by jurvetson
Six degrees of messaging : Nature News:
[Via Nature]

I’m not sure if anyone can see this or if you need a subscription. But, this being the Information Age, you can read the abstract of the paper itself and download a PDF of the paper. It discusses work done at Microsoft examining the connections used by its IM customers. The researchers examined the data from one month. this worked out to “255 billion messages sent in the course of 30 billion conversations among 240 million people during June 2006.” A lot of data.

After crunching the data they found some interesting numbers regarding this network - the average number of connections between people on the network, its width, was 6.6. This is very similar to what others have reported, even though the approaches were quite different.

Interestingly, these other reports used much smaller groups of people. One, in the 1960s, used only 64 people. Another in 2003 used 61,000. All three, using very different methodologies arrived a similar numbers for the width of the human social network. This is not too surprising since human social networks adopt a scale-free configuration. The hallmark of a scale-free network is that the average number of links connecting any two nodes, or people, does not increase substantially as the size of the network increases. Here the scale increases almost 4 million-fold, yet the average width of the network is still about 6.

Information in a well connected social network can percolate very rapidly. Using Web 2.0 approaches can harness the power of the Internet (another scale-free network) to disburse the information into an even larger social network much more rapidly than by utilizing face-to-face approaches.

Technorati Tags: Science, Social media

by Airton kieling

[Via One Big Lab]

First draft of PSB proposal
PSB proposal up on Google Docs
PSB Open Science session proposal submitted!
PSB proposal up on Nature Precedings
PSB proposal accepted for a workshop

A very interesting progression from first draft to final approval. Exactly what one would expect for an Open Science advocate. While not all Science 2.0 approaches may be suitable for exposure on the open web, this was certainly a wonderful exercise to follow. And I learned something about the process they went though, just in case I ever want to do something similar.

I may have to find myself in Hawaii early next year, at the Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing. It’s the Big Island.

Technorati Tags: Open Access, Science

by belgianchocolate

Publishing On OpenWetWare - Lessons Learned 4 - Presenting:Python
[Via Programmable Cells]

This is the fifth report of the ‘Publishing on OpenWetWare’ series. In brief, I am writing an article on OWW from start to finish: initial writing -> collecting comments -> publishing on arXiv.org -> presenting at a conference. For other articles, see one, two, three, four. In this report, I’ll share my experiences in presenting the work at Pycon 2008.

This is the most recent part in a continuing series by Julius Lucks about publishing on OpenWetWare, an example of Open Science. Initially, OpenWetWare was a great site to find protocols of all sorts. It has been expanding very rapidly to incorporate many facets of Science 2.0. This is one such. It led to a presentation dealing with his work and you can read the ‘paper’ dealing with his topic: Python All A Scientist Needs. Python is the programming language used here and it presents many advantages useful for scientists. It includes a special package, BioPython, just for biologists, which is supported by the Open Bioinformatics Foundation. So, we see an entire network of Open Source organizations that produce tools that not only make their work easier but also the work of others. By embracing these tools, one can engage the entire network and help use all the knowledge contained in it to help solve problems.

Technorati Tags: Bioinformatics, Science, Social media

TEDTalks: Jill Taylor (2008):
[Via TEDTalks (video)]

We are still working on the website to permit embedded Flash. Until we do, you will have to click the link above to see Jill Taylor’s presentation.

Neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor had an opportunity few brain scientists would wish for: One morning, she realized she was having a massive stroke. As it happened — as she felt her brain functions slip away one by one, speech, movement, understanding — she studied and remembered every moment. This is a powerful story about how our brains define us and connect us to the world and to one another.

This is a great presentation. Some science. Some personal experience. The TEDTalks offer great examples of how to present difficult subjects. There are some with pretty standard approaches but they are often the best of their type. And, thanks to the Internet, we do not have to be attendees in order to see this.

But some of them display a unique method of presenting and are very useful for gaining a better understanding of HOW to present. Check out this one from Larry Lessig.

