Cold war, the cult of expertise, the broadcast metaphor, scientism, chaste kissing…why this one’s got it all!

[Tags: certs advertising expertise ]

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The Financial Times yesterday ran a terrific op-ed by James Boyle, explaining the ridiculousness of the Conyers bill “that would eviscerate public access to taxpayer funded research.” The op-ed is written in Jamie’s light-hearted-yet-penetrating style, and should be read simply for that reason — preeminent legal scholars of copyright are not supposed to be entertaining.

Then, at the end, he adds an argument that I think is crucial because it addresses the Internet’s effect on knowledge and authority:

Think about the Internet. You know it is full of idiocy, mistake, vituperation and lies. Yet search engines routinely extract useful information for you out of this chaos. How do they do it? In part, by relying on the network of links that users generate. If 50 copyright professors link to a particular copyright site, then it is probably pretty reliable.

Where are those links for the scientific literature? Citations are one kind of link; the hyperlink is simply a footnote that actually takes you to the desired reference. But where is the dense web of links generated by working scientists in many disciplines, using semantic web technology and simple cross reference electronically to tie together literature, datasets and experimental results into a real World Wide Web for science? The answer is, we cannot create such a web until scientific articles come out from behind the publishers’ firewalls….

[Tags: copyright copyleft conyers james_boyle knowledge everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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At 7:30 tonight, before the Vice Presidential debate, the Ig Nobel ceremonies will be live webcast.

[Tags: ig_nobels humor science ]

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Here are the eight winners of the New Scientist visualization/photography contest. Beautiful.

[Tags: photos science ]

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James Boyle is chairman of Creative Commons and teaches law at Duke. He’s talking about the nature of openness. [Note: Live blogging. Error prone and error-full.]

We have patterns of behavior that economic theory does not predict. We are risk averse. For example, it makes no sense to buy a warranty; we buy them out of an absurd sense that buying the warranty affects the device’s outcome. There is another kind of bias that we wouldn’t predict from economic theory: A systematic bias against openness. We don’t expect openness and collaboration to generate what they do. We overestimate the risks. We underestimate the risks of closed systems and overestimate closed systems’ benefits.

Suppose in 1990 I came to you with two proposals: Build an open system. Or, build something like Minitel, Compuserv or AOL; it’s controlled and permission-based. Which would you pick? If you pick the first, you’ll have piracy, spam, massive amounts of crap, flame wars, massive violations of IP, use for immoral purposes. “I think you’d pick network #2” because those risks are foreseeable, but you couldn’t imagine wikis, blogs, Google maps, etc. It’s hard for us to imagine the benefits of open systems. It’s not intuitive.

Again, in 1990 you are asked to assemble the greatest encyclopedia, in most languages, updated in real time, adopt a neutral point of view. In 1990, you’d say that you need maybe a billion dollars, a hierarchical corporation, lots of editors, vet the writers you’re hiring, peer reviewers, copyright it all to recoup the money we’ve invested, trademark it. And someone else says, “We’ll have a web site, and people will like put stuff up and people will edit it.” How many of us would have picked #2. We don’t understand openness.

Free software is the same story.

What conclusions should we draw? Some people are raised in places where they learn how to drive in snow and ice. They learn to turn into the skid, contrary to our impulses. We can train ourselves to overcome our biases. But open doesn’t always work. Sometimes we do need closed, controlled. E.g., open won’t get us all the way to a phase 3 drug trial. Open doesn’t always work for privacy. We need a world with both open and closed.

So far, James says, we in the audience agree. Now for some things that will not flatter our sympathy.

He talks about Putnam’s “Bowling Alone” that talks about the loss of civil organizations in America. But, Putnam noticed that in the early 1900s American intellectuals noticed that the move to cities fragmented the old ties. But they didn’t say that history will just automatically correct itself. Instead, they created organizations like the Kiwanis, the Elks, etc. They invented institutions to make up for a problem they saw. Eventually, those institutions worked.

So, if we are bad at judging the boundaries between open and closed, if it’s important to get it right, then it’s beholden on us to create the institutions of civil society that enable us to get past our biases. Creative Commons is one such. It provides an infrastructure for sharing our work.

