Talks

The current paradigm for decision-making is government is beset by instances of ideological bias and manipulation. The Bush-Cheney Administration, which imposed ideological litmus testing on scientific advisors, eliminated advisory panels, and selectively edited reports on environmental hazards and endangered species, represented the nadir of a slow descent into the abyss of abuse against scientific truth in policymaking that began with Nixon. Some of the consternation about \'science bending\' can be discounted to inevitable and perhaps even desirable political disagreement. But there are also genuine problems with the practices by which government gathers, analyzes and distributes scientific expertise that open the door to this kind of political abuse and manipulation. Even in the absence of bad intentions, there is simply a lack of access to good information and useful ways of taking advantage of good science. In this talk, I develop the argument that technology is changing the nature of expertise in public decision-making and might afford new opportunities for the scientific community to inform policy-making. I put forward proposals for how to design a more collaborative culture that involves the scientific community more directly in decision-making.

I develop the idea that science works because scientists form communities defined by a set of ethical principles which, even if imperfectly applied, tend to lead to progress in our understanding of nature. While these communities have long been international, the combination of the internet with cheap airfare and easy migration of educated people makes scientists into \'global souls\', in Pico Iyer\'s phrase. This opens up new opportunities and also new challenges for the thriving of scientific communities.

I introduce `The Periodic Table of Expertises\' (Collins and Evans 2007). The classification is driven by the idea of tacit knowledge. Its most important division is between the expertise of those who have acquired tacit knowledge pertaining to a specialism as a result of social interaction with the relevant specialist community and those who use only `ubiquitous tacit knowledge\' to acquire specialist `information\' through their reading. I ask whether electronic communication blurs this dividing line; it does enable a huge increase in access to information. I conclude that electronic communication makes no profound difference but I try to explain why it might be thought to change things. Electronic communication can be understood only if we also understand the prior social relationships of those using electronic media.

Mendeley is a new \'science 2.0\' tool for managing & sharing academic papers. Its co-founder, Victor Henning, will highlight conceptual similarities between Last.fm and Mendeley to explore whether the ideas behind social music services can be applied to social software for researchers.

A wiki is an excellent tool for organizing and representing human knowledge. By building a personal wiki notebook, a scientific researcher may optimally organize past and current research notes. In this brief practical introduction I will provide a guided tour of an open scientific notebook -- physicswiki.org -- and discuss the design considerations, features, and content of this open source wiki.

\'The Medium Is The Message ... The Audience Is The Content\', Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964. A \'wiki is a ... collaborative space ... because of its total freedom, ease of access, and use, [and] simple and uniform navigational conventions ... .\' \'[It] ... is also a way to organize and cross-link knowledge ...\', Ward Cunningham, Father of The Wiki (Leuf and Cunningham, 2001, 16). Most wikis provide the user with a set of navigation or utility tools such as the ability to create and edit a page, view recently changed pages, and rollback to previous page versions. In addition, many wikis include a discussion forum for proposed page changes. Among its many perceived benefits are its potential for facilitating a more creative environment and expanding knowledgebase, and a significant ability to harness the power of diverse point-of-views in creating collaborative works. In this presentation, we will speculate on the Wiki as a digital environment that not only supports current scholarly practices, but more importantly, offers a framework for their enhancement and transformation.

The rapid technological change around us supports the idea of general speedup in the tempo of life, the illusion that we are living \'on Internet time.\' Yet many changes are still taking generations, and that includes changes in scientific communication as well as in sociology of science. The evidence for wildly varying rates of changes, and the reasons for them, will be discussed.

Cartographic maps of physical places have guided mankind\'s explorations for centuries. They enabled the discovery of new worlds while also marking territories inhabited by unknown monsters. Domain maps of abstract semantic spaces, see scimaps.org, aim to serve today\'s explorers understanding and navigating the world of science. The maps are generated through scientific analysis of large-scale scholarly datasets in an effort to connect and make sense of the bits and pieces of knowledge they contain. They can be used to objectively identify major research areas, experts, institutions, collections, grants, papers, journals, and ideas in a domain of interest. Local maps provide overviews of a specific area: its homogeneity, import-export factors, and relative speed. They allow one to track the emergence, evolution, and disappearance of topics and help to identify the most promising areas of research. Global maps show the overall structure and evolution of our collective scholarly knowledge. This talk will present an overview of the techniques and cyber-technologies used to study science by scientific means together with sample science maps and their interpretations.

The so-called cosmological backreaction arises when one directly averages the Einstein equations to recover cosmology. While usually applied to avoid employing dark energy models, strictly speaking any cosmological model should be built from such an averaging procedure rather than an assumed background. We apply the Buchert formalism to Einstein-de Sitter, Lambda CDM and quintessence cosmologies, and as a first approach to the full problem, evaluate numerically the discrepancies arising from linear perturbation theory between the averaged behaviour and the assumed behaviour. (References: J. Behrend, IB and G. Robbers, JCAP01(2008)013, aXiv:0710.4964; IB, G. Robbers and J. Behrend, in preperation)