Open science:
[Via Michael Nielsen]

The invention of the scientific journal in the 17th and 18th centuries helped create an institution that incentivizes scientists to share their knowledge with the entire world. But scientific journals were a child of the paper-and-ink media of their time. Scientific papers represent only a tiny fraction of the useful knowledge that scientists have to share with the world:

Enabled by a new media form, the internet, the last few years have seen a modest expansion in the range of knowledge that can be published and recognized by the scientific community:

The most obvious examples of this expansion are things like video and data.
However, there are many other types of useful knowledge that scientists have, and could potentially share with the world. Examples include questions, ideas, leads, folklore knowledge, notebooks, opinions of other work, workflows, simple explanations of basic concepts, and so on.
Each of these types of knowledge can be the basis for new online tools that further expand the range of what can be published by scientists:

It’s fun to think about what tools would best serve the needs associated with each type of knowledge. This is already starting to happen with tools and ideas like open notebook science, the science exchange, SciRate, and the Open Wetware wiki.

This is a very good point to make. Publishable information has increased tremendously. We are no longer limited by what the printing press is capable of displaying. We are no longer limited by the number of pages that can be printed a month.

This opens up the possibility of also making available not only the things that went right but those that went wrong. Preventing others from following a dead end would be useful.

Underlying this apparent problem is an opportunity to develop tools to assist scientists in finding relevant information, and to ensure that what they publish - their questions, ideas, and so on - is seen by those people who will most benefit. Ideally, the result will be not only a great expansion in the range of what is published, but also a great improvement in the quality of information that we encounter.

The reason new tools will be developed is that this approach will allow researchers to attack very complex problems in a much more efficient manner than those limiting themselves to the printing press. Success will breed success.

There are, of course, major cultural barriers to acceptance of these new tools. At present, there are few incentives to make use of new ideas like open notebook science. Why blog your ideas online, when someone else could be working on a paper on the same subject? This isn’t speculation, it’s already happening, and sometimes the blog posts are better - but try telling that to a tenure review committee.

Similar comments were made with regarding Open Source. What incentive would there be for creating software for free? It may well be that Open Science is not rewarded in the same fashion as science on paper. I think it is more likely that academia will change to provide proper rewards.

Certainly there are other places to pursue research than a university. In particular, I think there will be an even larger growth in non-profit research institutions over the next generation. They do not usually have the same arcane tenure problems universities do, and often rewarding people more like a corporation does than academia, that is for what they accomplish the meets the institution’s goals rather than where they published.

The successful institutions will find and use the tools that solve problems. They will also find ways to reward those that successfully use them

At the moment, many of these institutions are found in biotech and human health but as more money and focus moves towards using innovative tools to promulgate science, there will be ones for every discipline. And, as the brain drain from academia to these institutions increases, universities will either have to adapt or they will wither.

More flexibility, More collaborative environments. Less overhead. I believe that these research foundations will be the leaders in promulgating open science. It is to their advantage to do so.

Technorati Tags: Non-Profit, Science, Web 2.0

by MrClean1982
Next generation of business software could get more fun :
[Via Washington Post]

Once upon a time, people bonded with their co-workers on office softball teams and traded gossip at the watercooler.

OK, so those days aren’t gone yet. But as big companies parcel Information Age work to people in widely dispersed locations, it’s getting harder for colleagues to develop the camaraderie that comes from being in the same place. Beyond making work less fun, feeling disconnected from comrades might be a drag on productivity.

Now technology researchers are trying to replicate old-fashioned office interactions by transforming everyday business software for the new era of work. The historically dry-as-sawdust products are borrowing elements from video games and social-networking Web sites.
[More]

People are social animals and usually need some unstructured time to blow off steam, relax and generally recharge their batteries. In many business environments there are a host of conventions to accomplish this, from birthday parties to golf tournaments to lounges.

Online work will also include similar processes. As this article discusses, there are many approaches to creating break time in a virtual world. Where these tools can be important in research is that many bright ideas come up from the random interaction of a couple of scientists, often in a bar or a party. Crick famously drew up the list of the twenty amino acids used in protein synthesis on a napkin while at a pub before any real evidence existed.

They will have to be careful that the areas are not TOO much fun. Disney is finding out how hard it can be to shutdown a virtual world years after it has served its purpose. But using aspects of Second Life in a business setting may be important for a truly creative research experience.

There has always been a little bit of randomness in almost every great scientific endeavor.

Technorati Tags: Knowledge Creation, Social media, Web 2.0

Science communication has changed as the tools have gotten better. But creativity has always found a way to effectively communicate even with crude tools.

