Thursday, September 12, 2002

Busy for a While I've been working lately on some heavy code refactorings lately, and things are going well--the newly cleaned-up program structure is allowing me to add new features at a breakneck pace. It's really nice to see a tangled old hairball of code get better quickly after a long, long slog. And we're just getting warmed up. But for a number of reasons, I won't be updating this site for a few weeks. When I resume updates, I'll see if I can post some screenshots. 6:17:06 PM    trackback []     Articulate []

I encourage all of you to link to this site.  Check out Dr. Mary Ruwart's "Short Answers To The Tough Questions" column. http://www.self-gov.org/ruwart/ [Tara Sue's Weblog News] 2:50:45 PM    trackback []     Articulate []

Blogging, scientists, humanists, and complexity Stephen over at Blogging Alone mentions Sébastien Paquet's reasons why blogging has failed to become a widely accepted research tool among academia. I disagree with nearly all of these reasons. Below is the list of reasons and my thoughts based on my own experiences: 1. It takes time. All research and information sharing takes time, but yet it continues in so many ways. I know very few research scholars unwilling to do anything simply because it 'takes time' 2. The technology is not well-established and tested at this point. Since when is Blogging a technology heavy solution? It is more a social phenomenon and paradigm shift that in the end will be technology agnostic. 3. Many people don't like being among the first ones doing something. Silly, silly, silly. This is a population-general statement and does not support the hypothesis regarding research and academia. 4. Not all scholars are used to the Web and hypertext. I would say that most scholars are. This is no longer 1994. 5. Shyness and fear of public mistakes. We are talking about scholars aren't we? 6. Many scholars won't write unless they have to. The scholars I know, all they do is write, that is how they communicate. 7. They may especially be reluctant to publicly expose ideas that they haven't tested. A huge vast majority of scholarly ideas are untested - especially within the social sciences. Scholars within the social sciences have the most to benefit from a Blog culture - it will provide them another forum in which to expose ideas outside the circle of pure scholars. 8. Fear that someone else will pick up their ideas and work them out before they do. This is a legitimate reason. [Superfluous Man] I think this reply and this earlier one highlight the cultural difference between the social sciences and "science" that would be worth exploring. I have a "science" background. In this world, it would seem that there is more pressure for conformity. People are much more concerned about making mistakes in public and about doing things in non-traditional ways. For instance, it is far easier to publish work that follows a time-honored template, even when the template is arguably inadequate for the problem at hand, than to push forth an innovative methodology. Perhaps you could put it this way: scientists think of themselves as producers of reliable results, while social scientists see themselves as producers of tentative ideas. But this is an overgeneralization. Many theoreticians such as physicist David Mermin produce (very interesting) ideas, not results. I think the difference boils down to whether you're working inside a paradigm (what Kuhn calls normal science) or are busy trying to work out appropriate paradigms for a particular object of study. The latter kind of people spend little time in a lab and more time arguing, so maybe they're better prepared for blogging. But as science is increasingly diving into complex problems, growing numbers of scientists question the adequacy of the dominant paradigm or methodology in their particular discipline. Scientists gone meta. Third culture. Those oddballs are the ones I expect to start blogging. (By the way, if you're reading this, somehow recognize yourself and haven't yet started blogging, now is a perfect time to begin.) By the way, googling for "normal science" I found this really interesting page on post-normal science which suggests a possible middle ground between the labcoats and the latte drinkers. The business world in some ways would look like the most fertile soil for such a brand of science. Don't you think? 10:40:49 AM    trackback []     Articulate []

Thanks Jim Hughes I have been trying to find something like this to use with my unused Jabber client. Hurrah for Jabrss. Good news, Jabrss is back online. For those of you who don't use it, this 'bot works a bit like Simon Fell's blogToaster or Russell's blogAgent in that it tells you when someone has updated their weblog, but even better it gives you a snippet of their RSS feed, so you can see what they've posted. And the best bit is that it uses Jabber rather than one of those oddball proprietary instant messaging systems! posted by Jim Hughes at [Feet Up!] 9:51:23 AM    trackback []     Articulate []

Thanks for the link, Sebastien Paquet. I guess I really should start writing more comments on what I think about these links I am throwing up onto my Weblog A klognet makes the organization more sensitive and perceptive. Klognets as enterprise early warning system Dewayne Mikkelson pointed to a post by McGee about knowledge sharing, knowledge logs, and the unexpected. (Emphasis mine.) Do you live in a changing world? New rules? New problems and threats? New opportunities? New world views? Are you in touch with reality? Are you keeping it fresh? Challenging your assumptions?  Are you doing it alone?  [...full story at aka klogs] [Seb's Open Research] 9:42:11 AM    trackback []     Articulate []

Learnin' on kuro5hin. Introduction to Geometric Algebra (part two). This article continues to introduce the reader to the basics of geometric algebra. Some problems will be provided for the reader to work on their own in order to reinforce the lessons described here. While a few of the solutions to these problems will be provided, readers are encouraged to solve them all and post their answers as comments. [...]  If the reader works to comprehend the content and also works the problems, they will come away with a basic understanding of what a geometric algebra is and how they work. Specific goals include the following. The reader will know how to perform basic operations like reflection, rotation, and reversion. The reader will begin to work with objects expressed in a representation-free manner. [kuro5hin.org] Here's part one. Many readers are expressing intense interest in this material. They're interacting with one another. Can you believe it? they're spontaneously doing math, and liking it! [Seb's Open Research] 9:33:03 AM    trackback []     Articulate []

Western Philosophy in a Nutshell, Part I. The immediate purpose of this guide is to provide a layman's framework for talking about subjects philosophically. [kuro5hin.org] Ambitious, but why not?. [Seb's Open Research] 9:32:07 AM    trackback []     Articulate []