January 19, 2008 – 11:06 am
Scientific American has finally posted my Science 2.0 story on its Web site. As the introduction explains, this is actually an experiment in getting reader feedback well before the print version appears. So I hope you will all take advantage of that opportunity. And I hope you will also publicize the link as widely as you can–on your blogs, wikis and websites, among your fellow workshop and FOOcamp attendees, wherever. Let’s make the experiment a success!
For your convenience, here is the Web posting introduction:
Welcome to a Scientific American experiment in “networked journalism,” in which readers-you-get to collaborate with the author to give a story its final form.
The article, below, is a particularly apt candidate for such an experiment: it’s my feature story on “Science 2.0,” which describes how researchers are beginning to harness wikis, blogs and other Web 2.0 technologies as a potentially transformative way of doing science. The draft article appears here, several months in advance of its print publication, and we are inviting you to comment on it. Your inputs will influence the article’s content, reporting, perhaps even its point of view.
So consider yourself invited. Please share your thoughts about the promise and peril of Science 2.0.-just post your inputs in the Comment section below. To help get you started, here are some questions to mull over:
- What do you think of the article itself? Are there errors? Oversimplifications? Gaps?
- What do you think of the notion of “Science 2.0?” Will Web 2.0 tools really make science much more productive? Will wikis, blogs and the like be transformative, or will they be just a minor convenience?
- Science 2.0 is one aspect of a broader Open Science movement, which also includes Open-Access scientific publishing and Open Data practices. How do you think this bigger movement will evolve?
- Looking at your own scientific field, how real is the suspicion and mistrust mentioned in the article? How much do you and your colleagues worry about getting “scooped”? Do you have first-hand knowledge of a case in which that has actually happened?
- When young scientists speak out on an open blog or wiki, do they risk hurting their careers?
- Is “open notebook” science always a good idea? Are there certain aspects of a project that researchers should keep quite, at least until the paper is published?
–M. Mitchell Waldrop
January 2, 2008 – 5:40 pm
Big changes in the offing: Starting February 4 I will be joining Nature magazine as their editorial editor, working out of the Washington, DC, office. I.e., I’ll be the guy in charge of those two pages of official Nature opinion in the front of the magazine (along with Philip Campbell, the editor-in-chief), as well as being involved a number of other projects. I’ll be replacing Colin Macilwain, who is leaving to start a new online magazine.
I don’t know how much time or energy this will leave me for blogging. Maybe a lot: after all, I’ll be traveling quite a bit, which means a lot of time on airplanes. But be assured, I will still find no shortage of things to talk about…!
December 10, 2007 – 11:52 am
Maybe it’s because I have the subject of innovation on the brain these days, but I couldn’t help thinking about it as I read Atul Gawande’s article The Checklist in the December 10 issue of the New Yorker. Because Gawande is a practicing surgeon, as well as an amazingly gifted writer, he has always been fascinated with human fallibility and the ways we can (try to) guard against it. That’s been the subject of many of his New Yorker articles, as well as his books Complications: A Surgeon’s Notes on an Imperfect Science,
and Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance.
This article is no different: it describes how the medical equivalent of a pre-flight checklist—a standard routine for pilots since the B-17 days—could slash the rate of medical errors in hospitals and save millions of lives. The medical checklist is an absurdly simple idea. Its effectiveness has been demonstrated in many real-world trials. And naturally, for reasons Gawande describes in detail, it’s been strongly opposed by most of the medical profession.
That’s reason enough to read the article right there. But what really struck me Read More »
December 4, 2007 – 10:09 am
Over on BuzzMachine, Jeff Jarvis has written an eloquent rebuttal to the notion that bloggers are somehow in competition with professional journalists, or that they are hoping to replace professional journalism with some kind of bottom-up “citizen journalism.” Instead, Jarvis reiterates the concept of “networked journalism” that he first articulated in a post last year:
In networked journalism, the public can get involved in a story before it is reported, contributing facts, questions, and suggestions. The journalists can rely on the public to help report the story; we’ll see more and more of that, I trust. The journalists can and should link to other work on the same story, to source material, and perhaps blog posts from the sources (see: Mark Cuban). After the story is published - online, in print, wherever - the public can continue to contribute corrections, questions, facts, and perspective … not to mention promotion via links. I hope this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy as journalists realize that they are less the manufacturers of news than the moderators of conversations that get to the news. … this isn’t about citizens or amateurs vs. professionals. We’re all in this together. Journalism is a collaborative venture. Journalism is a network.
Precisely. The critical phrase here—and the central challenge for the profession—is “moderators of conversations.” Journalists have a not-entirely-undeserved reputation for being lone wolves, while editors have a similar reputation for being autocrats and/or control freaks. Our skill sets, painfully acquired, generally include some combination of reporting, writing, editing, photography, audio and video. But moderating a conversation—with the public—strikes me as a much different, herding-cats kind of skill. How many of us are going to be willing or able to learn that skill? Or be any good at it?
