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.
“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.”
“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.”
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.
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.”
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.
“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.”
“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. ;)'”
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.
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.
“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.”
“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.”
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.
I started telling her [the TV producer] about the Wikipedia article on Pluto. You may remember that Pluto got kicked out of the planet club a couple of years ago, so all of a sudden there was all of this activity on Wikipedia. The talk pages light up, people are editing the article like mad, and the whole community is in an ruckus–“How should we characterize this change in Pluto’s status?” And a little bit at a time they move the article–fighting offstage all the while–from, “Pluto is the ninth planet,” to “Pluto is an odd-shaped rock with an odd-shaped orbit at the edge of the solar system.”
So I tell her all this stuff, and I think, “Okay, we’re going to have a conversation about authority or social construction or whatever.” That wasn’t her question. She heard this story and she shook her head and said, “Where do people find the time?” That was her question. And I just kind of snapped. And I said, “No one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus you’ve been masking for 50 years.”
So how big is that surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project–every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in–that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it’s a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it’s the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.
And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that’s 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus.
That’s an awfully big space for people to work on collaborative projects that are fun, social, and intrinsically meaningful.
(With that said, something I’ve often wondered is why people apparently spend so much more time watching television at home than they do socializing.)
Shirky’s talk is well worth watching, not just reading. Here’s Part I (ignore the opening music, it gets better):
