by HiggySTFC
Sorry for being away for a couple of days. I have been putting the final touches on an exciting event that I have been working on. I hope to have an announcement soon.
Technorati Tags: General
Share Share Share Share Share:
[Via chrisbrogan.com]
One of the things people will get wrong when trying to determine how to make a more human-shaped web for their company is sharing. Sharing is something that was left out of the business books for the last forty or fifty years. Your company isn’t set up to share. It’s not in the genetics, and as such, the people responsible for figuring out how to collaborate and do something in this whole new web are going to run into a problem quickly.
We Share Everything
Why do these web tools make so much sense to digital natives? Because they have sharing built into the infrastructure. We use Flickr because it’s easy to share the photos. We use Del.icio.us because it lets us share bookmarks easier. We’re blogging, podcasting, mashing up, remixing, sharing files, sharing everything because it’s easier.
This is a key difference between new tech organizations and MBA-base 20th Century ones. Sharing and collaboration are in the DNA. The problems being attacked are too complex for any one group to control all the answers. But collaboration provides a method, leveraging human social networks in novel ways, whereby these barriers can be surmounted.
Share Business
I won’ give the details but Shel Holtz has now twice shared with me business opportunities. He’s sent them through to me in such a way that the person contacting me makes me feel like Shel convinced him or her that I am the ultimate person ALIVE to do whatever they request of me.
Today’s request like that was to speak at a really great company. I couldn’ make the date, as I have a conference of my own during that time frame, so I did what Shel did. I shared. I passed the person on to a friend in Atlanta who would be able to do exactly what I would’ve done.
An organization that does not share will not be able to utilize the new online tools to their fullest. Web 2.0 is all about conversations. No one wants to have a conversation where one side only takes and does not give. Or one side only speaks and does not listen. Monologs are just not fruitful.
Collaborators will go elsewhere.
Technorati Tags: Social media, Web 2.0
by nordique
The independent research institute will drive biomedical innovation:
[Via business|bytes|genes|molecules]
The Broad Institute just got a donation of $400 million from Eli and Edyth Broad. The donation is the formal start of an endowment, making the Broad Institute a permanent, standalone biomedical institution.
I have bemoaned the death of such bastions of innovation like Bell Labs in the past. But there is a trend in the biomedical sciences that is encouraging. Non-profit institutes and research centers like the Broad, The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, Janelia Farms, The Institute for Systems Biology, etc, with funding from powerhouse funders like the Wellcome Trust and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation are leading a trend towards independent research centers. Given the requirements for focussed cross-disciplinary research, I have a strong feeling that many of the innovations of the next quarter century are going to come from such institutions, funded by non-profits, private enterprises, and non-profit arms of companies like Google.
There will always be place for such federally funded institutes, especially those that fit the model of the ones described above, e.g. the Joint Bioenergy Institute. I wonder, in this changing environment, what the role of the traditional research university will be? In the life sciences, I see a continuum of research and collaboration, between universities, well-funding research institutes, and private enterprise. If we can harness the best of all three arms of research, I think we will be successful at innovation and not get in the kinds of rut we often do today, with too much overlap, little focus, and attempts at trying to leverage a somewhat broken federal funding system.
Is this a growing trend? Are we at risk of diluting the research pool by having too many institutes? We’ll just have to wait and see, but I am quite optimistic.
I think Deepak has hit on a very important trend. Independent, non-profit research centers are a real hotbed now, not only because of the large amount of money from large funders. There is also a lot of Federal money heading towards them.
Many large research universities do not handle collaboration well. It is just the what they are put together. Too often it is viewed as a zero-sum game, where helping other departments succeed is not viewed as helpful to your own.
Many corporations do not do research very well also, especially collaborations with other institutions. The focus on near-term profits prevents them from effectively dealing with really complex biological problems.
But non-profits fit right in the sweet spot. They HAVE to solve difficult problems, with deadlines much like small startups but with the freedom of endeavor and choice of research direction seen in universities. Since few are big enough to do everything themselves, collaboration is really required. This drives them to find the best solution to solve their problem, even if that requires collaboration.
Also, I think that this approach will draw many of the high powered researchers to the non-profit organization. At these non-profits, they can spend all their time dealing with research, and a much lower amount of their grants goes to overhead (up to 65% of each grant goes to such overhead at a university). This means that more money can actually be spent on research.
So, more money for research and less time devoted to other things means that more researchers may move to these non-profit research institutions, making them even more powerful.
It could well be that many universities simply return to undergraduate education and that large-scale research will move to these independent non-profit research institutes. What do you think?
Technorati Tags: Science, Social media, Web 2.0
by Avoir Chaud
Bioinformatics as mashup:
[Via business|bytes|genes|molecules]
bioinformatics: acquiring, collating and rearranging information already available elsewhere?
That is from a Tweet by Neil. My reaction was somthing along the lines of “boy that sounds like the definition of a mashup”.
Bioinformatics is a broad field, but part of it, a good part of what a bioinformatician does is exactly what Neil describes. The work of a bioinformatician is built on data collected by many people around the world and deposited in a variety of data bases. A lot of what we do is take information from one and try and match it up to information from a second source, presumably with the goal of getting additional insights. It might sound crude to call it that, but I think if we start thinking of bioinformatics as a mashup, we could start thinking about making those mashups available to others, and perhaps even new ways to present the information.
Disclaimer: This post was written early in the morning before any intake of caffeine
This is exactly right. Data just exists. It requires human interaction to provide context. Sitting in a database does nothing.
