Group items tagged

The key to reducing information overload is to more efficiently find the data you want among the information that you don’t care about.

at about the blogs where one in five or one in 10 posts are relevant for you?

the real magic is in filtering.

My favorite filtering tool is Yahoo Pipes

which lets me filter an RSS feed using various criteria: URL, author, date, content and more. 

and my some blogs filtered for just the best posts using PostRank.

The best thing about PostRank is that you can get an RSS feed of just the best posts from a particular publisher, and that feed then includes the PostRank score,

you can do even more hacking on the PostRank RSS feed using Yahoo Pipes.

Another technique that helps me to consume information more efficiently is to modify the format of many of my RSS feeds

By bringing more details into the title, I can avoid spending time clicking to get more information.

The final trick is to use Web APIs to gather additional data

isten to the audio from my session

His attention to the concept of serendipity is the best evidence

Some scientists seem to have been aware of the fact that the elegance and parsimony prescribed for the presentation of the results of scientific work tend to falsify retrospectively the actual process by which the results were obtained” (Merton and Barber 2004: 159)

Indeed if you are clever enough to take advantage of the opportunity, you may capture a fox thanks to accidental circumstances while searching for hares.

Colombus’ discovery of America, Fleming’s discovery of penicillin, Nobel’s discovery of dynamite, and other similar cases, prove that serendipity has always been present in research. Merton (1973: 164)

“Intuition, scriptures, chance experiences, dreams, or whatever may be the psychological source of an idea.

This descriptive model has many important implications for the politics of science, considering that the administration and organization of scientific research have to deal with the balance between investments and performance. To recognize that a good number of scientific discoveries are made by accident and sagacity may be satisfactory for the historian of science, but it raises further problems for research administrators.

If this is true, it is necessary to create the environment, the social conditions for serendipity. These aspects are explored in Chapter 10 of The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity.

The solution appears to be a Golden Mean between total anarchy and authoritarianism. Too much planning in science is harmful.

Whitney supervised the evolution of the inquiry everyday but limited himself to asking: “Are you having fun today?” It was a clever way to make his presence felt, without exaggerating with pressure. The moral of the story is that you cannot plan discoveries, but you can plan work that will probably lead to discoveries:

If scientists are determined by social factors (language, conceptual frames, interests, etc.) to find certain and not other “answers,” why are they often surprised by their own observations? A rational and parsimonious explanation of this phenomenon is that the facts that we observe are not necessarily contained in the theories we already know. Our faculty of observation is partly independent from our conceptual apparatus. In this independence lies the secret of serendipity.