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tvinko

Massively collaborative mathematics : Article : Nature - 28 views

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    peer-to-peer theorem-proving
  • ...14 more comments...
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    Or: mathematicians catch up with open-source software developers :)
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    "Similar open-source techniques could be applied in fields such as [...] computer science, where the raw materials are informational and can be freely shared online." ... or we could reach the point, unthinkable only few years ago, of being able to exchange text messages in almost real time! OMG, think of the possibilities! Seriously, does the author even browse the internet?
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    I do not agree with you F., you are citing out of context! Sharing messages does not make a collaboration, nor does a forum, .... You need a set of rules and a common objective. This is clearly observable in "some team", where these rules are lacking, making team work inexistent. The additional difficulties here are that it involves people that are almost strangers to each other, and the immateriality of the project. The support they are using (web, wiki) is only secondary. What they achieved is remarkable, disregarding the subject!
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    I think we will just have to agree to disagree then :) Open source developers have been organizing themselves with emails since the early '90s, and most projects (e.g., the Linux kernel) still do not use anything else today. The Linux kernel mailing list gets around 400 messages per day, and they are managing just fine to scale as the number of contributors increases. I agree that what they achieved is remarkable, but it is more for "what" they achieved than "how". What they did does not remotely qualify as "massively" collaborative: again, many open source projects are managed collaboratively by thousands of people, and many of them are in the multi-million lines of code range. My personal opinion of why in the scientific world these open models are having so many difficulties is that the scientific community today is (globally, of course there are many exceptions) a closed, mostly conservative circle of people who are scared of changes. There is also the fact that the barrier of entry in a scientific community is very high, but I think that this should merely scale down the number of people involved and not change the community "qualitatively". I do not think that many research activities are so much more difficult than, e.g., writing an O(1) scheduler for an Operating System or writing a new balancing tree algorithm for efficiently storing files on a filesystem. Then there is the whole issue of scientific publishing, which, in its current form, is nothing more than a racket. No wonder traditional journals are scared to death by these open-science movements.
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    here we go ... nice controversy! but maybe too many things mixed up together - open science journals vs traditional journals, conservatism of science community wrt programmers (to me one of the reasons for this might be the average age of both groups, which is probably more than 10 years apart ...) and then using emailing wrt other collaboration tools .... .... will have to look at the paper now more carefully ... (I am surprised to see no comment from José or Marek here :-)
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    My point about your initial comment is that it is simplistic to infer that emails imply collaborative work. You actually use the word "organize", what does it mean indeed. In the case of Linux, what makes the project work is the rules they set and the management style (hierachy, meritocracy, review). Mailing is just a coordination mean. In collaborations and team work, it is about rules, not only about the technology you use to potentially collaborate. Otherwise, all projects would be successful, and we would noy learn management at school! They did not write they managed the colloboration exclusively because of wikipedia and emails (or other 2.0 technology)! You are missing the part that makes it successful and remarkable as a project. On his blog the guy put a list of 12 rules for this project. None are related to emails, wikipedia, forums ... because that would be lame and your comment would make sense. Following your argumentation, the tools would be sufficient for collaboration. In the ACT, we have plenty of tools, but no team work. QED
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    the question on the ACT team work is one that is coming back continuously and it always so far has boiled down to the question of how much there need and should be a team project to which everybody inthe team contributes in his / her way or how much we should leave smaller, flexible teams within the team form and progress, more following a bottom-up initiative than imposing one from top-down. At this very moment, there are at least 4 to 5 teams with their own tools and mechanisms which are active and operating within the team. - but hey, if there is a real will for one larger project of the team to which all or most members want to contribute, lets go for it .... but in my view, it should be on a convince rather than oblige basis ...
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    It is, though, indicative that some of the team member do not see all the collaboration and team work happening around them. We always leave the small and agile sub-teams to form and organize themselves spontaneously, but clearly this method leaves out some people (be it for their own personal attitude or be it for pure chance) For those cases which we could think to provide the possibility to participate in an alternative, more structured, team work where we actually manage the hierachy, meritocracy and perform the project review (to use Joris words).
