Over the past week this tweet was doing the rounds. I’m not sure where it comes from or precisely what its original context was, but it appeared in my feed from folks in various student analytics and big data crowds. The message I took was “measurement looks complicated until you pin it down”. But what I took from this was something a bit different. Once upon a time the idea of temperature was a complex thing.

On April 26 I am attending a joint meeting of the NSF and EuroHORCS (European Heads of Research Councils) on “Changing the Conduct of Science in the Information Age”. I have been asked to submit a one page white paper in advance of the meeting and have been struggling a little with this. This is stage one, a draft document relating to researcher identifiers.

Just a quick note from the IDCC given I was introduced as “one of those people who are probably blogging the conference”. I spoke this morning giving a talk on Radical Sharing – Transforming Science? A version of the slides is available at slideshare. It seemed to go reasonably well and I got some positive comments.

I just wanted to point to a post that Tim O’Reilly wrote just before the US election a few weeks back. There was an interesting discussion about the rights and wrongs of him posting on his political views and the rights and wrongs of that being linked to from the O’Reilly Media front page. In amongst the abuse that you have come to expect in public political discussions there is some thought provoking stuff.

This is the second in a series of posts (first one here) in which I am trying to process and collect ideas that came out of Scifoo. This post arises out of a discussion I had with Michael Eisen (UC Berkely) and Sean Eddy (HHMI Janelia Farm) at lunch on the Saturday. We had drifted from a discussion of the problem of attribution stacking and citing datasets (and datasets made up of datasets) into the problem of academic credit.

Science commons and other are organising a workshop on Open Science issues as a satellite meeting of the European Science Open Forum meeting in July.

Image via Wikipedia Once again a range of conversations in different places have collided in my feed reader. Over on Nature Networks, Martin Fenner posted on Researcher ID which lead to a discussion about attribution and in particular Martin’s comment that there was a need to be able to link to comments and the necessity of timestamps.