Michael Nielsen

• Happiness as Your Business Model (Tara Hunt)
  • Interesting content and presentation.
• Court Ruling Will Expose Viewing Habits of YouTube Users | Electronic Frontier Foundation
  • The EFF’s comments on the recent ruling that Google must hand over it’s entire YouTube logging database to Viacom. This has the potential to get really ugly.
• Science After Sunclipse: What Science Blogs Can’t Do
  • “The incentives at work in the loose community of online science writers are not conducive to coordinated efforts, the dissemination of basic knowledge and other tasks necessary to make these online venues a true form of science education.”
• Want to know if waterboarding is torture? Ask Christopher Hitchens
  • You’ve got to give Hitchens a lot of credit for putting his money where his mouth is.
• Where the Hell is Matt?
  • Stunningly beautiful.
• Scholar2Scholar presentation by Jean-Claude Bradley
  • Great overview of open notebook science and related ideas.
• From Google back to Microsoft
  • Thoughts from a former Microsoftie who left to work for Google for a year, and is now going back to Microsoft. The cultural differences are striking.

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I’m continually surprised how popular the h-index is becoming. This post is a reiteration of something I noted in an earlier post: it appears that for most scientists, the h-index can be computed to a good approximation from the formula:

h ~ sqrt(T) / 2,

where T is the total number of citations the scientist. Thus the h-index contains little information beyond the total number of citations, and is not properly regarded as a new measure of impact at all. The earlier post contains additional details, including some caveats, and comments on possible further improvements to this rule. It really needs a detailed study, but I don’t think the basic point is in doubt.

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• John Lilly: What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, by Haruki Murakami
  • John Lilly, Mozilla’s CEO, on Murakami’s new book “What I Talk About When I Talk About Running”
• Karim Lakhani and Ned Gulley on collaborative innovation
  • “a week-long open collaborative competition for MATLAB programmers…Anyone can modify anyone else’s code and resubmit it as their own… winning entries on average have contributions from 30 people.”
• For Best Results, Forget the Bonus
  • “Most of us… take for granted that incentives in the workplace are successful. After all, such incentives are basically rewards, and rewards work, don’t they? The answer, surprisingly, is mostly no.”
• Craig Venter: Creating synthetic life (TED talk)
• Galaxy Zoo Blog » Open Data and the Discovery of the “Voorwerp”
  • Galaxy Zoo is a project using open data and volunteer labour to classify galaxies. One of the volunteers, a German Schoolteacher named Hanny, noticed a strange blue blob near one of the galaxy images. It’s still a mystery what the blob is.
• Knowledge production pipeline « Monday Begins on Saturday
  • Good summary of Science2.0, emphasizing how the key to new models of publication is new metrics for research activity.
• Slaying Monsters for Science
  • A scientific conference in World of Warcraft: “Although the participants all died during the final day’s social event — a massive raid on an enemy fort — they agree that this event is a glimpse at the future of scientific exchange.”

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This week’s Science contains Slaying Monsters for Science, by John Bohannon. Mr Bohannon penned the following abstract:

The first scientific conference held in Azeroth, the online universe of the role-playing game World of Warcraft, went off virtually without a hitch. Although the participants all died during the final day’s social event — a massive raid on an enemy fort — they agree that this event is a glimpse at the future of scientific exchange.

Sounds like a natural evolution for some fields.

The article is very interesting, and very funny. It concludes:

Then again, not even a conference in Vegas ends the way ours did. With fireworks bursting and confetti still drifting all around the dancing mob of wedding guests, Catullus announced the final event: a massive attack on Sentinel Hill, an Alliance stronghold. As we surged over the hills around the unsuspecting fort, everyone yelled, “For Science!” Bainbridge had enlisted the help of Alea Iacta Est, the largest guild in Azeroth. At first it seemed we were unbeatable. The 70th-level characters among us cut down the Sentinel Hill guards where they stood. We boiled up the spiral staircase to the platform atop the tower. It was so crowded that I could hardly see the parapets. Several people tumbled off during our celebratory dance.

But it wasn’t long before Alliance players learned about the Science guild raid on Sentinel Hill. Word spread that “the scientists are running amok!” Powerful Alliance characters arrived, and the tide of battle turned against us. Within half an hour, every last one of us lay dead on the grass. Victory is short-lived in the harsh world of science.

• Base jumping - You Tube
  • The most beautiful of the base jumping videos I’ve seen on You Tube
• Rethinking the conference (Scripting News)
• Unthinkable Futures
  • Kevin Kelly and Brian Eno brainstorm weird futures.
• Ten days of meditation
  • Amazing how much who we are is determined by external stimuli, even over the short term.
• A Computer Scientist in a Business School: Prediction Markets are NOT Efficient
• Discovering Biology in a Digital World : Biologists vs. the Age of Information
  • The perils of open data: what’s right, what’s wrong, how do we figure it out?
• Science in the open » Friendfeed for scientists: What, why, and how?
  • Excellent guide to using FriendFeed for scientists, including a beautiful example of how it can be used to start collaborations.

