russell diagram is one of the fundamental plots in astronomy. I remember it being one of the very first “sciencey” things I learnt about astronomy. It’s a very elegant plot, as it relates two very basic quantities about stars, their temperature and their brightness,  and presents a visually memorable picture. The main known classes of stars each, like white dwarfs or red giants, populate their own corner of the diagram.

And now Stuart has taken the HR diagram and made a human version of it: the Astronomer HR diagram! It’s very neat, and lots of astronomers have been figuring out where they would place on the plot. If I count my SPIE Proceedings papers, not strictly refereed but usually counted as such for intrumentalists, I’m at [17,4500], nicely along the Main Sequence. Counting just my very strictly peer-reviewed papers, I’m at [3,4500], in the new media section. Either’s fine by me!

Image: S. Lowe

Optical layout of LSST, the catalyst for many semantic headaches

Like many sciences, astronomy is becoming increasingly data-rich. The next generation of observatories, such as the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, will produce staggering amounts of data every night and push the subject into the petabyte regime. The large surveys that feed a substantial portion of the research community today, such as the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, are already demonstrating the difficulties of converting large datasets into knowledge: converting the data into catalogues, estimating selection biases and performing robust statistics are all common problems to those working with the data. Astroinformatics, or the science behind the information captured in our wealth of astronomical data, is therefore becoming an increasingly relevant field of study. The AstroInformatics 2010 conference was organised with the aim of essentially defining this emerging field.

Given that the number of astronomers in the world is unlikely to increase at the same rate as our data volumes, the key to continuing our current rate of discovery is information. The only way to mine large datasets successfully is to have sufficient meta-data provided alongside it to judge its content and value. In astronomy we actually do this very well already with our standard FITS format for images and tables. Introduced as a standard in 1981, FITS files are accompanied by standardised text headers containing much of the provenance of the data. But for the flood of data that’s about to be produced in the next few years, something altogether more sophisticated will be required, and that’s where semantic astronomy will come in.

With semantic astronomy, we essentially want to capture all the information that humans can extract from a dataset in a machine-readable form. In a way, this just like the tagging and trackbacks we perform on social networking sites and blogs, like this one. But to formalise and standardise this to be able to compare and cross-match data from different sources or epochs, this requires the definition of ontologies. We spent a whole day at the conference discussing the developments in the semantic web, or web 3.0, and ontologies, drawing parallels between the web at large and the needs of astronomy in particular. These discussions veered off into a level of abstraction that was a little out of my understanding – but the ideas are very stimulating and well worth thinking about.

David Hogg of NYU gave an excellent provocative talk questioning everything we hold dear about metadata and semantics. “Semantic astronomy is doomed,” [pdf] he says, arguing that catalogs are essentially just meta-data – and that meta-data is all just interpretation rather than fact. So rather than the kind of cataloguing we do today to characterise our datasets, we need a probabilistic approach to meta-data. While his assertions make my head spin, I do think he makes some good points. Even with the best software for data discovery and the best catalogs, how do we ensure that the best data do indeed rise to the top? This takes us into search engine territory.

The development of a solid data mining infrastructure has so far resulted in the Virtual Observatory, a kind of super-repository that provides links to data sources  with a high level of standardisation that allows astronomers to search for and work with data via well-defined protocols. Several software packages have been developed using the VO protocols with varying levels of uptake in the community.

I recently attended a VO workshop in Groningen, and by working through the example science cases it was obvious that some of the packages, like TOPCAT, offer excellent added value over currently available tools, whereas others were variations on existing themes. There were a lot of calls at AstroInformatics for an improved user friendliness of this software, but personally I think it’s simply the functionality that’s key. Astronomers’ time is valuable, and we don’t want to spend a month getting to grips with a new software tool unless it does something that we need much better than our current tool of choice. Why else would we love linux so much?

Very interesting were also the talks on what’s going on with semantics in some of our favourite search tools in astronomy: ADS for literature searches, and CDS and NED for data discovery. These services too are experimenting heavily with the new opportunities offered by the social web. Simbad, CDS’ database of astronomical objects, in March started allowing annotations to object records, and the CDS folks are letting this happen with as little intervention or moderation as possible. After 100 days, 57 users have posted 333 annotations – although two thirds of those came from 4 “power users”. Amazingly, the system has received no spam. Sebastien Derriere (CDS)’s slides on this are available online here [pdf]. While the uptake of the CDS annotations service is relatively successful, other initiatives appear less attractive to the community.