Science Commons is another such group. The Web was created to exchange scientific info, but the Web currently works much better for buying shoes or porn than doing that. The vast majority of scientific literature is behind the pay wall. You can find it but not read it. Nor can you build a sort of Google Maps mashup — take all the literature on malaria, find all the geo locations, all the proteins, overlay it, build a wikipedia for science. You can’t do that because it’s illegal, technologically impossible, and even if you could, you can’t reassemble it and do a click and buy. “The World Wide Web doesn’t work for science.” Science commons tries to address that…

Q: Is the bias a metaphor or an inherent inability to understand openness?
A: About 80% is explained by the fact that for most of my generation’s lives, our experience of property was with physical things; if I have it, you can’t. There are economic benefits to knowing who owns it. The closed intuitions generally work there.

[I have to stop to get read to give my talk …] [Tags: ae08 ars_electronica james_boyle creative_commons copyright ]

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Jennifer Ouellette at Cocktail Party Physics posts a long post comparing the science policies of Obama and McCain, including Obama’s answers to the excellent 14 science questions posed to both of the candidates; McCain has not answered yet, but he has said that he will. She does not find herself torn. (Neither do I.)

[Tags: politics obama mccain science jennifer_ouellette ]

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There’s an excellent story on the front page of the Boston Globe today, by Carolyn Johnson, about scientists who just go ahead and blab about their data before the village elders have given them permission.

Yay.

The article says:

Scientists who plunge into openness also risk giving a competing lab a leg up.

“Maybe somebody has discovered some interesting gene and doesn’t want to blab to the whole world about why it’s interesting,” said Michael Laub, an assistant professor of biology at MIT. He says his lab is not overly secretive, but does not post “all the gory details of what someone is working on, because I don’t want my grad students necessarily to be scooped by someone else.”

Laub is just saying what everyone knows.¹ But the fact that everyone knows it and we’re ok with it is a sign of the problem with the system: The system we want maximizes knowledge and innovation, but the system we have swerves in order to preserve credit for individuals. From the discovery of the shape of DNA to AIDS research, we’ve seen some of the problems with the competitive model of science. But we also routinely see the benefits, as scientists work overtime in order to get credit for a discovery.

And yet, the mix seems wrong. The competitive model made more sense when it was more difficult to share data anyway. The collaborative model is proving itself in unexpected places. It’s clear that a mixed model works — some competitive, some collaborative — but it’s not clear how far we can push the slider toward the collaborative side. My hunch, and my hope, is that it’s way further than we would have thought, especially since experience shows that the satisfaction of being recognized as a continuously generous member of a network can at least equal that of authors of intermittent, officially-sanctioned publications.

[Tags: science open_science collaboration ]

¹I’m totally guessing about his, but I suspect that Laub actually talked with Johnson, the reporter, mainly about the virtues of open science, but noted that his group doesn’t give away absolutely all of its data…and it was only the last part of the sentence that made it in. As I say, I’m totally making this up, but the quotation had that sort of ring to it.

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Here’s an animated explanation of how humans spread across the planet. (Thanks for the link, Greg!)

[Tags: science anthropology genetics ]

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Today’s English lesson: Are the people in this video geeks, nerds, or dorks?

Answer: They are geeks who are not ashamed of appearing dorky, if it will further their nerdy loves.

(Asbestos: I love this video. I think it ought to be shown right next to the Sesame Street song about how a bill becomes law.) [Tags: geeks nerds physics cern ]

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I’m reading Seth Lloyd‘s breezy book “Programming the Universe.” Breeziness is a good thing when you’re writing about quantum mechanics and information theory for a lay readership. But I’m finding myself frustrated that he’s not digging deeper into the ontological questions about information. I find myself asking whether he could just as well say that the universe is a dance because the particles move or stand still, which would be true but a not particularly fundamental metaphor. (Oh, don’t dance the Wuli dance to me in response! Seth seems to mean information to be more than a useful metaphor. He thinks it’s alongside energy in importance as a scientific phenomenon. It’s not like saying the universe is like a dance, or a game (oh, don’t Glass Bead me!), or a lovers quarrel.) I lose him even in his assumption that the universe is made of digital bits. Why think things — tossed coins or spinning particles — always reduce to simple on-off states?

Maybe I’ll understand it better as I read more of the book. On the other hand, I’ve also struggled through other books on this topic, including “The Bit and the Pendulum” and “A New Kind of Science,” to name the two that spring to my dialup-unaided brain. I just may lack the education, imagination and context required to understand this. [Tags: seth_lloyd information_theory quantum_computers ]

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