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• Science in the open » Friendfeed for scientists: What, why, and how?
  • Excellent guide to using FriendFeed for scientists, including a beautiful example of how it can be used to start collaborations.
• Kevin Kelly — Scenius
  • “Scenius is like genius, only embedded in a scene rather than in genes. Brian Eno suggested the word to convey the extreme creativity that groups, places or “scenes” can occasionally generate.”
• How to convert Wikipedia articles to Citizendium articles - Citizendium
  • Fascinating for cultural anthropologists. It’s like a guide to Rome for people from Paris.
• Citizendium Blog » Myths and facts about Citizendium
  • Corrected my impressions on many points.
• Industry Minister Jim Prentice interviewed about Canadian copyright on CBC
  • Absolutely excruciating.
• Ectropy » Citation trading
  • Alexei, attempting to cause trouble by proposing a citation trading scheme. Wonder if ifyouscratchmybackillscratchyours.com is taken?
• SocialCalc, a Social Spreadsheet
  • A wiki-spreadsheet. Should help enable open-source model building, and more transparency.
• Dad Jokes
  • Only for those very very easily amused.
• Joho the Blog » Microsoft the good sport
  • “The Microsoft Internet Explorer team sent a nice cake yesterday to the Mozilla Firefox team, congratulating them on the shipping of version 3.0…. ‘Mozilla should send a cake back, include the recipe, and ask for advice on how to improve it. ;)’”
• SubEthaEdit
  • Very cool looking scientific groupware application - rea-time collaborative text editing, with LaTeX and Skype integration. For OS X unfortunately, which means I haven’t tried it.
• One Big Lab: Would open science profit from a non-profit?
  • I think it’d benefit from many non-profits!
• Science in the open » The trouble with institutional repositories
  • Institutional repositories don’t work. This isn’t surprising - the people who run them have interests and incentives quite different than one would desire for a repository. The result: poor design, and poor interoperability.
• How we read online. - By Michael Agger - Slate Magazine
  • What’s known about the types of writing people prefer online.
• twistori
  • Watching the collective think. Eerie.
• Citation in Science: Nature Network London
  • Discussion forum about citations in science.

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• How we read online. - By Michael Agger - Slate Magazine
  • What’s known about the types of writing people prefer online.
• twistori
  • Watching the collective think. Eerie.
• Citation in Science: Nature Network London
  • Discussion forum about citations in science.
• Science 2.0 « O’Really? at Duncan.Hull.name
  • Duncan Hull maps web 2.0 onto Science 2.0.
• commonspace: Open edu-thing
  • “Mostly, I teach things I don’t understand. I need to go in there and show my students that I am willing to try things, fail and learn from others… This is the experience they need to work in open source.”
• Big Buck Bunny
  • Amazing Creative Commons licensed animated film, made using Blender.
• Kevin Kelly: the world’s oldest companies
  • “The oldest living company today is one from Japan. It is a 1,290-year-old hotel located at a hot spring, run by 46 generations of the Hoshi family. “

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• Public Library of Science: readership survey
  • “So in addition to the 414 readers in Indonesia, 259 in Saudi Arabia, 64 in Zimbabwe, and 15 in Iraq we also see that we have single readers in Niger and Sierra Leone.”
• Word Spy - tweetup
  • tweetup n. “A real world meeting between two or more people who know each other through the online Twitter service.”
• Jimmy Wales: Free Culture and the Future of Publishing
• Reed Elsevier to stop organizing arms fairs
• Aaron Swartz: How to Promote Startups
  • Thoughtful comments on how to create a more entrepreneurial society.
• The Harris Poll - Large Majorities of U.S. Adults Support Easy – and Free – Online Access to Federally-Funded Research Findings on Health Issues and Other Topics
  • 2006 poll showing overwhelming support for open access to federally funded research in the US.
• Heritage of humanity, by John Sulston
  • An account of the drafting of the Bermuda principles in 1996, which effectively made the human genome public property.
• Growth of Genbank
  • Graph showing the growth in base pairs in GenBank. Very clear exponential growth, with a doubling time of roughly 18 months.
• Mathematical Physics Preprint archive
  • Launched before (!) the Los Alamos archive. I’d never heard of it until just now. Still active in 2008.
• WorldWideWeb: Proposal for a HyperText Project
  • One of the original proposals by Berners-Lee and Cailliau
• RFC 2555 - 30 Years of RFCs
  • History of the RFC (Request for Comments). Lots of fascinating tidbits about the origins of the modern network.
• Formerly Elegant Milky Way Galaxy Downclassed As Cheap, Lousy “Bar Galaxy”
  • Two arms, not four.
• JASON report on “Human Performance”

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Could you run an ultramarathon, solve a major scientific problem, or write a bestseller?

What if you had a deadline to do it by the end of June 2009?

Sound too hard? What if you placed $10,000 of your own money with an escrow service (say, a beefed up version of stickk.com), with instructions that the money is to be donated to an anti-charity that you strongly dislike, unless you provide proof that you’ve succeeded?

In my case, I’d be tempted to nominate something like the George W. Bush Memorial Library as my anti-charity. Maybe ask them to put my name up on a wall listing donors. (If I had more money, I could raise the amount to ten million dollars, and ask them to build the “Michael A. Nielsen” wing of the George W. Bush library if I failed. Mmm.)

I haven’t done this, at least, not yet. But considering the idea at length has sure put the question “Am I doing everything I can to reach my goals” into sharp relief.