Even without fancy computer graphics, very complex biological reactions could be visualized. It just took hundreds of people. From 1971. Narrated at the beginning in a tie by Paul Berg at Stanford. He won the Nobel Prize in 1980 “for his fundamental studies of the biochemistry of nucleic acids, with particular regard to recombinant-DNA.”

It is the followed by the best mashup of straight biological processes, Jabberwocky and people who look like they are from the road show of ‘Hair.’

No animation, just hundreds of people and a fire extinguisher. But you will probably never forget the mixture of Lewis Carroll, biology and large open spaces.

Technorati Tags: Entertainment, General, Science

by Shutr
Doctors Say ‘I’m Sorry’ Before ‘See You in Court’ :
[Via New York Times]

In 40 years as a highly regarded cancer surgeon, Dr. Tapas K. Das Gupta had never made a mistake like this.

As with any doctor, there had been occasional errors in diagnosis or judgment. But never, he said, had he opened up a patient and removed the wrong sliver of tissue, in this case a segment of the eighth rib instead of the ninth.

Once an X-ray provided proof in black and white, Dr. Das Gupta, the 74-year-old chairman of surgical oncology at the University of Illinois Medical Center at Chicago, did something that normally would make hospital lawyers cringe: he acknowledged his mistake to his patient’s face, and told her he was deeply sorry.

Think about what might happen if the lawyers took a lower profile and the doctors admitted their mistakes, if they were open with their patients. Turns out, something significant happens. Most people accept the apology and forgive the doctor.

This approach directly contradicts what most lawyers advise.

For decades, malpractice lawyers and insurers have counseled doctors and hospitals to “deny and defend.” Many still warn clients that any admission of fault, or even expression of regret, is likely to invite litigation and imperil careers.

But with providers choking on malpractice costs and consumers demanding action against medical errors, a handful of prominent academic medical centers, like Johns Hopkins and Stanford, are trying a disarming approach.

People get really angry when they find out the error was concealed and that it might happen again. As with political scandals, it is the coverup that causes the problems.

So what happens if the doctors and hospitals are open with their patients?

At the University of Michigan Health System, one of the first to experiment with full disclosure, existing claims and lawsuits dropped to 83 in August 2007 from 262 in August 2001, said Richard C. Boothman, the medical center’s chief risk officer.

“Improving patient safety and patient communication is more likely to cure the malpractice crisis than defensiveness and denial,” Mr. Boothman said.

Mr. Boothman emphasized that he could not know whether the decline was due to disclosure or safer medicine, or both. But the hospital’s legal defense costs and the money it must set aside to pay claims have each been cut by two-thirds, he said. The time taken to dispose of cases has been halved.

The number of malpractice filings against the University of Illinois has dropped by half since it started its program just over two years ago, said Dr. Timothy B. McDonald, the hospital’s chief safety and risk officer. In the 37 cases where the hospital acknowledged a preventable error and apologized, only one patient has filed suit. Only six settlements have exceeded the hospital’s medical and related expenses.

From 262 to 83 in 6 years. Defense costs down by two-thirds. Malpractice cut in half. These are game changing numbers, in the completely opposite direction from what lawyers said would happen.

The hospitals have also taken to following up the apology with fair compensation. This has had the effect of changing the behavior of malpractice attorneys.

There also has been an attitudinal shift among plaintiff’s lawyers who recognize that injured clients benefit when they are compensated quickly, even if for less. That is particularly true now that most states have placed limits on non-economic damages.

In Michigan, trial lawyers have come to understand that Mr. Boothman will offer prompt and fair compensation for real negligence but will give no quarter in defending doctors when the hospital believes that the care was appropriate.

“The filing of a lawsuit at the University of Michigan is now the last option, whereas with other hospitals it tends to be the first and only option,” said Norman D. Tucker, a trial lawyer in Southfield, Mich. “We might give cases a second look before filing because if it’s not going to settle quickly, tighten up your cinch. It’s probably going to be a long ride.

In all likelihood, more money ends up in the patient’s pocket and less in lawyer fees. As long as the awards are also open, so that the hospitals can not manipulate the settlements too much, and people can really see that they are not committing the same errors again and again, the beneficial cycle of this should not only drive malpractice suits lower but also help care in the hospitals.

Quality improvement committees openly examine cases that once would have vanished into sealed courthouse files. Errors become teaching opportunities rather than badges of shame.

“I think this is the key to patient safety in the country,” Dr. McDonald said. “If you do this with a transparent point of view, you’re more likely to figure out what’s wrong and put processes in place to improve it.”