Alberto Accomazzi’s talk on the curation of the bibliographic record showed [pdf] that despite the numerous new features offered by the journals, and many now having adopted a delayed open access model, the main mode of query of the literature via ADS is to look at the article’s pdf, rather than the interactive html version with access additional features. Since 2004 AASTeX offers authors the opportunity to mark their text up with tags such as \object{},  \dataset{} or \facility{}, which automatically produces machine readable annotations with the paper; however, the uptake of these features is very low. The vast majority of links from journal articles to data or object identifiers were manually extracted by the editors, rather than provided by the authors. So right now, curation is still crucial to the process.

All these developments form part of the research cycle that is becoming ever more integrated via the social and semantic web. This closer integration is absolutely required to enable us to continue our rate of discovery in astronomy amidst a deluge of data. Conferences like AstroInformatics are essential to bring this issue to the attention of the community, and to create a debate about strategies to tackle it. On the conference blog, there’s a discussion over some concrete lines of action we can take in the immediate future – go read and give your opinion.

Image: Todd Mason, Mason Productions Inc. / LSST Corporation

The AstroInformatics 2010 conference is currently going on at Caltech in Pasadena. There’s a substantial online presence, if you can’t attend but want to take part in the discussion, here’s some links!

• The conference programme is here (times in Pacific time!)
• Follow the talks on Ustream
• Track the tweets (hashtag #astroinfo2010)
• Join in the discussion on the blog

More to follow!

Summer is a busy season for conferencing, and some really interesting and fun meetings in the area of Open Science/Science Online/Science and Society are coming up in the next few months.

From 16 to 19 June, the California Institute of Technology will be hosting the 2010 edition of AstroInformatics, which looks excellent. The meeting has three days of “proper” conferencing, covering many topics – conceptual (changing paradigms in astronomy research, developments in other sciences) , technical (what are the newest tools for exploring, visualising and sharing data?) , people-based (astronomy education, citizen science). The 4th day is a workshop on astro-semantics. I’m really excited about the conference itself and about the trip as a whole – I’m well overdue a trip to the astronomy beehive/wasp’s nest (?) that is Pasadena, home to friends, colleagues and fellow bloggers. A tweetup may be in order – be warned.

Inconveniently clashing with AstroInformatics is the very cool-looking Science Hack Day in London on 19-20 June, hosted at the offices of the Guardian newspaper and sponsored by a bunch of great organisations. It’s a typical weekend of geekery with no real programme, just a bunch of coding-aficionados – and more than a few DotAstronomers, I couldn’t help but notice – getting together to Do Cool Stuff With Computers. I’m sorry to miss it, although I’m a little too technically incompetent to really contribute much. I always had the impression that biomedical scientists were much more active in participating in such events and it’s great to see that astronomers are getting seriously involved too – I spotted that LCOGT are even sponsoring the Hack Day.

I was also very happy to see the announcement of the 2010 instalment of Science Online London on 3-4 September. After last year’s fun and stimulating event at the Royal Institution in London, this year’s SOLo will take place in the British Library, who are cohosting the conference with Mendeley and Nature Publishing Group.There’s not much info yet on programme or fringe events, but if last year was anything to go by, it should be well worth attending.

Galaxy rotation curves: NOT flat (Noordermeer et al, 2007)

Paolo Salucci has a bone to pick with the community. The Trieste-based astronomer is fed up with his colleagues’ misconceptions about galaxy rotation curves and has decided to Do Something About It. In his short paper posted to astro-ph last Friday, he describes the experiment he’s set up to convince the world that galaxy rotation curves are not flat (oh sorry, that’s: NOT flat) – he has set up a Facebook group with plots, background, links and discussion, to orchestrate a change in the hearts and minds of astronomers around the world, to stamp out once and for all the damaging “hoax” of flat galaxy rotation curves.

Rotation curves describe how the rotation velocity in galaxies changes with increasing distance from the galactic centre. For spiral galaxies these curves are useful for learning about the galaxies’ matter distribution and, importantly, the presence of dark matter. But I’m not going to talk about rotation curves – it’s not my field and I’m happy to accept that they’re not flat.

I wanted to write about Salucci’s chosen approach of starting a group on Facebook. His reasoning is entirely justified: social networking, he argues, has become a true force in society, as a platform for rapidly spreading news and ideas through a large community. Despite the fact that the web itself originated in the physical sciences,  social networking hasn’t been widely adopted here. Indeed, it’s my impression that the biological and biomedical sciences have embraced the web 2.0 far more enthusiastically (although it may just seem that way as those communities are much bigger). Studying the potential of social networking for spreading scientific ideas through a global community is certainly an interesting proposition. So I completely agree with the core of his idea, and it’s a great experiment.

