In 2008, IEEE brought out a special issue on Singularity. Anybody who is interested in developments of technology will probably be familiar with the term (Technological) Singularity. Perhaps popularized by futurist Ray Kurzweil (author of “Singularity is Near”). Discussion about what is singularity, is this really happening, who are the players..etc – are collected in this IEEE portal.
More of this here: [IEEE Singularity Page]
As appeared in 2008 EE times article. IMEC is named as one of the places!
More about this here: [The Link]
Here is stephen wolfram about computing a theory about everything. Pretty interesting about emergence of wolfram alpha..
A recent article, describes & highlights some of the pressures scientists & researchers face in a professional setting, which potentially leads to research & publication of falsehoods. Some of the reasons why many research results are outright wrong, are:
The social environment in which research occurs places scientists under pressure to perform. These institutional pressures have the well-intentioned aim of encouraging high productivity and performance, measured by the amount and quality of publications, and success in attracting research funding from government and charitable agencies.
However, there is an inherent tension between the scientific process, where success is often unpredictable, and the means by which research productivity is frequently assessed. The criteria currently used to assess a scientist’s career and make decisions about future funding, salary and tenure may be an important factor encouraging departure from the ideals of scientific integrity.
But institutional pressures of this sort are unlikely to be solely responsible…
As researchers (or otherwise) we all make predictions about what happens next. Sometimes we keep those to ourselves, sometimes we share with our friends and colleagues and sometimes we share it with the world through media.
But it might also pay scientists—financially and politically—to go along with such demands, and to indulge in what Joan Haran, Cesagen Research Fellow at Cardiff University, UK, diplomatically calls “discursive overbidding,” whereby they talk up the potential value of work for which they seek the support of funds, changes in legislation or public approval.”
..
The article also includes useful tips on how to predict responsibly
Monomath vs polymaths, specialist vs generalist, depth vs breadth in scientific knowledge. As many you might have noticed the degree of specialization required in many technical fields is very high. There is a high barrier to entry in most fields, requiring years of dedicated & focused work to make any meaningful contribution (no matter how small). An interesting article discusses these issues.
“The question is whether their [polymaths] loss has affected the course of human thought. Polymaths possess something that monomaths do not. Time and again, innovations come from a fresh eye or from another discipline. Most scientists devote their careers to solving the everyday problems in their specialism. Everyone knows what they are and it takes ingenuity and perseverance to crack them. But breakthroughs—the sort of idea that opens up whole sets of new problems—often come from other fields. The work in the early 20th century that showed how nerves work and, later, how DNA is structured originally came from a marriage of physics and biology. Today, Einstein’s old employer, the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, is laid out especially so that different disciplines rub shoulders. I suspect that it is a poor substitute.
Isaiah Berlin once divided thinkers into two types. Foxes, he wrote, know many things; whereas hedgehogs know one big thing. The foxes used to roam free across the hills. Today the hedgehogs rule. “
More about this here: [The Link]
Be it a source code of some software development project or various writings for some publication in journal or conference proceedings, we inevitably create different versions of the documents or the source code. Instead of simply naming them as v1, v2.. or some scheme similar to it, there are many tools available which help us maintain different versions in a more efficient manner. Some of them mentioned here:
Both GIT & Mercurial is based on distributed peer-to-peer model, while SVN & CVS are based on centralized client-server model. A review of these revision control systems is presented in an article in Communications of the ACM Magazine, Sept 2009 issue. The main conclusions of this survey is reproduced here:
“Choosing a revision-control system is a question with a surprisingly small number of absolute answers. The fundamental issues to consider are what kind of data your team works with, and how you want your team members to interact. If you have masses of frequently edited binary data, a distributed revision- control system may simply not suit your needs. If agility, innovation, and remote work are important to you, the distributed systems are far more likely to suit your needs; a centralized system may slow your team down in comparison.
There are also many second-order considerations. For example, firewall management may be an issue: Mercurial and Subversion work well over HTTP and with SSL (Secure Sockets Layer), but Git is unusably slow over HTTP. For security, Subversion offers access controls down to the level of individual files, but Mercurial and Git do not. For ease of learning and use, Mercurial and Subversion have simple command sets that resemble each other (easing the transition from one to the other), whereas Git exposes a potentially overwhelming amount of complexity. When it comes to integration with build tools, bug databases, and the like, all three are easily scriptable. Many software development tools already support or have plug-ins for one or more of these tools.
Given the demands of portability, simplicity, and performance, I usually choose Mercurial for new projects, but a developer or team with different needs or preferences could legitimately choose any of them and be happy in the long term. We are fortunate that it is easy to interoperate among these three systems, so experimentation with the unknown is simple and risk-free.”
More of this from the article here: Making Sense of Revision Control Systems, by Brayn O’Sullivan
Having reference lists is one of the most indispensable tools a researcher must posses. Whether is a journal or article from conference proceedings, to books to web-clippings. etc. Many tools are available for a researcher to manage their reference lists. Here are a few
Here is an interesting article from boston.com about relationships.
…”A growing body of experimental evidence suggests that, on the whole, we know significantly less about our friends, colleagues, and even spouses than we think we do. This lack of knowledge extends far beyond embarrassing game-show fodder – we’re often completely wrong about their likes and dislikes, their political beliefs, their tastes, their cherished values. We lowball the ethics of our co-workers; we overestimate how happy our husbands or wives are.”
…”Although such blind spots might at first seem like a comment on the atomization of modern life, the shallowness of human connection in the age of bowling alone, psychologists say that these gaps might simply be an unavoidable product of the way human beings forge personal bonds. Even in close relationships, there are holes in what we know about each other, and we fill them with our own assumptions.”
…”But perhaps most surprisingly, these blind spots might not be a bad thing, and may even strengthen relationships. Many of the benefits that friendship provides don’t necessarily depend on perfect familiarity; they stem instead from something closer to reliability. And it may be that a certain ignorance of our friends’ weaknesses, or of the realms where we disagree, may even help sustain the deep sense of support that friends are there to provide.”
More about this here: [The Link]
An interesting article was published recently about the role of scientific enquiry when mixed in policy making and politics. This experince shows that it not straightforward (as most of us suspected!). It is (yet another) motivation for more science education or familiarity of the general public. But, it also gives an indication to the scientists to be abit more smart and engange in the public debates. For being smart, one insight this article clearly points to is to pose the context and motivate the objectivity of science w.r.t what people care about. And, not necessarily impose to the public two constraints simultaneously – one is to learn more about science and its methods and second is to engage in a debate. The two issues are separate, best handled separately.
