A week after #scio12, #rwa and reinventing discovery

This week has seen a convergence of three topics.  First, I got back from the Science Online 2012 unconference a little over a week ago (1/22).  I had been meaning to write a post to wrap up the sessions I attended, but then I started to see a lot of news concerning the Research Works Act.  I have also been reading Michael Nielsen's Reinventing Discovery, and there has been a good deal of discussion about that book on the net as well, including from the famous #scio12 @BoraZ.  So, with all this open access and open science discussion swirling in my head, I figured it was a good time to put the electrons down on the blog.

1. Science Online 2012.  I tweeted a bunch of the sessions already (and blogged about one), and most of the sessions have some form of online abstract, so I don't need to go into the details.  What struck me most about the conference was the discussion between the science journalists and the scientists themselves.  Scientists are stuck in a hard place because many academic departments and/or institutions frown on bloggers/tweets and people who try communicate their research to a general audience.  Journalists have a hard time working with scientists who do not understand their craft.  These two sessions particularly caught my attention.
2. Research Works Act (RWA). While I had known about the RWA since well before the unconference (January 5th), the topic didn't catch fire with scientists until a post from Fields Medalist, Dr. Gowers wrote "Elsevier — my part in its downfall".  That sparked a huge amount of discussion and other blog posts from a variety of scientists.  Many of those posts are cataloged at Michael Nielsen's Polymath Wiki page on journal publishing reform. (I see some posts that are missing on the wiki, so I will add those later.)
3. This brings me to Michael Nielsen's book Reinventing Discovery.  I have been slowly reading the book (a library copy), and I was reading it on the way to and from the Science Online Conference.  Two copies were being given away at the conference, but alas, I didn't win a copy.  In any case, here are some good reviews of the book by Bora, John Dupuis and Martin Fenner.  Michael also talked about his book on Science Friday.  Here is the podcast last Friday, January 27th, bit.ly/wFibOk.

Library thoughts derived from the book, Where good Ideas Come From

A couple of years ago, I was able to go to a presentation by Steven Berlin Johnson. (I remember the Berlin part of his middle name, because there are A LOT of Steve Johnsons out there.)  Anyway, he was at DU talking about his 2006 book, Everything Bad is good for You. That was way back on March 31, 2009 for a Bridges to the Future (video) event.  (He was also selling his 2009 book, The Invention of Air.) Just this year, he wrote Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation.  This book also looked interesting, so I checked it out from Penrose.  In short, I was able to glean lots of great perspectives and insights that could be applicable to the library world.  Here are some:

Concerning open systems - "When one looks at innovation in nature and culture, environments that build walls around good ideas tend to be less innovative in the long run than more open-ended environments. Good ideas may not want to be free, but they do want to connect, fuse, recombine. They want to reinvent themselves by crossing conceptual borders." Page 22.

"Innovative environments are better at helping their inhabitants explore the adjacent possible, because they expose a wide and diverse sample of spare parts--mechanical or conceptual--and they encourage novel ways of recombining those parts. Environments that block or limit those combinations--by punishing experimentation, by obscuring certain branches of possibility, by making the current state so satisfying that no one bothers to explore the edges--will, on average, generate and circulate fewer innovations than environments that encourage exploration." Page 41.

"The trick to having good ideas is not to sit around in glorious isolation and try to think big thoughts. The trick is to get more parts on the table." Page 42.

Concerning the supposed wisdom of the crowd vs. herd mentality - "This is not the wisdom of the crowd, but the wisdom of someone in the crowd. It's not that the network itself is smart; it's that the individuals get smarter because they are connected to the network." Page 58.

Concerning browsing and serendipity - "But serendipity is not just about embracing random encounters for the sheer exhilaration of it. Serendipity is built out of happy accidents, to be sure, but what makes them happy is the fact that the discovery you've made is meaningful to you. It completes a hunch, or opens up a door in the adjacent possible that you had overlooked." Page 108-109.

