Skip to content

Latest commit

 

History

History
733 lines (714 loc) · 77.1 KB

reading-room.md

File metadata and controls

733 lines (714 loc) · 77.1 KB
Raw

About

This file hosts metadata about or links to resources that seem relevant for activities covered by this repo, but that have not been incorporated in any of the more specific files yet. Most of these I have read already but typically under circumstances that did not provide me with an opportunity to properly include them here. The plan is thus to spend an entire day every now and then on sorting and reading through these resources and putting them into context, be it in one of the more thematically focused files in this repository or elsewhere.

List

It is time for science to go agile.
[..]
academic publishing [must] move from its current read-only model and embrace a process as dynamic, up-to-date, and collaborative as science itself.
[..]
What academic literature needs goes deeper than the view of citations as kudos and shout-outs. It needs what software engineers have used for decades: dependency management.
[..]
An academic publisher worth their salt would also accommodate another pillar of modern software development: revision control. Code repositories, like wikis, are living documents, open not only for scrutiny, censure and approbation, but for modification.
[..]
A Git repository is the best of top-down and bottom-up, of dictatorship and democracy: its leaders set the purpose and vision, have ultimate control and final say—yet any citizen has an equal right to complain, propose reform, start a revolt, or simply pack their bags and found a new nation next door.
[..]
Authors need not thank "anonymous readers who spotted errors and provided critical feedback" when those readers' corrections are directly incorporated (with attribution) as differential edits. Those readers need not offer their suggestions as an act of obligation or charity, and they need not go unknown.

We propose that the success of iSpot arises from the structure of its social network that efficiently connects beginners and experts, overcoming the social as well as geographic barriers that normally separate the two.

Freed of the practical and economic constraints of print, journals will also need to encompass a far wider range of contribution sizes, just as the unit of publication in mainstream publishing has broken beyond the traditional bounds of a book and now ranges anywhere from a tweet to Wikipedia. With the advent of collaborative online databases, it is now perfectly feasible for a useful contribution to the scientific corpus to be comprised of literally one 'bit' of information. And, given the exponential arc of technological progress, within a decade or two the maximum size of a new scientific contribution may well exceed the sum total of all the scientific data that exist today.

Services

Events

Calendars

Upcoming

Past

Collaborative workflows

This section now lives at https://github.com/Daniel-Mietchen/datascience/blob/master/group-workflows.md.

Possible new subtopics to track

It actually defined the future as being the year 2000, and found it quite a good read when skimming through it. An example (p.5), with OCR errors: "We need to substitute for the book a device that will make it easy to transmit information without transporting material, and that will not only present in- formation to people but also process it for them, follow- ing procedures they specify, apply, monitor, and, if necessary, revise and reapply. To provide those services, a meld of Ubrary and computer is evidently required."

The author - Licklider, a psychologist - thought of the library as a "procognitive system", which he described as follows (p.21): "the aims of procognitive systems are to promote and facilitate the acquisition, organization, and use of knowledge."

or (p. 35ff): "The criteria that are clearly within our scope are those that pertain to the needs and desires of users. The main

criteria in that group appear to be that the procognitive system:

1 . Be available when and where needed. I 2. Handlebothdocumentsandfacts.*

  1. Permit several different categories of input, rang- ing from authority-approved formal contributions (e.g., papers accepted by recognized journals) to informal notes and comments.

  2. Makeavailableabodyofknowledgethatisorgan- ized both broadly and deeply — and foster the improve- ment of such organization through use.

  3. Facilitate its own further development by pro- viding tool-building languages and techniques to users and preserving the tools they devise and by recording meas- ures of its own performance and adapting in such a way as to maximize the measures.

  4. Provide access to the body of knowledge through convenient procedure-oriented and field-oriented lan- guages.

  5. Converse or negotiate with the user while he formulates his requests and while responding to them. 8. Adjust itself to the level of sophistication of the individual user, providing terse, streamlined modes for experienced users working in their fields of expertness, and functioning as a teaching machine to guide and im-

prove the efforts of neophytes. 9. Permit users to deal either with metainformation

(through which they can work "at arms length" with

  • "Facts," used here in a broad sense, refers to items of informa- tion or knowledge derived from one or more documents and not con- strained to the form or forms of the source passages. It refers also to items of information or knowledge in systems or subsystems that do not admit subdivision into documentlike units.

substantive information), or with substantive informa- tion (directly), or with both at once.

  1. Provide the flexibiUty, legibiHty, and convenience of the printed page at input and output and, at the same time, the dynamic quality and immediate responsiveness of the oscilloscope screen and light pen.

  2. Facihtate joint contribution to and use of knowl- edge by several or many co-workers.

  3. Present flexible, wide-band interfaces to other sys- tems, such as research systems in laboratories, informa- tion-acquisition systems in government, and application systems in business and industry.

  4. Reduce markedly the difiiculties now caused by the diversity of publication languages, terminologies, and "symbologies."

  5. Essentially eliminate publication lag.

  6. Tend toward consoHdation and purification of knowledge instead of, or as well as, toward progressive growth and unresolved equivocation.*

  7. Evidence neither the ponderousness now associ- ated with overcentralization nor the confusing diversity and provinciality now associated with highly distributed systems. (The user is presumably indifferent to the de- sign decisions through which this is accomplished.)

  8. Display desired degree of initiative, together with good selectivity, in dissemination of recently acquired and "newly needed" knowledge.

NIH’s mission is to seek fundamental knowledge about the nature and behavior of living systems and the application of that knowledge to enhance health, lengthen life, and reduce illness and disability. The goals of the agency are:

to foster fundamental creative discoveries, innovative research strategies, and their applications as a basis for ultimately protecting and improving health;
to develop, maintain, and renew scientific human and physical resources that will ensure the Nation's capability to prevent disease;
to expand the knowledge base in medical and associated sciences in order to enhance the Nation's economic well-being and ensure a continued high return on the public investment in research; and
to exemplify and promote the highest level of scientific integrity, public accountability, and social responsibility in the conduct of science.