For instance, he said, a sponge left inside an patient led the hospital to start X-raying patients during and after surgery. Eight objects have been found, one of them an electrode that dislodged from a baby’s scalp during a Caesarian section in 2006.

This looks like a program that could have huge effects across the country. By admitting their errors and treating the patients like rational human beings, the doctors remove themselves from antagonistic relationships, the hospitals spend less money on lawsuits and the standard of care goes up.

All by showing a little openness and transparency.

Technorati Tags: Health, Science, Sustainability

by Shereen M
Who needs coauthors?:
[Via Survival Blog for Scientists]

Young people, in tenure track positions, feel they to have to collect as many authorships as possible. Questions like “Will I be a coauthor?” and demands as “I have to be a coauthor” are part of daily conversations in science institutes.
But not only junior scientists are eager to boost their cv’s with authored papers.
[More]

Biology papers usually have large numbers of authors. It is rare to see a major paper in Nature or Science with two authors. Often modern papers are the results of collaborative research between multiple institutions. It makes it easier to get your name on a lot of papers but also makes proper assignation of credit difficult.

Credit for papers can be incredibly important and manipulation of the credit is not unheard of. Harvey Fletcher was a graduate student for Robert Millikan around 1910. Fletcher developed and designed the oil-drop experiments that measured the charge on an electron as well as investigations on Brownian motion that led to a better determination of Avogadro’s number.

Now, Fletcher could use a published paper in lieu of his Ph.D. thesis but only if he was sole author.

Millikin proposed that Fletcher be the sole author on the Brownian motion work and Millikan would be sole author on the electron charge work, even though Fletcher’s work was critical in both. Millikan knew which one would be the more important paper. As a graduate student, Fletcher really had no choice but to acquiesce to Millikan’s proposal.

Millikan published as sole author of the paper on the charge of the electron. Fletcher wrote on Avogadro’s constant. Millikan won the Nobel Prize in 1923. Although, Fletcher became the first physics student to graduate from The University of Chicago summa cum laude, he spent most of the next 38 years outside of academia, working at Bell Laboratories.

Although he did not win the Nobel Prize, he had a tremendous impact on many of the technologies that were developed in the 20th Century. At Bell Labs, he not only became ‘the father of stereophonic sound’ but was the director of the labs that developed the transistor.

What this shows is that while a true genius can not be stopped by who published what, in the scientific world, particularly in academia, the assignment of credit has huge ramifications. Almost anyone who takes physics knows about Millikan and the oil-drop experiment. Who knows about Fletcher?

These days, often the person who did the research is first author and the person who directed the research or whose lab supported the research is last. Everyone else involved in smaller amounts is in between.

But this can change. Often with 20 authors, no one ever gets to the last one when the article is referenced. The bibliography will just be ‘Smith, et al.’ So sometimes, the director of the lab will be placed as first author instead of last so everyone sees their name in the references.

So how does proper credit actually get assigned? In large measure, figuring out who designed the critical experiment, who simply provided reagents and who had critical intellectual input are all hidden from general view. This permits political pressures, such as what Millikan used on Fletcher, to determine placement, rather than actual worth.

Huge battles have been waged over where one’s name gets placed in a paper. Since this is what the world will see, it is worth it for many people to spend all their political capital to get a choice placement on a paper. A lot of scientific blood may have been spilt in order to get on a paper published in Nature.

Sometimes those in the know have an idea of proper credit but tenure committees, grant committees and other vetting bodies can have a difficult time telling just what contribution a scientist made on a paper with 40 authors.

There have been some attempts at better clarifying this, with authors making statements about who did what. Perhaps as we move away from the current model of publishing to one more digital in nature, there will be approaches to simplify this process.

In particular, there will have to be a way to assign credit for things other than just the number of publications. Scoring the impact people had on those publications, what work they actually performed and where they can be placed in the process that lead to novel scientific discoveries will become more likely, if the social media aspects of Science 2.0 comes to be appreciated.

Because every one of those aspects can be time-stamped and made accessible by using things like wikis and weblogs in ways that email will never accomplish. Openness and transparency, important aspects of successful Web 2.0 tools, will also make it possible to more accurately track the progress of creativity and innovation. Surely rewards will follow.

Will Science 2.0 make it less likely that political pressures can be used to claim credit that is not deserved? Being human, the pressures may never disappear. But Science 2.0 should make it a little more difficult to claim credit after the fact. Fletcher kept the secret of Millikan’s proposal until after he died. In those days, it was easier to control the flow of information, to hide political manipulations of the research.

Now, not as much.