Mashups, as described here, take explicit information and transform it into knowledge. The key is to provide the right tools so that appropriate mashups can be performed. Perhaps Ubiquity will provide an avenue for such mashups.
by jurvetson
How academic health research centers can foster data sharing:
[Via Science Commons]
PLoS Medicine today published a new paper that provides useful guidelines for people at academic health centers seeking to support scientific data sharing. The paper, Towards a Data Sharing Culture: Recommendations for Leadership from Academic Health Centers, discusses both the enormous benefits and the obstacles to forging a research culture that fosters data sharing, and outlines practical steps people can take to set the process in motion.
[More]
There are some very useful recommendations in the paper. It will really take some changes in scientific culture for some of them to be undertaken. But the faster these changes are made, the sooner the benefits can be seen.
The ‘Ubiquitous’ web:
[Via business|bytes|genes|molecules]
Image via Wikipedia
All of you know about it already, but I shall happily add to the noise. Last evening I had one of those “Holy S**t” moments. Was sitting in a coffee shop, catching up with the days news, when I saw a flurry of activity on Friendfeed around Ubiquity. Turns out Ubiquity is a new project by Mozilla Labs, which for want of a better description is like Quicksilver for the browser, a mini command line available with an Alt-space.[More]
Ubiquity looks to be very interesting and useful. It will be nice to use this for various science mashups. One more reason to use Firefox.
by fdecomite
More on bloggers and OA:
[Via Open Access News]
Bora Zivkovic, ResearchBlogging.org, v.2.0, A Blog Around the Clock, August 29, 2008.
… [W]e took a little look [at the new release of ResearchBlogging.org] at the PLoS HQ and noticed that out of 87 pages of ‘all results’ there are 8 pages of ‘PLoS’ results – implying that about 10% of all the [ResearchBlogging.org] posts are on PLoS papers from all seven journals – and of those, 4 pages are just on PLOS ONE papers – which is about 5%. All I can say is w00t! for Open Access – when bloggers can read, bloggers will write.
ResearchBlogging demonstrates how blogging can be used to disburse information. The individual writers serve as excellent filters. It is like a journal club online, providing a way to cut through some of the jargon in a paper and see what its real relevance is.
It is one step above “Hey, did you see the paper in the latest Blood about X?” Now when an interesting paper is found, a short synopsis, with the proper attribution is available to a large network.
Technorati Tags: Science, Social media, Web 2.0
by cadmanof50s
Science blogging is the new email:
[Via Gobbledygook]
The just finished conference Science Blogging 2008: London was a wonderful chance for real-life socialising networking. I started to upload some fotos to Flickr (e.g. Scott Keir explaining sign language, see all fotos tagged sciblog here), some of them are too embarrassing and I will keep them for bribes reference later on.
The meeting was also a great opportunity to think about where we are today with scienceblogging. Having a conference is a good sign that the field is evolving1, and you can see several subdisciplines evolving:
- conference blogging (also includes event blogging)
- edublogging
- metablogging (blogging about blogging, by far the largest discipline)
- research blogging (blogging about scientific experiments, the smallest discipline)
- investigational blogging (the keynote lecture by Ben Goldacre described this very well)
- evolution blogging (a large subdiscipline)
- news blogging (blogging about science news)
- watercooler blogging (small pieces of interesting or funny thoughts/pictures)
- summary blogging (summarizing other blog posts and linking to them)
- diary blogging (blogging as a personal diary of self-expression)
- hoax blogging (see this example by Jonathan Eisen)
[More]
This is a pretty interesting framing of the use of blogs for research. A lot of useful scientific inquiry is informal in nature, occurring around a coffee machine or at a pub. Blogs just allow people who do not share the same time or place to participate. And in a more useful fashion than email.
by freeparking
London Science Blogging Conference on Friendfeed:
[Via Confessions of a Science Librarian]
Boy, do I ever love Friendfeed.
You can follow what’s going on at today’s London Science Blogging Conference in its very own Friendfeed room. Each session has it’s own thread with multiple people commenting on the proceedings. It actually gives a very good and surprisingly understandable impression of what’s going on in the sessions. Most of the sessions have dozens of comments. Check it out.
You can also check me out on Friendfeed (join, you won’t regret it). Michael Nielsen has also created a room for the upcoming Science in the 21st Century conference.
As a sort of aggregator of one’s life, FriendFeed can be especially useful for all sorts of ad hoc social meetings, such as conferences. I wonder what the ‘room’ looks like for a really large conference, the 10,000 attending ones? I’ll be sure and check out the Science in the 21st Century room.
Technorati Tags: Open Access, Science, Web 2.0
Workflow- Social Media School Teacher:
[Via chrisbrogan.com]
Dharmesh wakes up a little late. After a quick shower, he skips checking email, but goes right to his RSS reader to see updates of where the students worked within the social network. Luckily, Ning (and lots of services) send new activities out via RSS, so they’re easy to track.
It looks like Margarite has added more YouTube videos to the video section, and Franklin has written a blog post about the town’s historic water cooler. Jeremy has already commented that Franklin forgot to cite a source, saving Dharmesh the effort. He eats a breakfast bar, and hops in his car for the commute to work.
On his iPod, Dharmesh listens to last week’s book reports read out by the students. The quality of their work has improved a great deal since switching to the audio requirement. The second report, by Kelly, is a little loud and the audio clips a bit. Dharmesh makes a mental note to show Kelly how to level the audio in Audacity.
[More]
Photo credit, LizMarie
These are pretty interesting representations of what the day might be like in a Web 2.0 world. Chris has a couple others – a minister and a marketer. They are nice ways to visualize the possibilities.
Technorati Tags: Social media, Web 2.0