Bill Gates from Microsoft used to take annual reading vacations.  He (and his successor Ray Ozzie) would "cultivate a stack of reading material--much of it unrelated to their day-to-day focus at Microsoft--and then they take off for a week or two and do a deep dive into the words they've stockpiled." Page 112-113.

More on browsing and serendipity - "But it [browsing on the web] is much more of a mainstream pursuit than randomly exploring the library stacks, pulling down books because you like the binding, ever was.  This is the irony of the serendipity debate: the thing that is being mourned has actually gone from a fringe experience to the mainstream of the culture." Page 118.  I am not sure that I agree with this.  There is a bit of research that shows that browsing and serendipity was important in the print world of the library, too.  Here is one good article, final version is behind a paywall...

Concerning the market of ideas and intellectual property - "All of the patterns of innovation we have observed in the previous chapters--liquid networks, slow hunches, serendipity, noise exaptation, emergent platforms--do best in open environments where ideas flow in unregulated channels.  In more controlled environments, where the natural movement of ideas is tightly restrained, they suffocate." Page 232. Yes, yes, yes.  Let's get scholarly research out from behind paywalls.

"Most academic research today is fourth-quadrant in its approach: new ideas are published with the deliberate goal of allowing other participants rerefine and build upon them, with no restrictions on their circulation beyond proper acknowledgement of their origin." Page 233.

Concerning walled information gardens - "Participants in the fourth-quadrant don't have those costs; they can concentrate on coming up with new ideas, not building fortresses around the old ones." Page 235.

"Whatever its politics, the fourth quadrant has been an extraordinary space of human creativity and insight.  Even without the economic rewards of artificial scarcity, fourth-quadrant environments have played an immensely important role in the nurturing and circulation of good ideas--now more than ever." Page 239.

Thomas Jefferson noted: "That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition...."  Johnson noted: "Ideas, Jefferson argues, have an almost gravitational attraction toward the fourth quadrant.  The natural state of ideas is flow and spillover and connection.  It is society that keeps them in chains." page 241.

Another good line concerning the Internet - "There are good ideas, and then there are good ideas that make it easier to have other good ideas." Page 243.

Overall, I liked the book.  I highly recommend it.

"We are people of the screen."

This is from "TOC 2011: Kevin Kelly, 'Better than Free: How Value Is Generated in a Free Copy World'".  Found this via Patricia Anderson and this blog post.

More on the book, Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?

Here are some interesting passages...

Chris Anderson, "The Rediscovery of Fire."
"Before Gutenberg, we had a different technology for communicating ideas and information. It was called talking."  And then, "Read a Martin Luther King Jr. speech and you may nod in agreement.  But then track down a video of the man in action, delivering those same words in from of an energized crowd.  It's a wholly different experience."  I think this is part of the reason that YouTube is so popular.  Seeing a presentation or a demonstration is much more powerful than just trying to read about how to do something.

Eric Drexler, "The Web Helps Us See What Isn't There."
This deals with absence detection.  This "could help societies blunder toward somewhat better decisions about those questions."  Identifying what is absent by observation is much more difficult than identifying what is there.  Reference librarians get these kinds of questions every once in a while.  A student wants to see if anyone has done research on a niche topic.  One could search and search and search and search and not find anything.  This is what the person wants, because he or she wants to identify a unique area where the person can perform novel research.

Martin Rees, "A Level Playing Field."
He discusses the arXiv.org as the preferred mechanism for reading research in physics.  He notes that "far fewer people today read traditional journals.  These have so far survived as guarantors of quality."  He sees that other less formal methods of publication will survive, such as blogs, and that quality control will be controlled by mechanisms of restaurant-like grading or Amazon style reviews.

Seth Lloyd, "Move Aside, Sex."
Why trek over to the library, when Wikipedia is 99.44% correct?  The 0.56% can burn you.  In mathematics, "an approximate theorem is typically an untrue theorem."  What is the sex part?  He goes on to explain that sex is a good way to share DNA information with others, and yadda, yadda, yadda.