Technorati Tags: Open Access, Science, Social media, Web 2.0

myScience: “social software” for scientists:
[Via O'Really? at Duncan.Hull.name]

With apologies to Jonathan Swift:

“Great sites have little sites upon their back to bite ‘em
And little sites have lesser sites, and so ad infinitum…”

So what happened was, Carole Goble asked on the myExperiment mailing list, “is there a list of scientist social networking sites”? Here is first attempt at such a list (not comprehensive), you’ll have to decide for yourself which are the great, greater, little and lesser sites.

For simplicity, I’ll break social software down into social networking, data sharing, blogging, ranking and video. These categories aren’t exclusive, as some sites do more than one of these tasks, but they help to classify the wild wild web of social software.
[More]

Technorati Tags: Knowledge Creation, Science, Social media, Web 2.0

by miyukiutada
A Moment of Clarity:
[Via Transparent Office]

I do my best thinking when I’m talking. That may sound funny, but it’s true. When I write, I tend to overthink the issues and get ahead of myself. But when I’m talking to another person, or better yet a group of people, I slow down and spit out what’s really essential. (I’m a solid E on the Myers-Briggs test.)

So it’s not surprising that I had a moment of clarity the other day while talking to a customer. The customer had asked me how you launch a collaborative, wiki-based community. We didn’t have a lot of time–I was late to pick up my kids from school–and I had promised him a 60-second answer. What I said was, “Look, it’s really very simple: Structure, populate, review, invite, and garden.” As soon as the words had passed my lips I thought to myself, hey, that’s pretty clear. Maybe I should write it down. And now I have.

It’s a good, and simple, way to remember how to do it. So I propose “SPRIG” as the acronym for remembering how to launch a collaborative community:
Structure the wiki up-front with stubs and links
Populate it with real content
Review what you’ve done within your core group and refine the structure as needed
Invite a few people who have relevant knowledge and relationships and will be into the idea
Garden the wiki content as things get going.

In my next few blog posts, I’ll elaborate on each of these activities. So stay tuned. And if my tone seems conversational, now you know why.

BTW, “SPRIG” may not be the world’s catchiest acronym. Maybe we could do “SPRING” playing off the first two letters of “Invite”. Any reactions or counter-suggestions?

Acronyms can be very useful. SPRIG is a good one. SocialText uses SPRING, with the N coming from ‘Ncourage.’

Whichever is used, the steps are very important, particularly the last, which is often missed. Not everyone needs to garden but it will not be a useful wiki without a gardener.

UPDATE (6:25 am): No wonder the acronyms from Transprent Office and SocialText are so similar. The author of Transparent Office, Michael Idinopulos, works for SociaText as the VP of Professional Services. I guess I should have clicked the ‘About’ link before I wrote.

It makes no difference. The acronym is as useful as ever.

Technorati Tags: Knowledge Creation, Social media, Web 2.0

by eye of einstein
Facebook and The Future of Competition:
[Via HarvardBusiness.org]

Last week, I discussed Facebook’s relentless evil, how that was a profound strategic error, and why the costs of evil are starting to outweigh the benefits - for everyone, not just Facebook.

Now, that’s a pretty unorthodox argument, and I took a lot of heat for it: what is evil, anyways? Does it really have any relevance to the real world of backslapping, boardrooms, and bonuses?

After all, business exists in a kind of Nietzschean state beyond good and evil - it has to, because it’s only when we ditch the suffocating dictates of morality that we can think in terms of economically meaningful concepts, like utility, efficiency, and productivity.

Right? Wrong. The problem with failing to call evil, well, evil is simple: we can never really do good unless we’re able to judge what’s evil. And doing good is fast becoming a strategic - not just a moral - imperative.

There is a very interesting discussion going on over at Harvard Business online. It is about the very nature of companies, on whether they are good or evil.

While the terms are pejorative, the discussion is about what works best in the Information Age. Industrial Age approaches were all about gaining complete control and zero-sum games. Now, in a networked world, the most successful companies are those that make it easiest for their customers. Otherwise they will move to the one that is easier.

Creating walled sandboxes will not be as successful as open playing fields. At least if the leaders of this discussion are right.

But, truthfully, the importance is to have the conversation. While they may not be exactly right, the dialogs can get them to the right answer sooner. Sometimes being provocative can speed things up.

Here are a few more things he wrote:

It’s that, in fact, yesterday’s lumbering dinosaurs are actually smartening up faster than Facebook. Even textbook cases of pathological evil like Starbucks and Wal-Mart have decided to play the tiresome, zero-sum games of competitive strategy less and less.

What’s really going on here? There’s a massive tectonic shift rocking the economic landscape. All these players are discovering that the boardroom’s first and most important task is simply to try always and everywhere do less evil. In the dismal language of economics: as interaction explodes, the costs of evil are starting to outweigh the benefits.

