2009 Minne Web Con Social Connections In Scientific Research

Social Connections in Scientiﬁc Timothy M. Kunau, MS kunau@umn.edu Research timk@relres.com twitter.com/tkunau MinneWebCon 2009 April 6, 2009

Agenda •Introduction •Story •Deﬁnitions •Examples •Tips •Questions

Introduction Timothy M. Kunau •technologist •social animal •explorer

Story: Searching for Jim Gray

Jim Gray: Tenacious • 7:00AM, Sunday, January 28, 2007 http://helpﬁndjim.com/

The Problem • Common • Most resolve within 24hrs. • USCG search-and- rescue scoured 132,000 square miles of Paciﬁc over 5 days. • Boats and aircraft were equipped with thermal- imaging radar. http://helpﬁndjim.com/

TODD & ASSOCIATES, INC. MARINE SURVEYORS, CLAIMS SETTLING AGENTS & INVESTIGATIONS LOST AT SEA Lost at Sea 1983 40’ C & C sailboat • Hull: Red hull w/silver/gray graphic • Decks: White • Monday morning the Intended course - West of Farrallon Islands & USCG issued a press return to San Francisco Bay release for the missing Vessel Owner: Jim Gray Age: 63 sailor. • The Press made the Vessel Name: “Tenacious” Microsoft connection HIN #: ZCC40183M83B Documentation #: 661 459 and arrived with TV LAST KNOWN LOCATION: 15 miles West of Golden Gate Bridge cameras. DATE LAST SEEN: January 28, 2007 INVESTIGATING AGENCY: United States Coast Guard REWARD • Email started to circulate TBD TBD between the “Friends of A reward is being offered by the insurance company for information leading to the safe return and recov- Jim” ery of the above vessel. Reward amounts for information leading to the safe return and recovery shall be determined based on the strength of information and shall be at the sole discretion of the carrier. Assured, relatives of assured, or employees of entity offering reward, are ineligible for reward for recovery. With any information, call collect or immediately notify your local law enforcement agency. TODD & ASSOCIATES, INC. (800) 325-8061 or (619) 226-1895 Fax: (619) 223-8942 stolenboats@boatman.com http://www.boatman.com BSIS #21305 February 2, 2007; 07-1030 ! ! San Diego, CA 92106 www.boatman.com 2390 Shelter Island Drive #220

Volunteer resources • World-wide effort • Bill Gates at Microsoft personally provided access to corporate NetJets. • NASA scheduled ER-2 training missions in the search area. • Sergey Brin, of Google, worked with DigitalGlobe to re-task satellites.

http://www.sigmod.org/sigmod/record/issues/0806/p21.olson.pdf

Amazon’s Turk • Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon.com, offered Amazon’s Mechanical Turk for distributing tasks. • Satellite data ultimately covered a 30,000 square mile search area. • 560,000 images • 12,000 online volunteers • 20 ‘likely’, 1 ‘very likely’ https://www.mturk.com/mturk/welcome

http://www.sigmod.org/sigmod/record/issues/0806/p21.olson.pdf

Lost at Sea Search suspended: February 16, 2007 2:00 PM PT

Bio: Jim Gray • Manager of Microsoft Research eScience Group. • ACM Turing Award Winner for transaction processing. • Interests in databases and transaction processing - with particular focus on using computers to make scientists more productive. • Projects included the world-wide telescope and online databases like TerraService.net and SkyServer.sdss.org. “Jim Gray is one of the • Many of the tools his work made possible were world’s best listeners.” marshaled in the massive search. Ed Lazowska http://helpﬁndjim.com/

Deﬁnitions

Social Media: Internet and mobile-based tools for sharing and discussing information among humans.

Social connections in scientiﬁc research require • Diversity of opinion: from multiple perspectives. • Independence: opinions aren't determined by the opinions of those around them. • Decentralization: supporting specialization and drawing on local knowledge. • Aggregation: Some mechanism exist for turning private contributions into a collective story.

• Seek Relationships. • Start Conversations. • Create connections to support Stories.

Examples

ARPANET August 1964 http://www.rand.org/pubs/research_memoranda/2006/RM3420.pdf

ARPANET December 1969 http://www.rand.org/pubs/research_memoranda/2006/RM3420.pdf

ARPANET December 1970 http://www.rand.org/pubs/research_memoranda/2006/RM3420.pdf

ARPANET July 1975 http://www.rand.org/pubs/research_memoranda/2006/RM3420.pdf

ARPANET July 1976 http://www.rand.org/pubs/research_memoranda/2006/RM3420.pdf

ARPAnet • Unix to Unix Copy (UUCP) • USENET news groups http://www.rand.org/pubs/research_memoranda/2006/RM3420.pdf

ARPANET • Survivability. • Designed to support defense research during the Cold War. • While the hardware was interesting (PDP-10/11 systems linked by IMPs), the connection between people was more important. • Unix to Unix Copy (UUCP), with the rise of supporting technologies, became the method of transmitting ﬁles from one site to another. • USENET news groups

Networks critical to humans are Social, not Electronic.

Social bookmarking • Flickr: photo sharing and tagging. • YouTube: video sharing and tagging. • digg.com: technology news link sharing and tagging. • Technorati: technology news link sharing and tagging. • Del.ic.io.us: news link sharing and tagging.