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    I am, and was, involved in "collaboration" but I can say from experience that we are mostly a sum of individuals. In the end, it is always one or two individuals doing the job, and other waiting. Sometimes even, some people don't do what they are supposed to do, so nothing happens ... this could not be defined as team work. Don't get me wrong, this is the dynamic of the team and I am OK with it ... in the end it is less work for me :) team = 3 members or more. I am personally not looking for a 15 member team work, and it is not what I meant. Anyway, this is not exactly the subject of the paper.
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    My opinion about this is that a research team, like the ACT, is a group of _people_ and not only brains. What I mean is that people have feelings, hate, anger, envy, sympathy, love, etc about the others. Unfortunately(?), this could lead to situations, where, in theory, a group of brains could work together, but not the same group of people. As far as I am concerned, this happened many times during my ACT period. And this is happening now with me in Delft, where I have the chance to be in an even more international group than the ACT. I do efficient collaborations with those people who are "close" to me not only in scientific interest, but also in some private sense. And I have people around me who have interesting topics and they might need my help and knowledge, but somehow, it just does not work. Simply lack of sympathy. You know what I mean, don't you? About the article: there is nothing new, indeed. However, why it worked: only brains and not the people worked together on a very specific problem. Plus maybe they were motivated by the idea of e-collaboration. No revolution.
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    Joris, maybe I made myself not clear enough, but my point was only tangentially related to the tools. Indeed, it is the original article mention of "development of new online tools" which prompted my reply about emails. Let me try to say it more clearly: my point is that what they accomplished is nothing new methodologically (i.e., online collaboration of a loosely knit group of people), it is something that has been done countless times before. Do you think that now that it is mathematicians who are doing it makes it somehow special or different? Personally, I don't. You should come over to some mailing lists of mathematical open-source software (e.g., SAGE, Pari, ...), there's plenty of online collaborative research going on there :) I also disagree that, as you say, "in the case of Linux, what makes the project work is the rules they set and the management style (hierachy, meritocracy, review)". First of all I think the main engine of any collaboration like this is the objective, i.e., wanting to get something done. Rules emerge from self-organization later on, and they may be completely different from project to project, ranging from almost anarchy to BDFL (benevolent dictator for life) style. Given this kind of variety that can be observed in open-source projects today, I am very skeptical that any kind of management rule can be said to be universal (and I am pretty sure that the overwhelming majority of project organizers never went to any "management school"). Then there is the social aspect that Tamas mentions above. From my personal experience, communities that put technical merit above everything else tend to remain very small and generally become irrelevant. The ability to work and collaborate with others is the main asset the a participant of a community can bring. I've seen many times on the Linux kernel mailing list contributions deemed "technically superior" being disregarded and not considered for inclusion in the kernel because it was clear that
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    hey, just catched up the discussion. For me what is very new is mainly the framework where this collaborative (open) work is applied. I haven't seen this kind of working openly in any other field of academic research (except for the Boinc type project which are very different, because relying on non specialists for the work to be done). This raise several problems, and mainly the one of the credit, which has not really been solved as I read in the wiki (is an article is written, who writes it, what are the names on the paper). They chose to refer to the project, and not to the individual researchers, as a temporary solution... It is not so surprising for me that this type of work has been first done in the domain of mathematics. Perhaps I have an ideal view of this community but it seems that the result obtained is more important than who obtained it... In many areas of research this is not the case, and one reason is how the research is financed. To obtain money you need to have (scientific) credit, and to have credit you need to have papers with your name on it... so this model of research does not fit in my opinion with the way research is governed. Anyway we had a discussion on the Ariadnet on how to use it, and one idea was to do this kind of collaborative research; idea that was quickly abandoned...
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    I don't really see much the problem with giving credit. It is not the first time a group of researchers collectively take credit for a result under a group umbrella, e.g., see Nicolas Bourbaki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bourbaki Again, if the research process is completely transparent and publicly accessible there's no way to fake contributions or to give undue credit, and one could cite without problems a group paper in his/her CV, research grant application, etc.
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    Well my point was more that it could be a problem with how the actual system works. Let say you want a grant or a position, then the jury will count the number of papers with you as a first author, and the other papers (at least in France)... and look at the impact factor of these journals. Then you would have to set up a rule for classifying the authors (endless and pointless discussions), and give an impact factor to the group...?
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    it seems that i should visit you guys at estec... :-)
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    urgently!! btw: we will have the ACT christmas dinner on the 9th in the evening ... are you coming?
Ma Ru

