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SoLo11: Change Can Happen

September 15, 2011 By Leave a Comment

A couple of weeks ago I attended Science Online London, where I heard lots of great talks and discussions on communicating science, open access, open data and other pet subjects. My favourite talk of the conference was Michael Nielsen‘s keynote on the topic of Open Science. Michael was a keynote speaker at the 2009 edition of .Astronomy in Leiden, where he told us about some exciting demonstrations of science research being done entirely openly on the web, rather than in closed collaborations. He gave a nice TED talk on this subject too.

Projects like Polymath and Galaxy Zoo do make people very excited about open science. But in reality bringing such innovative methods into the mainstream of research requires quite a dramatic change in culture amongst researchers; anyone who’s ever tried to introduce just one new research tool to even a small team of scientists knows what a quixotic exercise that can be.

So to address this much-raised issue, Michael gave a great talk, not about traditional open science topics, but about how wide-spread change can be effected in a community, or in societies as a whole. Many smart people in the political sciences and economics have thought, spoken and written about this very topic, and it was great to get this broader perspective on a problem we tend to see as quite narrowly applicable to science.

I like that his talk was really aimed at moving the discussion forward. I’ve been attending these Science Online-type conferences for some time now, and while I always meet interesting people and have a good time, the ideas tend to get recycled from year to year with little real progress in the arguments. Michael’s talk gives no answers, but it addressed the criticisms his ideas tend to get in a very direct way.

The video of the talk is now available online, watch it below or on YouTube.

 

Filed Under: Sci & Soc, Sci 2.0 Tagged With: ,

Open Data Quandary

September 4, 2011 By 4 Comments

Every now and then, it’s good to read stories that force me to challenge my own opinions. This week, I read in the news that Philip Morris (PMI), the tobacco giant, have requested primary data from the University of Stirling from a research project into teenagers’ attitudes to smoking. That feels very wrong.

As regular readers of this blog will know, open access to scientific datasets is something I’ve long preached the benefits of. It allows scientists to reuse data in new and unpredicted ways, and underpins the culture of openness and trust that’s essential for fruitful engagement with a broad audience beyond the scientific community.

I think that being open and upfront about our data and methods, and willing to share these with the world, will foster trust in science at a time when science is crucial to addressing the mountainous challenges we face as a society.

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Filed Under: Sci & Soc Tagged With: , , ,

Astronomy Twitter Journal Club

June 7, 2011 By 1 Comment

I’ve often thought that social media platforms would lend themselves perfectly to no-border, zero-hierarchy journal club meetings. There’s a low threshold for participation, an equally low threshold for non-participation if you’ve just been too busy, and it’s an excellent way of getting new angles on literature from people with different research backgrounds. And as every tweet is limited to 140 characters, there’s little scope for one person hijacking the entire discussion.

So: how about an astronomy journal club on twitter? After a convincing effort organised by two British junior doctors, astrotweeters Emma Rigby, Matt Burleigh and Emily Baldwin suggested we give it a try with astronomy literature. I’m all for it.

Twitter has proven to be a very successful medium for discussion of new stories, including complex scientific ones – see for example the #arseniclife episode or, more recently, analysis of the WHO’ announcement on mobile phones and cancer. I’ve also enjoyed Dutch astronomy writer Govert Schilling’s “Twursus” sessions (in Dutch), where he explains a scientific idea or concept, like water or weightlessness,  in 15 tweets. Sean Carroll at Caltech recently took up a similar challenge to explain an idea in quantum mechanics in just three tweets.

Are you interested? Gutter blogger Emma has set up an AstroJournalClub blog, a twitter account called @astronomyjc and a hashtag #astroJC. I suggest we curate the tweets and any other contributed content using Storify, which is easy to use and allows embedding of the transcript into webpages and blogs. If you have any suggestions, post them here, on twitter, or on the dedicated blog.

 

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Open Science @ TEDx Waterloo

April 10, 2011 By 2 Comments

One of our keynote speakers at the .Astronomy conference in Leiden in December 2009 was Michael Nielsen, who gave an excellent and inspirational talk on open science. Michael spoke at TEDx Waterloo in March about similar topics, and I thought I’d repost it here. Producing nice slick videos à la TED is perhaps something we should work on for the next .Astronomy!

Filed Under: Sci 2.0 Tagged With: , , ,

Solo10: Online vs. Offline

September 12, 2010 By

#solo10 Word Cloud

Last week I attended the 2010 instalment of Science Online London, which was held over 2 days at the British Library. Both days were packed with interesting discussions covering lots of topics, loosely bound by the general ideas of science and the internet. One topic that caught my attention in a number of sessions, and that I’d been giving some thought before the conference, was the different pros and cons of online versus offline activities.

I enjoy having an active online persona immensely, and since I started blogging and tweeting I’ve gained a lot of experience, knowledge and perspective. But recently I’ve found myself wondering: what are the limitations of being active online? What can a blog, however fantastic or prolific the writing, not achieve?  And I tried to have some discussion about this at the conference.

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