In the future that was supposed to unfold, we’d stay in our offices, and the world would come to us. Instead, we still travel, and we carry our offices with us.
Interesting piece by Alex Soojung-Kim Pang at the Red Herring blog. (Scroll to the April 20 entry, couldn’t find a permalink.)
A professor, earlier at Karolinska institutet, is being accused of scientific misconduct. According to Dagens Nyheter, the Swedish Research Council will launch an investigation that might take at least six months to finish.
At the moment, the Research Policy Institute is planning a research project on scientific misconduct. In particular, we are interested in investigating the grey zones where bias and other systemic factors enter into the research process, rather than outright fraud and the ethics of the individual scientist.
Elin Oxenhielm’s homepage is currently undergoing updating. While doing so, Oxenhielm apparently lifted the whole site off the net. Stay tuned for the third incarnation of the homepage.
Also, out of curiosity, I had a look at the html source of the page. Did you know that Oxenhielm updates the page in … Word?
There should be some way to handle numerical data in Movable Type. Say you run a research project, and have numerical data coming in every now and then. In MT you should be able to enter this data as it happens and have it analysed: rudimentary statistics, diagrams could be produced. Export in standard formats, of course.
Every datapoint/day’s entry should be a separate entry in MT. Permalink, comments, trackbacks of each entry would facilitate discussions about the data.
Lab notebook meets Excel meets graphing software meets blogging meets collaborative software.
There is an Entry Body area in MT; there could also be a Numerical Entry area.
It would be really useful in, for example, research groups where people often are’nt in the lab at the same time, in different departments or quite often on different continents.
“I for one am fascinated by the edge of the academic world meeting my world through blogs.” Joi Ito in a comment to a post by Danah Boyd that is part of a debate about technological and social factors going on at the moment. A good startingpoint for the debate is this post by Anne Galloway.
Is Ito’s comment sign of technology studies and techies meeting through blogging, blogging as boundary work/boundary organizations/trading zones/interfaces?
Some will have to look in to this in detail, but it seems to me that such meetings are rather scarce. How many (productive) tradings between sociotechnical subcultures / manufactures of boundary objects have come out of blogging? I guess they are rather few. If that is the case, blogging would be just a mirror of That. Other. World. Outside. Of. The. Bloggosphere, you know: Society, not-Net, with its Science Wars and its many curricula at tech schools devoid of any humanistic/social science perspectives on technology. Which is not that much of a surprise, but is something that we need to remind ourselves of every now and then, when we marvel at the tools on our screens. Blogging can be a vehicle for change, but in many cases it can, as a first approximation, perhaps rather be seen as a mirroring of not-Net.
Danah also sees little contact between the STS community and techies: “Unfortunately, i feel as though too many science studies folks just wait to see what will be created before studying it, rather than helping the creators think through the environment in which they are creating.”
One wonders if it would be possible to make policy out of these insights, and what such a policy would look like? How do you make perspectives from STS and sci/tech meet?
Update: after posting, I found this interesting note by Brayden King, that takes a similar stance. See also some of the comments to King’s post. Perhaps it is time for a reality check in blogland.
The Waypath buzzmaker is a nice toy to map trends in the blogosphere. Trends is a small collection of buzzsensors using Waypath buzzmaker. For example, there’s been increasing talk about Bjorn Lomborg in the blogosphere the last week, following the recent Lomborg-supportive move from the Danish government.
Follow the latest news on the Beagle weblog or through the live webcast; calibration colour chart for the Beagle’s cameras was painted by Damien Hirst and the signal to be sent once the Beagle lander is safe on the surface was composed by Blur: to do space science you need the public’s interest and approval. Publicity stunts have been around for ages, but you also see the web being used increasingly to build up and maintain the public’s interest in costly technoscientific project.
I’m doing a paper on how the web is used by scientists to drum up support through public participation. A bit more interactive than just posting pressreleases on EurekAlert. Perhaps the Beagle and Mars Express thing could be a case; otherwise I’ve been working mostly with SETI@Home.
Google search on Elin Oxenhielm turns up 1990 hits. (About a week ago it was about 1500.)
Blog discussions on Oxenhielm began at around the end of November and has become somewhat less frequent during the last week, according to the data from Waypath buzz maker :
Elin Oxenhielm will publish a book:
I have received lots of comments on my paper, and I will publish answers to those in my upcoming popular book. This book will be about the second part of Hilberts 16th problem and my attempt to solve it. I will publish more information about this book at this web page soon, so bookmark this page if you are interested!
Oxenhielm’s homepage has recently been updated (thanks, Peter!) with information of the upcoming book.
Elin Oxenhielm has not been afraid to go out in the open on her homepage with criticism of Yishao Zhou - what tone will the book have? What possible effects will a book have on her future at the university? She is, after all, working as teaching assistant at a university department.
And what will happen with the homepage? Oxenhielm has published her rationale for setting up oxenhielm.com and publishing her (former?) teacher’s e-mail messages there: “Now I have realized that I must use this information channel to take action against these rumours.” One could imagine the homepage becoming a kind of “weapon” used by Oxenhielm in the publicity campaigning. But what form will her homepage take; it has, this far, not been very active; will she set up a blog-like regularly updated site?
We have, methinks, only seen the beginning of a trend where scientists increasingly will use the web to further their careers. We have had the ordinary homepage for quite some time - about as long as the web itself - where a scientist publish his or her cv, perhaps some preprints and a fuzzy photo of the cats or kids at home. This will change.
In contested areas we are beginning to see a new use for the webb; scientists/scholars using the homepage as a repository of arguments in a controversy. Two obvious examples are lomborg.com and anti-lomborg.com.
And in non-contested fields there will also be an extended use of the web. Just about any major scientific site - a lab, an observatory - is on the web, with material for journalists, outreach materials. Every university nowadays has a major webpresence, with press releases professionally produced. These are in turn aggregated and disseminated by boundary organizations such as EurekAlert. The press releases are boundary objects, useful for both journalists, scientists, and policy makers. Media exposure is a policy instrument.
But we also have the individuals. Some scientists will excel in the personalization of their webpresence. Media alliances has for a long time been of use to scientific entrepreneurs and they will use the web/bloggosphere in similar ways as they have in earlier times used popular science. (I’m doing it as I write …)
The use of the web by scholars will be the subject of The Boundary Works, a new blog - coming soon to a browser near you! - by that eminent scholar Alf Rehn and the undersigned. We plan to survey the use of websites by scientists. More information as it goes live.
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