ChemSpidey lives! Even in the face of Karen James’ heavy irony I am still amazed that someone like me with very little programming experience was able to pull together something that actually worked effectively in a live demo. As long as you’re not actively scared of trying to put things together it is becoming relatively straightforward to build tools that do useful things.
A number of things have prompted me to be thinking about what makes a piece of writing “original” in a web based world where we might draft things in the open, get informal public peer review, where un-refereed conference posters can be published online, and pre-print servers of submitted versions of papers are increasingly widely used.
A session entitled “The Future of the Paper” at Science Online London 2009 was a panel made up of an interesting set of people, Lee-Ann Coleman from the British Library, Katharine Barnes the editor of Nature Protocols, Theo Bloom from PLoS and Enrico Balli of SISSA Medialab. The panelists rehearsed many of the issues and problems that have been discussed before and I won’t re-hash here.
Yesterday, along with Chris Thorpe and Ian Mulvany I was involved in what I imagine might be the first of a series of demos of Wave as it could apply to scientists and researchers more generally. You can see the backup video I made in case we had no network on Viddler.
Interesting conversation yesterday on Twitter with Evgeniy Meyke of EarthCape prompted in part by my last post. We started talking about what a Friendfeed replacement might look like and how it might integrate more directly into scientific data. Is it possible to build something general or will it always need to be domain specific. Might this in fact be an advantage?
…is that someone needs to make money out of them. It was inevitable at some point that Friendfeed would take a route that lead it towards mass adoption and away from the needs of the (rather small) community of researchers that have found a niche that works well for them.
Issues surrounding the relationship of Open Research and replication seems to be the meme of the week. Abhishek Tiwari provided notes on a debate describing concerns about how open research could damage replication and Sabine Hossenfelder explored the same issue in a blog post.
On Wednesday morning I had the distinct pleasure of seeing a group of students in the Computer Science department at the University of Toronto giving demos of tools and software that they have been developing over the past few months.
On Tuesday I was able to sit in on a conversation that is regularly held within the Computer Science department at University of Toronto that focuses broadly on what can computer science bring as a discipline and a skill set to the sciences more generally. The conversation is lead by Steve Easterbrook so there is a focus on climate science but we also roamed much more widely than that.
Google Wave has got an awful lot of people quite excited. And others are more sceptical. A lot of SciFoo attendees were therefore very excited to be able to get an account on the developer sandbox as part of the weekend. At the opening plenary Stephanie Hannon gave a demo of Wave and, although there were numerous things that didn’t work live, that was enough to get more people interested.
Last Friday afternoon (was it really only a week ago?) about 200 people made their way to the Googleplex in Mountain View for the fourth SciFoo. There are many people who got their blog posts out well before me so I will focus on the sessions which don’t seem to have been heavily discussed and try to draw a few themes out. For me, the over riding theme that came through was Engagement.