John Tooby, "RIvaling Gutenberg."
He talks about the huge impact that Gutenberg had on the transmission of information and knowledge.  Not really new news here.  But, I like his note about William Tyndale who dared to translate the Bible into English, because that is what, you know, everybody read in England. He wanted lowly farmers to be able to read the scriptures and the supposed word of God. He was executed for doing such a foolish thing.

More to come.

Thoughts on Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?

I am a very slow reader.  I got this book (HarperCollins, Ha) several weeks ago, but I haven't read much of it.  In the past, I would do whole book reviews on here, but in this case, I think I will chunk it out, and do reviews of sections of the book.  It is derived from an edge.org project.  They have about 150 2-4 page essays from prominent scientists and artists.  The book is an edited version of the essays on the edge.org site.  For example, Clay Shirky talks about the invisible college. 

Concerning the old publishing and mass media system:

The beneficiaries of the system in which making things public was a privileged activity--academics, politicians, reporters, doctors--will compain about the way the new abundance of public thought upends the old order, but those complaints are like keening at a wake: The change they are protesting is already in the past.  The real action is elsewhere. [Preprint of the essay is here.]

I hear some things like this from my faculty.  I need them to wake up and see that the old publishing system is dying, and that they need to support new methods of publishing and peer-review. The Administrators need to figure out new ways to award tenure based on the different publishing systems. The architecture of access to scientific knowledge is just plain messed up.  We can't go back to the good ol' days.


Hopefully, I will be able to blog about many more sections of this book.

Sort of a review of Cognitive Surplus

Finally finished Cognitive Surplus the other day. Took me a little while to read it. I had to renew it twice... I guess I was using my cognitive surplus on other things besides reading that book.

The word library shows up once I think. I can't find it again. Anyway, there are a number of things that Clay Shirky talks about in the book that is pretty relevant to libraries. Such as:

Clay said on page 17:

People want to do something to make the world a better place. They will help when they are invited to. Access to cheap, flexible tools removes many of the barriers to trying new things. You don't need fancy computers to harness cognitive surplus; simple phones are enough.... Once you have figured out how to tap the surplus in a way that people care about, others can replicate your technique, over and over, around the world.

This is what hit me with the Library Camp and Unconference model for meetings and conferences. That is why I helped to organize the STELLA Unconference. We don't always need big organizations like the ALA or SLA or State Library Associations to hold meetings of like-minded (or unlike-minded) librarians anymore. [Note: I am the Chair-Elect of the Sci-Tech Division of SLA, and I still find the SLA conference to be worthwhile.] If anything, a lot of work and discussion can get done over discussion lists and other social networking sites. The difficulty is figuring out how to tap that surplus in a way that people care about. I hope others will continue to replicate the unconference model (very low cost aspects) for other meetings and gatherings.

Page 50:

When publication--the act of making something public--goes from being hard to being virtually effortless, people used to the old system often regard publishing by amateurs as frivolous, as if publishing was an inherently serious activity.... An activity that once seemed inherently valuable turned out to be only accidentally valuable, as a change in the economics revealed.

Open Access publishing is continuing to gain steam. People are starting to realize that it does not take a behemoth to publish high quality articles. I hope that the journal I am involved with, Collaborative Librarianship, fits this description.

Page 98:

No one wants e-mail for itself, any more than anyone wants electricity for itself; rather, we want the things that e-mail enables--news from home, pictures of the kids, discussion, arguments, flirtation, gossip, and all the mess of the human condition.

As a librarian, I need to remember to focus on how the technology can enhance the human condition (and how our students can use the technology to learn stuff and gain knowledge and pass their classes and get good jobs after they graduate, etc.), and not on the technology itself. I have a tendency to do that, I know...

Page 162:

Andrew Keen, author of The Cult of the Amateur, compared bloggers to monkeys. These complaints, self-interested though they were, echoed more broadly held beliefs. Shared, unmanaged effort might be fine for picnics and bowling leagues, but serious work is done for money, by people who work in proper organizations, with managers directing their work.