Euroscience Open Forum 2010 - 2 views

shared by Ma Ru on 24 Apr 09 - Cached
LeopoldS liked it
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    A conference ACT should consider going to.
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    Perhaps some of ACTers will find this conference interesting... One of the talks: "Would Einstein be on Twitter? Exploring the potential and limits of Web 2.0 in science & science communication" [Edit] Oh, I see someone has already posted this link... a year ago. Anyway, if anyone of you plans to go, let me know - I'll be around ;-)
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    Just came back from ESOF 2010... I was on look for ACT agents undercover, but either they were not there or the cover was good enough... Anyway here's a few remarks from me (I could write a nice report... if you paid): 1) In general, to say that ESA was underrepresented on the conference as a whole is not enough (I guess ESA just failed to notice the event taking place). For instance, on the GMES presentation, ESA as such was not mentioned at all... at some point I started to wonder if ESA is actually involved in the project, but now I checked the website and apparently it is. On the other hand, GMES presentation was crap anyway, as after 1:15 of talking, I didn't gain any knowledge of what GMES is and what its contributions to the EU community will be. 2) There was a lot of talk about LHC and particle research (well, at least among those that I attended). Some of them were very good, some of them rather crap... 3) "Would Einstein be on Twitter? Exploring the potential and limits of Web 2.0 in science & science communication" talk - quite interesting, but focusing mainly on Science-to-Wide Public and Science-to-Journalists communication. Not really on Science-to-Science (as in Ariadnet). There was quite an extensive discussion with the public. You may be interested that Nature is trying to stimulate Web 2.0 communication, running blog service, but also I think a kind of social network - perhaps you'd like to have a look. In general the conclusion was that Web 2.0 is not so useful for scientific communication because practising it requires TIME (blogs, etc.) and often some professional skills (podcasts/videocasts, etc.), and scientists have neither of these. This can be run on corporation level (like ESA does actually), but then it looses the "intimate" character. 4) "How much can robots learn?" talk... very nicely presented: understandable by the wide public, but conveying the message... which is something like "we can already make the robots do stuff absolutely imp
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    Well, my comment was cut in half, and I don't feel like typing it again... the most important highlight from the rest is that the only presenter from ESA (ESTEC) did not show up on his talk because his department was undergoing some sort of audit on the same day :)
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    Fantastic comment - or better report!! thanks very much Marek! Who was the supposed no-show speaker from ESA?
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    Bernard Foing (he is actually one of the 8 ESA employees who have their own page on Wikipedia)...
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    written almost entirely by a guy called a "quest for knowledge" ... who will this be????? :-)
Joris _

SPACE.com -- NASA to Boost Speed of Deep Space Communications - 1 views

  • a few megabits per second might someday get as much as 600 megabits per second, if not more. That could enable far more scientific payoff per mission in the long run.
  • new communication innovations such as disruption tolerant networking
  • one of the biggest communication revolutions will come from laser-driven optical communication
    • Joris _
       
      they kind-of stole my idea ;)
LeopoldS

Helix Nebula - Helix Nebula Vision - 0 views

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    The partnership brings together leading IT providers and three of Europe's leading research centres, CERN, EMBL and ESA in order to provide computing capacity and services that elastically meet big science's growing demand for computing power.

    Helix Nebula provides an unprecedented opportunity for the global cloud services industry to work closely on the Large Hadron Collider through the large-scale, international ATLAS experiment, as well as with the molecular biology and earth observation. The three flagship use cases will be used to validate the approach and to enable a cost-benefit analysis. Helix Nebula will lead these communities through a two year pilot-phase, during which procurement processes and governance issues for the public/private partnership will be addressed.

