Advanced Concepts Team

Or: mathematicians catch up with open-source software developers :)

"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?

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!

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.

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 :-)

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

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 ...

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).

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.

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.

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

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...

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.

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...?

I like them again and again ....

what would be todays equivalents?

Ha! The one about the horse is that "in 100 years there will be people who've never seen a live horse in their lives" :-) Actually it's more than true now with children asking my mother who works in the school "so, do those kangaroos really exist"? Children are fed with so much realistic BS on TV (dinosaur parks etc.) that they can hardly tell the difference between fiction and reality. If you already have offspring: have they seen, say, a live cow or chicken already?

(This is most probably a reference to the quote: "Horse is as everyone can see")

>what would be todays equivalents?
Hmmm... what about technology forecasts?

ah. that makes sense. what about the one where they're having dinner then?

For all those who find solving differential equations boring...

Very interesting, though I'm amused how the author tends to (subconsciously?) shift the blame to non-US dictators :-) Suggestion that in absence of cold war US might have abandoned HB and ICBM programmes is ridiculous.

Interesting, this was written by Neal Stephenson ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neal_Stephenson#Works ). Great article indeed.
The videos of the event from which this arose might be equally interesting:

Here Be Dragons: Governing a Technologically Uncertain Future
http://newamerica.net/events/2011/here_be_dragons


"To employ a commonly used metaphor, our current proficiency in rocket-building is the result of a hill-climbing approach; we started at one place on the technological landscape-which must be considered a random pick, given that it was chosen for dubious reasons by a maniac-and climbed the hill from there, looking for small steps that could be taken to increase the size and efficiency of the device."

You know Luis, when I read this quote, I could help thinking about GO, which would be kind of ironic considering the context but not far from what happens in the field :p

Fantastic!!!

this is the podcast I was listening to ...

We can do it in nine :)

why wait then?

hmm, wonder how easy it is to get funding for that, 25k is a bit steep for 10weeks :)

well, we wait for the same fundings they get and then we will do it in nine.... as we say in Rome "a mettece un cartello so bboni tutti". (italian check for Juxi)

and what you think about the project subjects?

I like the fact that there are quite a lot of space projects .... and these are not even bad in my view:
The space project teams have developed imaginative new solutions for space and spinoffs for Earth. The AISynBio project team is working with leading NASA scientists to design bioengineered organisms that can use available resources to mitigate harsh living environments (such as lack of air, water, food, energy, atmosphere, and gravity) - on an asteroid, for example, and also on Earth .

The SpaceBio Labs team plans to develop methods for doing low-cost biological research in space, such as 3D tissue engineering and protein crystallization.

The Made in Space team plans to bring 3D printing to space to make space exploration cheaper, more reliable, and fail-safe ("send the bits, not the atoms"). For example, they hope to replace some of the $1 billion worth of spare parts and tools that are on the International Space Station.

and all in only a three months summer graduate program!! that is impressive. God I feel so stupid!!!

where can I buy it?????

ore-order just here ... shipping Feb 2013

https://live.leapmotion.com/order.html

just ordered it!

formation flying around black holes... so practical...

Shit!! I only got 79, should have lied better...

My score was obtained with *sincere* answers, don't cheat!

ouah, 80...! didn't think i was so nerd...!

Dario, Francesco, we're waiting for your scores... are you afraid of the truth??

hmm "Low Ranking Nerd. Definitely a nerd but low on the totem pole of nerds." , as of a score of 66

http://www.nerdtests.com/images/ft/nq/7532d17e56.gif
http://www.nerdtests.com/images/ft/nq/7532d17e56.gif

I am disappointed!!!!! Shame on me.......

Sigh

wow!

wtf is this! As I read this morning in the newspaper (not even a scientific one), 1 TeV is the kinetic energy of a flying mosquito... so be careful !
It seems they already sloved every thing on this website:
"At the Institute for Space Quantum Physics ISQP, it was already proved in 1991-1992 that dark matter is in magnetic fields as magnetic space quantum flux."

This website is the biggest source of crackpots i have seen in a long time...!
(http://www.supernovae-energy.com/)

Come on guys, this website is hilarious!
"The HAITI EARTHQUAKE (...) were impossible for the Institute for Space Quantum Physics (ISQP) to compute because on one single planet was on a common line or axis with the Sun: Venus."

as a start of a peer reviewed paper this is an interesting first paragraph: "I recently saw an old friend for the first time in many years. We had been Ph.D. students at the same time, both studying science, although in different areas. She later dropped out of graduate school, went to Harvard Law School and is now a senior lawyer for a major environmental organization. At some point, the conversation turned to why she had left graduate school. To my utter astonishment, she said it was because it made her feel stupid. After a couple of years of feeling stupid every day, she was ready to do something else."

Hilarious! Mr Schwartz, who made a PhD at Stanford(!) and apparently is working as a postdoc now, has finally discovered what science is about!!! Quote: "That's when it hit me: nobody did. That's why it was a research problem." And he seems so excited about it! I think he should not only get published in 6.14 journal, but also get the Nobel Prize immediately!
Seriously, after reading something like this, how one may not have superstitions about the educational system in the US?

I'm also pretty sure that the ones who are remembered are not the ones who tried to be... so why all these rules !? I think it's bullshit...

The seminar is not a manual on how to achieve fame, but rather an analysis on how others were able to perform very significant work. The two things are in some cases related, but the seminar's focus is on the second.

Then read a good book on the life of Copernic, it's the anti-manual of Hamming... he breaks all the rules !