Librarians from lots of various organizations can work together just fine without having managerial overhead. The Library Society of the World is a good example. While the LSW may experience some growing pains every once in a while, it is a working example of a group of people that can be organized without the organization.

Page 189:

The communications tools we now have, which a mere decade ago seemed to offer an improvement to the 20th century media landscape, are now seen to be rapidly eroding it instead. A society where everyone has some kind of access to the public sphere is a different kind of society than one where citizens approach media as mere consumers.

I am not quite sure I agree with his "everyone has some kind of access to the public sphere" bit. There is still quite a big problem with the information haves and have nots here in the US, and lots of people in China or Nigeria or Romania have information access problems. But, we are heading towards greater information access for all. In any case, our society is going to see great changes in the way our patrons view the media and publishing in general. The upheaval has just begun.

Page 192:

Users never behave exactly as the designers of the system expect or want them to.

As librarians, we know that this is sooooo true. Patrons never use the databases the way that the computer programmers expected. The patrons try to extract information in ways that are not expected. The patron wants to sort by the first name instead of last? The patron wants to search by the city of publication, and not just the publisher name? The patron wants to get a list of sales by longitude instead of by zipcode or some other geographic data?

Page 194:

It is far better to start with a system that is small and good and work on making it bigger than to start with a system that is large and mediocre and working on making it better.

Another truism in library systems and databases. I'd rather have patrons use a smaller clean database with good indexing and good links than a huge database that has lots of errors, comes back with strange results and leads the patron to dead ends.

Page 196:

If you want different behavior, you have to provide different opportunities.

In other words, the patrons will respond to how the database and the interface is designed. If your catalog is set up so that patrons can tag items, but only after they jump through some hoops to login to the system, then they are not going to use that feature. If a patron has to click three or four times to get to an advanced search screen, they are not going to use that, even if that is what they need to find the kinds of articles they are looking for.

Page 203:

Twitter was created for use on mobile phones, then retooled itself for more web use..... Instead, the imperative is to learn from failure, adapt, and learn again.

This section deals with adaptation. Of course libraries and librarians need to adapt, but I think we could learn from our mistakes faster and adapt a bit quicker. I work in an academic library, and some of the decisions can be made verrrrrrryyyyyyyyyy sloooooooowwwwlllllllyyyyyyyyy. Lots of decisions are made by committee, and if you don't have a consensus on something, it can be death by committee. Sometimes it can be easier to just do something based on your gut feeling and knowledge of something, and if it was the wrong decision, own up to the mistake and admit it. Sometimes, it is easier to ask for forgiveness after the fact, than it is to ask for approval from a group of people to do something before the fact. If you want some examples, let me know.

Page 205:

As a general rule, it is more important to try something new, and work on the problems as they arise, than to figure out a way to do something new without having any problems.

Some librarians can be quite risk averse. They don't want to start a new service or program without figuring out how to solve all of the possible problems ahead of time. How should we respond if someone asks a question like this? What if we get a line of people at the service point? What if the patrons want to use the equipment under water? What if patron doesn't recharge the battery? Well, I say we should just start the service and see how they use it. There is no way we are going to know how people are going to use the service or the equipment until we make it available.

Page 209:

Biases in favor of existing systems is good, as least in periods of technological stability. When someone runs a bookstore, or a newspaper, or a tv station, it's advantageous to have those people think of their work as being critical for society.

This is a section of the book where Clay is arguing that we should have as much chaos as we can stand during this media transition. We are going to see massive change in the culture of information use. Of course, librarians want libraries to exist [and thrive and prosper] because we are critical to the underpinnings of an educated populace, and to a well-oiled and smoothly running society. (Well, relatively smooth running society...) But, journalists see themselves in a similar role, and so do people who work in the telecommunications industry. When people can get news from non-journalists, or communicate with friends on Twitter or Skype or IM, then those industries are going to contract with some of the professionals in those industries crying about the lack of services that the non-professionals provide.

Libraries are going to continue to see contraction because some of the funders and decision makers do not see the value of services and information we provide. We have to do a better job of marketing what we do to more of the higher ups.