    This game-changing strategy will boost scientific innovation and bring new discoveries through novel services and products. At the same time, Helix Nebula will ensure valuable scientific data is protected by a secure data layer that is interoperable across all member states. In addition, the pan-European partnership fits in with the Digital Agenda of the European Commission and its strategy for cloud computing on the continent. It will ensure that services comply with Europe's stringent privacy and security regulations and satisfy the many requirements of policy makers, standards bodies, scientific and research communities, industrial suppliers and SMEs.

    Initially based on the needs of European big-science, Helix Nebula ultimately paves the way for a Cloud Computing platform that offers a unique resource to governments, businesses and citizens.
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    "Helix Nebula will lead these communities through a two year pilot-phase, during which procurement processes and governance issues for the public/private partnership will be addressed." And here I was thinking cloud computing was old news 3 years ago :)
fichbio

Bacteria's Social Media - 2 views

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    Perhaps when you think of bacterial communities you think of a flask full of rapidly dividing E. coli. But in non-lab conditions, bacteria grow in complex, heterogeneous communities composed of diverse microscopic organisms. In these communities, bacteria need a means to communicate with their kin, and they do this through a language known as quorum sensing (QS), where bugs secrete and detect factors that tell them whether they're surrounded by kin (and if so, how many there are).
Francesco Biscani

Tom Sawyer, whitewashing fences, and building communities online - 3 views

  • If you are looking to ideas like open source or social media as simple means to get what you want for your company, it’s time to rethink your community strategy.
  • I’ve talked to people at companies who are considering “open sourcing” their product because they think there is an army of people out there who will jump at the chance to build their products for them. Many of these people go on to learn tough but valuable lessons in building community. It’s not that simple.
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    Illuminating article about corporations trying to exploit "open source" and not getting what they want.
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    I like the red had definition: "To be the catalyst in communities of customers, contributors, and partners creating better technology the open source way."
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    yeah, it is the same with crowdsourcing in general, when some company "managers" see how much cheaper they could do it but don't understand where it comes from...
Francesco Biscani

The Art of Community - 3 views

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    A recently-published book by the Ubuntu Community Manager, Jono Bacon. I just started reading it: lots of information, experiences and revealing hints on how open-source communities are born and evolve today.
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    "Since I released The Art of Community, one thing has become evident: the people who are buying it are awesome. If you have bought it you are awesome. If you have not, you too can be awesome." To me seems more interesting the topic than the author. I have the impression that many people in this community behave like high-school pupils, though their production it's absolutely "awesome".
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    Awesome!
Thijs Versloot

Communicate through the plasma sheath during re-entry - 1 views

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    In order to overcome the communication blackout problem suffered by hypersonic vehicles, a matching approach has been proposed for the first time in this paper. It utilizes a double-positive (DPS) material layer surrounding a hypersonic vehicle antenna to match with the plasma sheath enclosing the vehicle. Or in more easy language, basically one provides an antenna as capacitor, in combination with the plasma sheath (an inductor), they form an electrical circuit which becomes transparent for long wavelength radiation (the communication signal). The reasons is that fluctuations are balanced by the twin system, preventing absorption/reflection of the incoming radiation. Elegant solution, but will only work on long wavelength communication, plus I am not sure whether the antenna needs active control (as the plasma sheath conditions change during the re-entry phase).
jmlloren

Experimental verification of the feasibility of a quantum channel between space and Earth - 0 views

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    Extending quantum communication to space environments would enable us to perform fundamental experiments on quantum physics as well as applications of quantum information at planetary and interplanetary scales. Here, we report on the first experimental study of the conditions for the implementation of the single-photon exchange between a satellite and an Earth-based station. We built an experiment that mimics a single photon source on a satellite, exploiting the telescope at the Matera Laser Ranging Observatory of the Italian Space Agency to detect the transmitted photons. Weak laser pulses, emitted by the ground-based station, are directed toward a satellite equipped with cube-corner retroreflectors. These reflect a small portion of the pulse, with an average of less-than-one photon per pulse directed to our receiver, as required for faint-pulse quantum communication. We were able to detect returns from satellite Ajisai, a low-Earth orbit geodetic satellite, whose orbit has a perigee height of 1485 km.
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    hello Jose! Interesting it was proposed to do the same with the ISS as part of the ACES experiment. I don't remember the paper but i can look if you're interested
Tom Gheysens