Other aspects of his argument, however, I find completely bizarre. First, he gives numbers to show the magnitude of the problem he wants to address:

Our thesis is proved if on a timescale of months there will be a substantial reduction in the number of submitted papers to astrophysical journals with a FRC [flat rotation curves] statement, (currently, these amount to ~15% of those published in the DMAG [dark matter, its alternatives, and galaxy formation and present-day properties] subject) or with ambiguous or no statement (~20%), the extinction of papers based on such paradigm (~5%). We also want the corresponding increase of works framed within the correct phenomenology (~60%). Furthermore, we expect a radical shift of thinking also in those many people that, although do not work in the DMAG field, still express FRC convictions in their seminars, lectures, public outreach events and articles, books, reviews and web pages sometime just loosely related to the subject.

If I understand these numbers correctly, he argues that 5% of papers in the category of “DMAG” are based on the entirely false notion that galaxy rotation curves are flat, 15% of papers contain a specifially erroneous statement, and a further 20% are ambiguous. Where do these numbers come from? He doesn’t describe how this count was carried out, over what timescale, or how the subject was defined beyond the “DMAG” description of all papers related to dark matter, its alternatives, galaxy formation and present day properties. In its broadest sense, that could encompass a substantial fraction of all astrophysics papers. Did he really count them all up?

Second, he expects an outcome “on a timescale of months”, which seems a little naive. Even if he convinced all these foolhardy flat rotation curvers on the very day the Facebook group launched, given the time to publication of scientific papers, the shortest timescales on which this kind of shift can be detected must be at least a year. Third and in keeping with the rest of his methodology, Salucci doesn’t discuss at all how he intends to measure the outcome of this experiment, or over what timescales. What does a “substantial reduction” mean? Isn’t a quantifiable outcome somewhat essential to running a successful experiment? Even something as simple as a user survey might tell you something useful. Science is science, even if it’s over Facebook, and this is no way to approach it.

Yet, despite the lack of clear methodology or quantifiable measures of success, he expects a dramatic and conclusive outcome that will have far reaching implications for social networking in science:

The test case is organized in a way that the failure of the mission leaves no hope to SNs to be of any help for astrophysics at the present time[...] The success of the experiment may mark the opening of a new phase in Astrophysics: a truly global community in which results and ideas are really shared and discussed and in which there is less space for prejudices and dogmas.

Even with a perfectly rigorous methodology, isn’t this a little overly optimistic/pessimistic? While both success and failure of this “experiment” would give some interesting food for thought, I doubt that it would prove anything conclusively. Like science itself, progress in research methods and adoption of new technology advances in baby steps. Also, the idea that using social networking would lead to less “prejudice and dogma” in the community leads me to think that Salucci has not spent much time on the internet! Social networking has huge potential for engaging with a large global audience – but sadly that applies to both “good” and “bad” science. With the best methods in the world, this experiment will not be the final word on anything.

The tone of the paper actually suggests to me that Salucci doesn’t think much of social networks to begin with. In his final discussion section, he poses the following question:

Are SNs undermining the peer review system?

Wait, what? Isn’t the fact that the notion of flat rotation curves has persisted in the literature despite being disproved over and over again observationally a surefire proof that peer review has failed? Why would SNs undermine that? The numbers quoted above, although it’s impossible to interpret them accurately without knowing how they were produced, would suggest that at least some referees who know that galaxy rotation curves are not flat did not make corrections to papers that stated the opposite. And:

Why would we want to establish new arenas for scientific debate and who will control them?

Why wouldn’t we want to establish new arenas for scientific debate? Particularly spaces without barriers in hierarchy, geography, financial status or even education level? That’s the fantastic thing about social networking: anyone can connect and participate, everyone has a voice, and everyone’s voice is equal. As for control, yes, some moderation is required. But from what I’ve seen on, say, the Galaxy Zoo forum (surely a great attractor for crackpottery!) this is perfectly manageable for a small number of people.

Finally, as a small aside, I’d like to comment on Salucci’s statement that “[...] in astrophysics, SNs and blogs do not play an important role in forming the prevalent scientific views, in influencing the scientific policy and in supporting specific ideas”. I’ve noticed on twitter that the discussion of the funding cuts in the British Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) has continued since last December between several prominent senior physicists and astronomers, PhD students, postdocs, and, importantly, the British science minister Lord Drayson and several more politicians. These funding cuts, together with other issues (e.g. the controversial sacking of a respected scientist from a government advisory committee on drugs policy and the use of libel laws to stifle academic debate), have led scientists to rally to make science a big voting issue in the upcoming election. Social networking platforms such as blogs and twitter are instrumental in this. So yes, I do cautiously believe social networking can have an effect on science policy – maybe not for astrophysics on its own, but on broader issues we do have a voice.