[snip]

That’s really what Facebook’s mini case is all about: no amount of competitive strategy can help Facebook gain advantage - because advantage is built on putting good before evil.

[snip]

As Starbucks and Wal-Mart are discovering, orthodox strategy was built for an industrial world - an equilibrium world of oligopolies, soulless “product”, and zombified “consumers”. But that’s not today’s world. Playing the games of orthodox strategy in a world whose economic fabric is being rewoven isn’t just small: the opportunity cost is never discovering newer, better approaches to strategy.

Technorati Tags: Social media, Web 2.0

by ThunderChild the Magnificent
Square One: The Knowing Doing Gap:
[Via Creativity Central]

Let’s go back 1999. Crown Prince Abdullah becomes the ruler of Jordan on the death of his father, King Hussein. Lance Armstrong wins first Tour de France. And most importantly Family Guy airs its pilot episode.

It’s also the year that Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton wrote The Knowing-Doing Gap. Nearly a decade later a significant number of companies have amnesia. A lot of mangers read the book. A lot of managers ignored what they learned.

Their preface does a masterful job of setting up the premise. “We wrote this book because we wanted to understand why so many managers know so much about organizational performance, say so many smart things about how to achieve performance, and work so hard, yet are trapped in firms that do so many things they know will undermine performance.”

In a nutshell: There are more and more books and articles, more training programs and seminars and more knowledge that, although valid, often had little or no impact on what managers actually did.

Nothing has really changed.

[More]

In my rubric, knowledge allows decisions to be made and actions to be taken. Data interacts with humans to gain context and become information. Information interacts with human social networks to become knowledge. While knowledge allows decisions to be made, widsom permits the correct decision to be made.

Knowledge, by itself, does not guarantee that the decision will be the correct one. It does permit a decision to be made, even if the decision is to collect more data. Wisdom often requires several false starts to be taken before the right path can be found. In many settings, groups actually learn more from their mistakes than from a success.

P.S.

If you want to dig a little deeper, here are a few lines in an interview that Pheffer did with Fast Company

“If companies genuinely want to move from knowing to doing, they need to build a forgiveness framework — a tolerance for error and failure — into their culture. A company that wants you to come up with a smart idea, implement that idea quickly, and learn in the process has to be willing to cut you some slack. You need to be able to try things, even if you think that you might fail.

The absolute opposite mind-set is one that appears to be enjoying a lot of favor at the moment: the notion that we have to hold people accountable for their performance. Companies today are holding their employees accountable — not only for trying and learning new things, but also for the results of their actions. If you want to see how that mind-set affects performance, compare the ways that American Airlines and Southwest Airlines approach accountability — and then compare those two airlines’ performances.

American Airlines has decided to emphasize accountability, right down to the departmental — and even the individual — level. If a plane is late, American wants to know whose fault it is. So if a plane is late, what do American employees do? They spend all of their time making sure that they don’t get blamed for it. And while everyone is busy covering up, no one is thinking about the customer.

Southwest Airlines has a system for covering late arrivals: It’s called “team delay.” Southwest doesn’t worry too much about accountability; it isn’t interested in pinning blame. The company is interested only in getting the plane in the air and in learning how to prevent delays from happening in the future.

Now ask yourself this: If you’re going to be held accountable for every mistake that you make, how many chances are you going to take? How eager are you going to be to convert your ideas into actions?

So the final point from Square One is that a learning culture driven by creativity and innovation must allow mistakes to be made. The goal of mistakes is to learn from them, not to assign blame. People must be recognized for the attempt, not always for the solution.

One of the strong points of Web 2.0 tools is that they create much more openness and transparency. This makes it much easier to tell identify someone who pushes the envelope in order to help create knowledge that is useful to the organization. If the only way to succeed is never to fail, then the organization will eventually find itself with only followers and no leaders in creativity.

Technorati Tags: Knowledge Creation, Social media, Web 2.0

by makelessnoise
Innovation Development:
[Via InnoCentive]
This site uses new tools to solve problems. It essentially acts as a broker between organizations that need problems solved and the large external community that may be able to find a solution.

The rewards can be pretty substantial if someone can become a successful solver. The site not only has problems in specific areas, but there are pavilions sponsored by single entities for directed solutions. The Rockefeller Foundation Accelerating Innovation for Development is one such organization.

So the possibility exists that external investigators could solve internal problems, and make a reasonable living at it. It will be interesting to see if this does become a form of livelihood.

Technorati Tags: Open Access, Science, Web 2.0