Direct brain-to-brain communication demonstrated in human subjects -- ScienceDaily - 2 views

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    In a first-of-its-kind study, an international team of neuroscientists and robotics engineers has demonstrated the viability of direct brain-to-brain communication in humans.
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    Was just about to post it... :) It seems after transferring the EEG signals of one person, converting it to bits and stimulating some brain activity using magnetic stimulation (TMS) the receiving person actually sees 'flashes of light' in their peripheral vision. So its using your vision sense to get the information across. Would it not be better to try to see if you can generate some kind of signal in the part of your brain that is connected to 'hearing'? Or would this be me thinking too naive?
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    "transferring the EEG signals of one person, converting it to bits and stimulating some brain activity using magnetic stimulation (TMS)" How is this "direct"?
Luís F. Simões

Russian Physicists Solve Radio Black-Out Problem for Re-Entering Spacecraft  ... - 1 views

  • When spacecraft return to Earth, one of the tensest parts of the mission is the radio black out that occurs as the vehicle re-enters the atmosphere. Travelling at hypersonic speeds of between Mach 8 and 15, the spacecraft heats and breaks down molecules in the atmosphere causing a plasma to form. It is this plasma sheath that prevents radio communication.
  • Ref: arxiv.org/abs/0704.3103: Communication Through Plasma Sheaths
LeopoldS

House Approves Flat 2011 Budget for Most Science Agencies - ScienceInsider - 0 views

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    "Some segments of the research community would get their preferences under the House spending bill. For example, it matches the president's request for a 1.5% increase for NASA, to $19 billion, including a 12% increase, to $5 billion, for the space science program. Legislators had already worked out a deal with the White House on the future of the manned space program, and they included funding for an additional shuttle flight in 2011. They even added $35 million to the $20 million increase that the president requested for NASA's education programs, boosting them by a whopping 30% to $180 million. "
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    Some segments of the research community would get their preferences under the House spending bill. For example, it matches the president's request for a 1.5% increase for NASA, to $19 billion, including a 12% increase, to $5 billion, for the space science program. Legislators had already worked out a deal with the White House on the future of the manned space program, and they included funding for an additional shuttle flight in 2011. They even added $35 million to the $20 million increase that the president requested for NASA's education programs, boosting them by a whopping 30% to $180 million.
Francesco Biscani

What Open Source shares with Science - Khaotic Musings - conz's Blog at ZDNet.co.uk Com... - 0 views

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    Beautiful and inspirational piece.
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    Thinking about it, probably Open Source today is more faithful to the "scientific method" than most science, as far as the communication and sharing of information is concerned. We badly need to get rid of the dictatorship of journals and assorted bullshit like impact factors...
santecarloni