I think Salucci’s idea is really good. But the way it’s currently outlined, it won’t allow us to conclude anything. If Salucci would like this to be considered a real experiment, I’d like to see it described as one.

An update [13/04]

I actually had a nice chat with Paolo Salucci yesterday, he called me up to clarify some points I’d brought up here, which I appreciated. He does actually have recorded data on paper counts and intends to be more explicit about the methods of the experiment in a future publication, which I think is essential to be able to draw any conclusions from it. Salucci is very passionate, not only about rotation curves, but also about openness in science and better communication – and certainly I have no arguments with that. His paper was actually submitted to the open-access Journal of Science Communication so will be peer-reviewed and updated in due course – I’ve also modified the citation below to reflect that.  I look forward to seeing how the paper and the experiment pan out.

References

Paolo Salucci (2010). Can Social Networks help the progress of Astrophysics and Cosmology? An experiment in the field of Galaxy Kinematics Submitted to JCOM arXiv: 1004.1190v1

Some time ago Kelle Cruz, one of the writers of the Astrobetter blog, invited me to write a guest post on how I use Evernote for work. It’s just appeared on the blog today, so go check it out.

I created a public notebook in Evernote with some screenshots to illustrate some of the ways I use the programme I’ve described in the post. At the same time this can give Evernote newbies a flavour of the application’s  look and feel.

My twitter feed in the last weeks of the decade was often dominated by reactions to and discussions of the funding cuts to physics and astronomy research in the UK announced on 16 December. On the day of this announcement I created a permanent archive for all tweets hashtagged #stfc to keep a record of all that was said on the issue – as regular twitter searches only go back around 10 days. On the last day of the year I exported all the tweets going back to 10 December and I’ve been playing around with visualising them. Here are a few samples.

Here’s a plot of the number of tweets in the 12 days from 15 December to 16 December, binned per hour. The red lines indicate the approximate time of the announcements of the funding cuts on 16 December, and of the postdoctoral fellowships cancellation on 21 December. Click on the chart for a closer look and get the data here. At the height of the buzz, there were almost 120 tweets in one hour, and on the 16th around 500 tweets were tagged #stfc. And while the traffic has quieted somewhat now, the STFC crisis is still an active topic of discussion.

If you thought it was only a small group of people making a lot of noise, think again. Over 330 people tweeted about STFC in the whole 3-week period, and even the busiest tweeters contributed no more than 4% of the total. Click on each pie segment to see the usernames and numbers.

The archive is accessible to anyone and continues to aggregate #stfc tweets at the same location. I’ve placed the data file with the tweets I used to generate these images in a public location, as well as the idl script I wrote to process the data and generate the timeline (the script uses a few functions from the idl astronomy library). The pie chart was created using the Google Pie Chart gadget in Google docs. The word cloud was generated by Wordle, removing common English words plus “rt” and “stfc”.

The post I just wrote on laser guide stars and magnetometers reminded me that I meant to write something about the recently announced collaboration between ResearchBlogging and Public Library of Science (PLoS). PLoS publishes several peer-reviewed journals in the biomedical science and provides open access to all the articles published. In an attempt to move away from journal impact factors in assessing the importance of a paper, PLoS make available a number of article-level metrics, such as ratings, citations, downloads. The most recent addition to these metrics is  the integration of the ResearchBlogging portal, to provide links to blog posts that scientists have written about the article, as an added way of measuring an article’s impact. To see how it works, watch the video below.

The biological sciences are way ahead of astronomy in the addition of such “social” features. Some journal websites provide easy linking to bibliographic tools such as CiteULike and social bookmarking sites (Del.ici.ous, StumbleUpon), ADS provide the number of reads and citations for articles, and arxiv supports trackbacks. But on the whole there’s little integration of comments, ratings or links to blog posts.

It would be really nice to see the folks at ADS or the journals integrate more 2.0 features to help us wade through the sea of publications we are expected to keep ahead of. Particularly for junior researchers this extra information would be of particular value. Also, for cross-disciplinary papers such as those published in optics journals, the citation counting in ADS tends not to be representative. I did hope to get a few people from the publishing industry or ADS along to .Astronomy to hear from them what is being done or planned on that front, but that part of the community was not represented in the end. If you have thoughts, ideas or information, drop me a comment.

ResearchBlogging.org comes to PLoS Article-level Metrics from PLoS on Vimeo.