Page 210:

People committed to solving a particular problem also commit themselves to maintaining that problem in order to keep their solution viable.

This has huge implications for libraries. The good news is that as the information universe continues to get more complex, we are going to continue to have patrons who need our help in navigating that universe. As new information gets published, we will have to continue to purchase or lease or subscribe to it. We need to keep track of the electronic resources and books we have, and we also have to let our patrons know about all of that stuff and all of the services we provide to our patrons.

But, do we have to worry about doing too good of a job? Can we ever teach them so well, that they will no longer need to ask us how to use information products? Could a search engine do such a good job that it can do a true reference interview? I think computer software will get better, particularly with the semantic web, but I don't think it will be able to have a conversation with the patron. If someone knows what they are looking for, they might be able to get a good answer. What about the patron that needs advice on how to narrow it down? Can a computer respond with--have you tried looking at this problem in a completely different way? The computer might be able to recommend other search terms, but it won't be able to see the facial expression of the students when they are confused or happy, and know how to ask that next question.

---

Well, that is it for me. Did you read the book?

Mini book review -- Love is the Killer App

I just finished reading most of Love is the Killer App. I thought about writing a good long review of the book, but then I figured, there are already 144+ reviews out there on it, why bother. The book came out in 2002, and it seems like it was way ahead of its time. This was written before social networking services came into vogue, and he (the author, Tim Sanders) advocated radical sharing of business ideas and thoughts -- gasp, even with competitors.

I liked his idea of jotting many notes about a book within the book. I don't know if I will do that, but I might jot more notes down in different spots to jog my memory of the gist of the books I read. It seemed strange that he doesn't like magazines or newspaper articles on business topics. Perhaps he is just reading the wrong magazines, journals and newspapers... He likes to hand out lots of hardback books to colleagues as gifts. But, I would guess that more and more people today would prefer gift certificates so they can get an ebook version. It is the thought and the love that counts.

As a librarian, I think I could always share my love and compassion with my coworkers and my patrons a little bit more. Maybe I will make that an unofficial new years resolution.

What is the future of the book? LRS wants to know your opinion

This survey just came out from the Library Research Service.

Recently, news outlets and blogs have been busy deriding and celebrating the recent ascension of e-readers. The growing popularity of this new format has come with murmurs about the death of paper books and some even surmise that as technology advances libraries will cease to exist!

Taking notice of the chatter, Library Research Service has decided to survey librarians on the matter. This new 60-Second Survey asks your opinions on e-readers and how you think they will transform reading.

• Will e-readers be the demise of the paper book?
• What will libraries circulate?
• What is the future of the book?

Please let them know...

The 95 theses from the Cluetrain Manifesto have stood the test of time

It is odd for me to write a blog post announcing that I will be writing another blog post (on April 28th), but this is the case today.

The 95 theses (not 96) from the Cluetrain Manifesto have now been around for about 10 years. For the most part, the theses form the heart of the Web2.0 revolution. The book turns 10 years old on April 28th, and in celebration, the author has asked for 95 bloggers to write blog entries that expand upon how the world has changed in 95 ways over the last 10 years. In short, I've signed up to expand upon thesis #72, which is "We like this new marketplace much better. In fact, we are creating it." I have an idea in my head about how I would like to expand upon this (talking about OA, blogs, wikis, new media, etc.), but maybe you would have some other ideas on how I could talk about how we are creating our own new media outlets.

I know some other library bloggers who are covering other thesis statements. Thanks goes to Connie Crosby for noting the celebration.

The Pedagogy of Innovation

This was the title of the "Symposium for Colorado Teachers and Faculty" that took place right before the Bridges to the Future event.

I learned a lot of stuff about:

• Scalable Game Design from the University of Colorado, Boulder
• Humane game development for students and teachers
• Scratch -- A programming language that makes it easy to create your own interactive stories, animations, games, music, and art.
• Greenfoot -- Game development platform that is more appropriate for teenagers.
• David Thomson wrote the book, Law School 2.0: Legal Education for a Digital Age. This books is focused on how students are using social networking services. I really like how he used wordle at the beginning of each chapter.