[1101.6015] Radio beam vorticity and orbital angular momentum - 1 views

  • It has been known for a century that electromagnetic fields can transport not only energy and linear momentum but also angular momentum. However, it was not until twenty years ago, with the discovery in laser optics of experimental techniques for the generation, detection and manipulation of photons in well-defined, pure orbital angular momentum (OAM) states, that twisted light and its pertinent optical vorticity and phase singularities began to come into widespread use in science and technology. We have now shown experimentally how OAM and vorticity can be readily imparted onto radio beams. Our results extend those of earlier experiments on angular momentum and vorticity in radio in that we used a single antenna and reflector to directly generate twisted radio beams and verified that their topological properties agree with theoretical predictions. This opens the possibility to work with photon OAM at frequencies low enough to allow the use of antennas and digital signal processing, thus enabling software controlled experimentation also with first-order quantities, and not only second (and higher) order quantities as in optics-type experiments. Since the OAM state space is infinite, our findings provide new tools for achieving high efficiency in radio communications and radar technology.
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    It has been known for a century that electromagnetic fields can transport not only energy and linear momentum but also angular momentum. However, it was not until twenty years ago, with the discovery in laser optics of experimental techniques for the generation, detection and manipulation of photons in well-defined, pure orbital angular momentum (OAM) states, that twisted light and its pertinent optical vorticity and phase singularities began to come into widespread use in science and technology. We have now shown experimentally how OAM and vorticity can be readily imparted onto radio beams. Our results extend those of earlier experiments on angular momentum and vorticity in radio in that we used a single antenna and reflector to directly generate twisted radio beams and verified that their topological properties agree with theoretical predictions. This opens the possibility to work with photon OAM at frequencies low enough to allow the use of antennas and digital signal processing, thus enabling software controlled experimentation also with first-order quantities, and not only second (and higher) order quantities as in optics-type experiments. Since the OAM state space is infinite, our findings provide new tools for achieving high efficiency in radio communications and radar technology.
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    and how can we use this?
Juxi Leitner

U.S. Spies See Superhumans, Instant Cities by 2030 | Danger Room | Wired.com - 1 views

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    how the us intelligence community forecasts tech development into 2030
Guido de Croon

Astro Drone featured on robohub! - 4 views

shared by Guido de Croon on 28 Mar 13 - No Cached
LeopoldS and Joris _ liked it
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    "Robohub is an online platform that brings together leading communicators in robotics research, start-ups, business, and education from around the world." What is nice about robohub is that they generally give a look behind the scenes of interesting robotic studies.
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    This is currently a very trendy subject in navigation, indeed. In your case, how exactly do you resolve the ambiguity? why only one 2D marker? what would be the conclusion exactly?
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    "leading communicators", love it!
santecarloni

Chinese Physicists Smash Distance Record For Teleportation  - Technology Review - 1 views

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    The ability to teleport photons through 100 kilometres of free space opens the way for satellite-based quantum communications, say researchers
LeopoldS

Sex differences in the structural connectome of the human brain - 0 views

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    it seems that there are indications that we are differently wired .... Sex differences in human behavior show adaptive complementarity: Males have better motor and spatial abilities, whereas females have superior memory and social cognition skills. Studies also show sex differences in human brains but do not explain this complementarity. In this work, we modeled the structural connectome using diffusion tensor imaging in a sample of 949 youths (aged 8-22 y, 428 males and 521 females) and discovered unique sex differences in brain connectivity during the course of development. Connection-wise statistical analysis, as well as analysis of regional and global network measures, presented a comprehensive description of network characteristics. In all supratentorial regions, males had greater within-hemispheric connectivity, as well as enhanced modularity and transitivity, whereas between-hemispheric connectivity and cross-module participation predominated in females. However, this effect was reversed in the cerebellar connections. Analysis of these changes developmentally demonstrated differences in trajectory between males and females mainly in adolescence and in adulthood. Overall, the results suggest that male brains are structured to facilitate connectivity between perception and coordinated action, whereas female brains are designed to facilitate communication between analytical and intuitive processing modes.
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    I like this abstract: sex, sex, sex, sex, SEX, SEX, SEX, SEX...!!! I wonder if the "sex differences" are related to gender-specific differences...
Thijs Versloot

Graphene #nantennas for power transfer and communication between tiny devices - 0 views

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    Known technically as a surface plasmon polariton (SPP) wave, the effect will allow the nano-antennas to operate at the low end of the terahertz frequency range, between 0.1 and 10 terahertz - instead of at 150 terahertz With this antenna, we can cut the frequency by two orders of magnitude and cut the power needs by four orders of magnitude," said Jornet. "Using this antenna, we believe the energy-harvesting techniques developed by Dr. Wang would give us enough power to create a communications link between nanomachines." As always, graphene seems to be the answer to anything, but steady progress is being made although one needs to find out first an easy method of generating high quality graphene layers (btw that is also one of the reasons to do the supercapacitor study...)
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    Well plasmonics is also the solution to everything it seems...
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