Flickr http://www.ﬂickr.com

Flickr • Open invitation to comment on the images provided by others. • Users can assign arbitrary descriptive tags to the image. • There is little constraint over what a tag can be. A word, a group of words. • Patterns start to emerge. http://www.ﬂickr.com

Connotea http://www.connotea.org/

What is it? • Reference management and social bookmarking service for scientists • Modeled on del.icio.us, recognizing scholarly reference management was a similar problem space. • Free • On-line • EndNote for the web, shared. http://www.connotea.org/

Connotea: key concepts • Diverse collection of opinions, if not facts. • Independent development and non-hierarchical organization: Avoid ‘group think’, anarchy of unconstrained vocabularies is a good thing. • Decentralized discovery of bibliographic information: imports external bibliographic references. • Aggregating: bookmarks are visible to others. There is a provision for private bookmarks, but the default is public. Patterns begin to emerge. Multiple tags for each citation express facets. http://www.connotea.org/

The Basic idea http://www.connotea.org/

A tactile sense of Relationship,

reCAPTCHA Translation • Carnegie Mellon University • Channels the human effort spent solving CAPTCHAs into helping to digitize books from the Internet Archive (www.archive.org) and back issues of the New York Times (www.nytimes.com). recaptcha.net • When you solve a reCAPTCHA, you help preserve literature by deciphering a word that was not readable by computers. http://recaptcha.net/

reCAPTCHA: humor http://recaptcha.net/

Fold.It • Protein folding as video game. (FPPF?) • Welcome to the Fold: Teams support for group play. • University of Washington • Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency (DARPA) http://fold.it/

Fold.It http://fold.it/

with data in Conversation,

The old way creates a tree. The new rakes leaves together. -- David Weinberger http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Weinberger

EBI: Ensembl Genome Browser • Data, includes human and approximately 40 other species (see www.ensembl.org for a list) as well as comparative genomics data (550GB). • Biomart, is a de-normalized, query-optimized Ewan Birney database that facilitates complex queries of one or www.ensembl.org more datasets (172GB). • Data sharing on a massive scale. • Track-based annotations preserve provenance. • Not simply data, an API.

http://www.ensembl.org/Homo_sapiens/Location/View?db=core;g=ENSG00000180613;r=4:54660955-54662879;t=ENST00000326902

supporting Stories.

Encyclopedia of Life • A series of websites, one for each of the approximately 1.8 million known species. • scientists and non- scientists working from museums and research institutions around the world. • Wikipedia for eol.org Zoology.

Audubon Society • National network of community-based nature centers and chapters, scientiﬁc and educational programs, and advocacy groups. • Social networks existed before social media tools. • 1900 ﬁrst annual Christmas Bird Count proposed as alternative to traditional Christmas hunt.

Tips for better social connections in scientiﬁc research.

Read

Wisdom of Crowds Author: James Surowiecki, New Yorker business columnist Hardcover: 320 pages Publisher: DoubleDay (05/25/2004) ISBN: 0385503865 Average customer review: 4 of 5 stars, based on 111 reviews.

Here Comes Everybody Author: Clay Shirky Hardcover: 336 pages Publisher: Penguin Press HC (02/28/2008) ISBN: 1594201536 Average customer review: 4.5 of 5 stars, based on 39 reviews.

Wikinomics Author: Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams Hardcover: 320 pages Publisher: Portfolio Hardcover (12/28/2006) ISBN: 1591841380 Average customer review: 4 of 5 stars, based on 102 reviews.

Tribes Author: Seth Godin Hardcover: 160 pages Publisher: Portfolio Hardcover (10/16/2008) ISBN: 1591842336 People, not ads, build Average customer review: 4.2 social networks of 5 stars, based on 101 reviews.

The Cluetrain Manifesto Authors: Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Rick Levine, Doc Searls, David Weinberger Hardcover: 190 pages Publisher: Basic Books (01/09/2001) 95 Theses ISBN: 0738204315 Average customer review: 4 of 5 stars, based on 153 reviews.

Communicate through humor • Jorge Cham's comic Ph.D. or Piled Higher and Deeper: Life (or Lack Thereof) in Academia. • Humanize academia through humor. • Newton's First Law of Graduation states: “a grad student in procrastination tends to stay in procrastination unless an external force is applied to it.\" phdcomics.com Date: Thursday, April 23rd Time: 6-8pm Location: Anderson Hall, Room 210

Seek Relationships •Make personal connections, but keep ties loose. •Keep yourself exposed to as much information as possible. •Think ‘hive mind’ versus ‘org chart’. •Share unpublished or unprocessed data. •Share resulting data •Share experiment design.

Start Conversations •Become a bridge across hierarchies. •Embrace new ways of connecting and aggregating information. •Increase your audience: communicate locally and internationally. Intentionally. •Provide opportunities for participation in division of labor.

Create connections to support Stories •Immerse yourself in your chosen ﬁeld. •Maintain independence of opinion and avoid ‘group think’. •Acknowledge collaboration in your results. •Develop endurance. •Engage with Passion!

\"Knowledge speaks, but wisdom listens.\" Jimi Hendrix

Questions

Thank You. Timothy M. Kunau, MS kunau@umn.edu timk@relres.com twitter.com/tkunau MinneWebCon 2009

2009 Minne Web Con Social Connections In Scientific Research

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