I hope I can use some of these resources to help my son make his own video/computer games.

My short review of the Age of Spiritual Machines

I came across this book (The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence) written in 1999 concerning the future of computing. Dr. Kurzweil has an interesting take on the future of computing and the human race. He sees things in a very positive light, and he is a very strong "strong AI" proponent. He had many specific predictions about the future of computing in 10 year increments. There are predictions for 2009, 2019, 2029 and 2099. Since it is now 2009, I thought I would look at his predictions for 2009 to see how accurate they are. The synopsis of his predictions come from pages 277-278, but chapter nine (pages 189-201) covers the year 2009 in more detail.

"A $1,000 personal computer can perform about a trillion calculations per second." This would be 1,000 Gigahertz computer. In looking at some Dell and Gateway desktop models that cost around $1,000, I see that they have processors such as a Quad-Core Intel® Xeon® Processor up to 3.33GHz or an Intel® Core™2 Quad Processor Q8200 at 2.33GHz. This isn't exactly 1,000 GHz, but with the dual and quad processors, they may be effectively operating at much greater than a 3.33 or a 2.33 GHz single Intel processor. Processing power isn't as important as it used to be. Memory is also very important, and that is not addressed at all in his book. Also, the speed of the computer can depend on the operating system that is used.

"Personal Computers with high-resolution visual displays come in a range of sizes, from those small enough to be embedded in clothing and jewelry up to the size of a thin book." He kind of called this one, but wearable computers are not exactly in fashion these days, unless you consider an iPhone a wearable computer.

"Cables are disappearing. Communications between components use short-distance wireless technology. High-speed wireless communication provides access to the Web." Plenty of cables are still around, but WIFI and G3 is taking care of the Web access.

"The majority of text is created using continuous speech recognition. Also ubiquitous are language user interfaces." Ummmmmmmmmmm, no.

"Most routine business transactions (purchases, travel reservations) take place between a human and a virtual personality. Often, the virtual personality includes an animated visual presence that looks like a human face." Well, we do make purchases and reservations online, but it is not with an animated virtual presence.

"Although traditional classroom organization is still common, intelligent courseware has emerged as a common means of learning." We are not even close to being there. I think Dr. Kurzweil doesn't understand the political and social inertia that is in the public education system and in the college educational system. High quality educational software is pretty difficult to devise.

"Translating telephones (speech-to-speech language translation) are commonly used for many language pairs." Another no.

"Accelerating returns from the advance of computer technology have resulted in continued economic expansion. Price deflation, which had been a reality in the computer field during the 20th century, is now occurring outside the computer field. The reason for this is that virtually all economic sectors are deeply effective by the accelerating improvement in the price performance of computing." Well, no. However, how could he possibly have predicted the 9/11 bombings. The Tech bubble bursting in the early 2000's, and the economic and housing market collapse of the fall of 2008. We are in a stage of abundant over consumption, and humans need to learn not to consume so much and to save more.

"Human musicians routinely jam with cybernetic musicians." Again no. But, I do find the word 'cybernetic' interesting. Haven't used that word in some time.

"Bioengineered treatments for cancer and heart disease have greatly reduced the mortality from these diseases." I wish. As humans have gotten heavier, our heart problems have gotten worse. The war on cancer is still being waged.

"The neo-Luddite movement is growing." Another no. I see more and more people sharing their thoughts, ideas, images and videos using Web2.0 technology. We are seeing solutions to our problems being solved with crowd-sourced open-access software platforms.

Some other good reviews are at:

Fogel, David B., A true visionary's truly fantastic vision. IEEE Spectrum, (July 1999), Vol. 36 Issue 7, p9-10.

Casti, John L., Exit Homo sapiens, stage left. Nature (2/25/1999), Vol. 397 Issue 6721, p663-664.

Proudfoot, Diane, How Human Can They Get? Science (04/30/1999), Vol. 284 Issue 5415, p745.