Academic Productivity

(Conference announcement via Gerry McKiernan)

Science in the 21st Century: Science, Society, and Information Technology

Waterloo, Ontario, Sep 8-12, 2008.

Times are changing. In the earlier days, we used to go to the library, today we search and archive our papers online. We have collaborations per email, hold telephone seminars, organize virtual networks, write blogs, and make our seminars available on the internet. Without any doubt, these technological developments influence the way science is done, and they also redefine our relation to the society we live in. Information exchange and management, the scientific community, and the society as a whole can be thought of as a triangle of relationships, the mutual interactions in which are becoming increasingly important.

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Google will host large scientific datasets at http://research.google.com. That is, of you have a dataset that is requested constantly, now you can ‘open-source’ it and let google take the server load. Wired has this covered.

For those not seeing the point in having open, portable data, this presentation (Making Massive Datasets Universally Accessible and Useful) is a good an explanation.

How do you ship a large dataset to google? Well, they send you hard drives in a suitcase!:

(Google people) are providing a 3TB drive array (Linux RAID5). The array is provided in “suitcase” and shipped to anyone who wants to send they data to Google. Anyone interested gives Google the file tree, and they SLURP the data off the drive. I believe they can extend this to a larger array (my memory says 20TB).

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Sara Lloyd has published a manifesto on the way knowledge is distributed today.

In an ‘always on’ world in which everything is increasingly digital, where content is increasingly fragmented and ‘bite-sized’, where ‘prosumers’ merge the traditionally disparate roles of producer and consumer, where search replaces the library and where multimedia mash-ups -not text- holds the attraction for the digital natives who are growing up fast into the mass market of tomorrow, what role do publishers still have to play and how will they have to evolve to hold on to a continuing role in the writing and reading culture of the future?

This is important since the publishing industry somehow determines how academics allocate their time. If you can communicate your ideas in a way that fits the current standards, you may get them to spread farther.

Another interesting point is how the development of the text itself and the writing and editing process is now often ‘open’: there are ‘beta’ books on the net, and readers, ‘debug’ chapters as soon as the author releases them. This is a fantastic model that could leave professional editors out of the equation and speed up publishing in general. But then, do you really need the paper version of the book when all is said and done? Do you need to make a trip to the library to get it?

Oh, and by the way, Adobe acrobat 9 is out and now you can embed flash (i.e., video) in it. This makes possible to create a book that contains talks; or 3D rotations of a complex data visualization. Yet another reason to pay attention to fully digital book distribution.

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How can you take advantage of the current craze about social media?

The fact is that many people use social media to  build a powerful reputation In any Industry. This article will focus on professional social sites (i.e., linkedIn, biznik) and not on the more leisure-based social sites (mySpace, facebook). Having said that, do not discard the more traditional forums and blogs; making posts in these can get you the same benefits than professional social sites, and they are often more targeted.

1 - Benefits are not immediate

Social networks will look like a supreme waste of time in the short term; the benefits are cumulative and slow. Andy Erickson (linkedIn) says:

For me, it’s sort of like having done all the preparation work for an emergency (fire drills in school, CPR certification) and then being grateful that you did when you finally need it.

This is also true for other forms of name-branding and visibility such as blogging. Having the attention of some people is a great currency that you never know when you are going to need.

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