Heidi Allen Digital Strategy

What if every scientist could share their data as easily as they tweet about their lunch? Michael Nielsen calls for scientists to embrace new tools for collaboration that will enable discoveries to happen at the speed of Twitter.

I find this concept very helpful: a need to ‘change how we construct knowledge itself’.  It also helps answer the question why some social media sites for science bods dont work – for example social networks for scientists with similar interests such as Research Gate or BiomedExperts have not worked as well as they should have. Why? Because scientists get no reward for uploading data to social media sites – it doesn’t result in papers. No papers, no funding = no ability to buy a round next time you’re in the pub. What Michael Nielsen shows here is that science can use social media for entirely new ways of collaborating.

An outstanding undertaking, beautifully captured on video MIT cognitive scientist Deb Roy shared a remarkable experiment, from the day his son was brought home from the hospital the family’s every movement and word was captured and tracked with a series of fisheye lenses in every room in their house. For Five Years!

The purpose was to understand how we learn language, in context, through the words we hear. For example, Roy was able to track the length of every sentence spoken to the child in which a particular word–like “water”–was included. Right around the time the child started to say the word, what Roy calls the “word birth,” something remarkable happened.

“Caregiver speech dipped to a minimum and slowly ascended back out in complexity.” In other words, when mom and dad and nanny first hear a child speaking a word, they unconsciously stress it by repeating it back to him all by itself or in very short sentences. Then as he gets the word, the sentences lengthen again. The infant shapes the caregivers’ behavior, the better to learn.

The clip below shows the evolution of the word ‘ball’.

Via Slashdot – worth reading the full article on Fast Company.  The images themselves are compelling, and from what this article says this will soon be seen on TED.com.

This study of social networks is from Harvard Professor Nicholas Christakis, who during this TEDtalk came out with this superbness:

Our experience of the world depends on the architecture of the ties around us, it depends on the actual structure of the networks in which we are residing and on all the kinds of things that ripple and flow through the network.

Human beings assemble themselves and form a kind of super organism. A super organism is a collection of individuals which show behaviours or phenomena that are not reducible to the study of individuals and must be understood by reference to and by studying the collective

Compare this ‘super organism’ to a hive of bees looking for new nesting site or flock of birds and then apply it to market crashes, adoption of innovation etc. We form social networks because the benefits of a connective life outweigh the costs such as the spread of good and valuable things

What is spread is not a behaviour, but a new ‘norm’, an idea.

About Nicholas Christakis

At Harvard, Christakis is a Professor of Medicine, Health Care Policy, and Sociology, and he directs a diverse research group investigating social networks.

His work examines the biological, psychological, sociological, and mathematical rules that govern how we form these social networks, and the rules that govern how they shape our lives. His work shows how phenomena as diverse as obesity, smoking, emotions, ideas, germs, and altruism can spread through our social ties, and how genes can partially underlie our creation of social ties to begin with. His work also sheds light on how we might take advantage of an understanding of social networks to make the world a better place.

Thanks for the hat-tip Chris and Raz.

Something close to my heart – sharing of information. This TED talk by Tim Berners Lee shows the benefits of sharing data on the web – for clinicians and researchers this is a big deal, publication of experiments in top journals can result in major funding and raw data is often closely guarded.

But…when data is freely shared the results are impressive.