November 19, 2007 – 3:57 pm
Back in 2003, the National Research Council commissioned me to write a chapter about “systems biology” for a report they were doing on the relation between biology and information technology. Since the report, which eventually appeared as Catalyzing Inquiry at the Interface of Computing and Biology (2005), was radically reorganized after my assignment was done, and since my text wound up being scattered, I thought I would post the original version here. It’s a little dated, and none of the references are recent, but it still gives a pretty good overview of the issues. Enjoy… Read More »
November 17, 2007 – 12:06 pm
Like everyone else in (science) journalism, I am a). fascinated; b). perplexed; and/or c). terrified by how the Internet is changing our profession. Recently, though, I’ve come across several items that provide a little reassurance—and a challenge. Robert Niles‘ post in Online Journalism Review, Michael Hirschorn’s article in this December’s issue of The Atlantic Monthly, and the surveys done for the new book on local TV news, We Interrupt This Newscast
, all come to pretty much the same conclusion: Readers, on or off the Web, do not necessarily have a nanosecond attention span, are not necessarily obsessed with all Britney (and her ilk) all the time, and are willing to wade through quite a lot of detail on topics of real importance. But they do insist on compelling stories told with style, originality, and a distinctive personal voice. Colorless, by-the-numbers reporting leaves them cold, no matter how “important” the story might be.
That’s the reassuring part: the basics of good journalism (and good writing) in the Web era are just what they always were, only more so. But it’s also a challenge, because putting that lesson into practice is a lot easier said than done, for writers, editors and publishers alike.
November 14, 2007 – 5:42 pm
Interesting post by Peter Fleischer, Google’s Global Privacy Counsel, on the Google Public Policy Blog: “Global privacy standards should focus on preventing harm to consumers.” Fleischer points out that, on the one hand, three-quarters of the countries in the world still don’t have meaningful privacy regimes in place. And on the other, “virtually every organisation [in today's world] - public or private, large or small, offline or online - relies on the collection and use of personal information for core operational purposes.”
Given that reality, what’s needed are new, globally accepted standards of privacy - which Google is working towards. And, Fleischer argues, the best starting point for such a framework is “an entirely new privacy protection principle that does not exist in the regulatory frameworks of the 80s and the 90s: the ‘preventing harm’ principle.” That is, don’t try to stop organizations from collecting information about individuals, because you can’t. But do try to make sure that that information isn’t used to harm individuals.
The trick, of course, is to define “harm.” The standard has been criticized as vague, and the whole idea has turned out to be surprisingly controversial. But then, that’s why the article is worth reading, and the discussion is worth having.
November 8, 2007 – 3:39 pm
The Urban Institute recently released the report by Lindsay Lowell and Hal Salzman that I mentioned in my post on challenges to conventional wisdom on innovation—the one claiming that all the “gathering storm” concern about a declining U.S. science and engineering workforce is way overblown. Their title, appropriately enough, is “Into the Eye of the Storm.” Their abstract:
Recent policy reports claim the United States is falling behind other nations in science and math education and graduating insufficient numbers of scientists and engineers. Review of the evidence and analysis of actual graduation rates and workforce needs does not find support for these claims. U.S. student performance rankings are comparable to other leading nations and colleges graduate far more scientists and engineers than are hired each year. Instead, the evidence suggests targeted education improvements are needed for the lowest performers and demand-side factors may be insufficient to attract qualified college graduates.
November 7, 2007 – 9:36 pm
One of the most frustrating things about our relentlessly partisan debate over health care is that the proposals on every side are so-linear. Are drugs too expensive, and do too many people lack insurance? Subsidize them. Are malpractice awards spiraling out of control? Cap them. Is the total cost of health care growing faster than any conceivable economy could support? Manage it. Force individual patients to defer, cut back, pay more out of pocket, go without. Do whatever meets the needs of the moment, in short, so long as you don’t actually change anything.
Even as the arguments have raged in Washington, however, a radically different vision of medicine’s future has begun to emerge from the laboratories, courtesy of the Human Genome Project and its many spin-offs. Think of it as the ultimate in treating causes, not symptoms. Or think of it as the medical version of working smarter, not harder. Either way, the new “genomic” medicine is shaping up to be the most potent catalyst for health care transformation since the introduction of antibiotics in the mid-20th century-perhaps even since the germ theory of disease in the 1860s. Nor will the results be limited to new forms of treatment. Along with therapy, genomic medicine will change the nature of drug development, health insurance, and even the relationship between doctor and patient-all in ways the health-care industry is just waking up to.
That’s from one draft of a feature story I wrote about the new genomic medicine back in 2003, for the prototype issue of a new general-interest science magazine that was going to be published by a certain famous university. The magazine never materialized, unfortunately (although I was paid for my work!) But I’ve always liked the story, which holds up pretty well four years later. So I thought I would publish the final version here. (Along with a printable version for downloading.) Enjoy. Read More »
November 2, 2007 – 12:21 pm
A couple of newspaper items caught my eye this week, both making the point that culture matters-whether we’re talking about scientific creativity, economic competitiveness, the spread (or non-spread) of democracy, or almost anything else.
You’d think this point would be blazingly obvious to everybody, but apparently not. On the left, it regularly gets denounced as being elitist, racist, blame-the-victim, and so on. Just remove the exploitation and oppression, and the poor will prosper, etc. And on the right, especially among “hard-nosed” neocons of the Rumsfeldian stripe, it tends to get dismissed as being touchy-feely claptrap. Just remove the commissars and Russia will become a flourishing free-market economy and model democracy. Just get Saddam out of the way and give Iraqis the vote, and they will become a model democracy. Read More »
A narrative history of personal computing and the Internet.
The story of the Santa Fe Institute and the emerging science of complex adaptive systems.
My first book—a study of artificial intelligence.