Technorati Tags: Science

by The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

Images help give a website a nice look. They break up the text and provide some visual interest. Flickr is a great spot to get images. There are a huge number that are covered by the Creative Commons license that can be used. But it is nice to find others.

The Hubble Heritage Image Gallery is another great site. Excellent images of objects in space. You can simply place these photos onto your web page and provide proper attribution. This is one of the great mashups on the Internet. Great photos taken by people can get spread around the Internet in ays that enhance both the user and the photographer.

Technorati Tags: Science

Video @ the bench
[Vie Free Genes]

I saw the movie I Am Legend this weekend, and although it wasn’t exactly a ringing endorsement of synthetic biology (re-engineering measles is a bad idea, apparently) Will Smith’s character did have a slick lab in his basement. Good to see a little Garage Biotech in action.One component of the lab they made heavy use of was a video lab notebook. I assume this was done since Will Smith scribbling in a paper lab notebook wouldn’t have had quite the same cinematic effect. However, getting video into the lab will be important for democratizing biological engineering. A lot of the barriers to would be bio-hackers lay in the difficulty of learning biological protocols from texts. New graduate students benefit enormously from hands-on learning with a mentor in their early days in lab, and without this visual teaching getting booted up in the lab is extremely frustrating.

New science video sites like Jove and Scivee.tv suffer because labs aren’t really equipped to capture video. So at best you’ll be able to disseminate talks, but video protocols are going to be very hard to pull off. I’ve been thinking about video lab notebooks / protocols since Tom Knight brought up some clever ways you might set your bench up to accommodate video capture (cameras in various spots, foot-petal control, and smart ways to handle the data). A more nerdy looking way to do this (no offense to Will Bosworth who used to work around the Endy Lab) is the head-mounted video camera described by Saul Griffith in Make magazine.

There are also some wireless web-cameras that might make your setup cheaper. If anyone is doing a good job of taking video at the bench, please let me know about your setup.

Video use in social media will be explosive when the tools get more mature. Will they be a major way that research is communicated? Maybe not always but I visited the Seattle Science Foundation last week and saw what medical theaters can do when hi-def video is built into the infrastructure. Almost everything can be transmitted/archived on video. How will things change when we really can archive everything?

Technorati Tags: Bioinformatics, Science

by MuniMan

Bio::Blogs #18:

The 18th edition of Bio::Blogs can be read at Bioinformatics Zen. The main focus of this months’ edition is Open Science with many links to interesting new developments. In particular go have a look at this video that Michael Barton made about science and the web. Unless there are any other volunteers the 19th edition of Bio::Blogs will be hosted by me again at Public Rambling.

Bioinformatics and Open Science seem to be made for each other. There is a proposal to discuss Open Science at the Pacific Symposium of Biocomputing next year. I hope it gets accepted. I’d love a reason to go to Hawaii.

Additionally, the increasing use of these sorts of aggregations, also called Carnivals, is a very novel expansion of normal scientific tendencies. Each member of the community gets to host the Carnival, which is mostly made up of links to appropriate posts by other members. So, it is a great way for all the members of the community to get to know each other. It also allows new members to very quickly get up to speed with who does what in the community. Another example of how social media can speed up even internet time.

Technorati Tags: Science

Learning through Blogging: Graduate Student Experiences:
Robert Davison, an Associate Professor of Information Systems at the City University of Hong Kong, has found blogs to be an essential tool even in the traditional graduate-level classroom. Among the benefits: On blogs, students tend to document that which is understood tacitly, and often learn from each other through reading and commenting on entries.

This article details some of the same ideas I have been driving towards. Blogs help make tacit information explicit. It helps shy people gain a voice. It provides a way to communicate in a novel fashion. In this setting, it elevates a study group onto the web, enhancing its ability to teach students.

I’m at the O’Reilly GSP conference in San Diego. Lots of power strips but no power for the first session. They did get them going at the break. It is no fun to be at a meeting with no power and watch your computer’s battery just go down. Lots of outlets is what we crave.

Watch for it.