Did you know that 80-90% of all scientific discovery has been accomplished in the last 100 years? Apparently if we calculate the percentage of scientists who are still alive from the total number of scientists that have ever lived, we will get just about the same number: 80-90% (Sismondo, 2004).

Of course asking a question like “do you believe in science?” might seem absurd. Ever since my days back in Alexander’s lab at the University of Utah I have considered myself one of those scientists, but now having read too much philosophy I find myself questioning what I was doing. Much like Bruno Latour’s anxious friend who only dares to admit he isn’t so certain about “reality”, I find myself trying to justify this scientist identity.

Looking towards the past, and in anticipation of my future, gnovis is running an essay of mine that briefly considers two theoretical heavyweights: Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn.

If Popper is right, then we are accomplishing some of the most remarkable work in human history. However, if Kuhn is correct, then we might need to come to terms with the reality that all of that work might be thrown out the window some day.

This time around I don’t have any answers. If you do, I would love to hear them.

Read more here:
Falsifying my Paradigms @ gnovis Journal

As a new member of gnovis’ New Media Team, I will be spending a good chunk of time this year engaged in “academic blogging.” I am not quite sure what that is yet, but I am thrilled to invite you to help me find out by participating in the conversations on gnovis’ blog. In case you haven’t bookmarked it, here is the address: http://www.gnovisjournal.org/blog

Bravely charting its first year, the New Media Team is comprised of Patricia Fancher, Margarita Rayzberg, and myself. This means there is a lot of passion on gnovis’ blog, and so we thought it was appropriate to each take a moment and talk about what blogging means to us.

“Why We Blog” is a four part series that considers the relationship between the academy, journals, blogs, and their authors. Can you relate to Margarita’s telenovela-blogger-lifestyle? Or is blogging more like Trish’s caffeinated conversations? You might, as Brad Weikel does, consider blogging a type of exploration, or agree with my belief that blogging can fulfill an obligation to the community:

I blog with the hope that the open dissemination of knowledge will add pliability to the nature of academia and education, much in the same way blogs are currently restructuring traditional news media. I strongly believe that the Ivory Tower has an obligation to the global community that makes its very existence possible. Blogging is just one way in which to assist the collaboration and dissemination of knowledge. In this information age, there is no reason that information should be scare or that every voice should not be heard.

Or perhaps you have a different viewpoint all together! That is what gnovis is about. Come share your thoughts, tell us what you think. With your participation we can, as Brad Weikel hopes, “propel the discourse, instead of merely chronicling it.”

Welcome to the conversation!

And we are off…

I am really excited about how my semester is looking this Fall. My courses are great, my professors are great, my own work is great. Life is just great. (I know, I know… check back in two weeks.)

Each semester I am always surprised at the way in which my courses appear to compliment each other, providing the semester with a broader theme. This semesters theme would unquestionably be the ways in which users and technology shape each other.

In Unpacking Science & Technology, taught by Dr. Ribes (a new professor at CCT whose blog has become noticeably quiet — I am convinced he doesn’t want us cyber-stalking him), I am going to Science and Technologies Studies (STS) boot camp. As Dr. Ribes said in his first lecture, we will be examining the relationship between “content” and “context” in everything from medical categories to the scientific method itself.

(more…)

How does one produce “truth”?

Today gnovis ran an article of mine considering this very question. It all started when I stumbled across an issue of Wired with a headline proclaiming “The End of Theory”. Evocative titles always seem to get me to buy magazines, but this one seemed to have some personal relevance and worth the $4.95. I suppose the gnovis article was inevitable. Here is a taste:

As we rush to reconstruct our physical lives in online spaces, digital worlds like Facebook and Second Life have largely forgone the potential freedoms of digital environments. When Anderson asserts that we should focus on what people are doing, he forgets Althusser’s Marxist response that “ideology is material” and as such, never offers a problem that is outside of material’s ability to respond. No wonder all of this data analysis is working. We are just measuring predefined user behavior in a digital world, a world we insisted on digitizing.

It is a fun piece, so I hope you will check it out.

This week gnovis published a special issue on “New Media, Technology, and Democracy“. With the elections just months away, the editor Brad Weikel (or “sleepcamel” on his blog) was right when he said that now is the perfect time to reflect on the intersection of technology and politics.

There are a number of fantastic articles, but I was particularly delighted to see my friend Tatyana Varshavsky’s article published. In the editor’s words:

Tatyana Varshavsky’s “Creating Community Through the Arts: Cultural Engagement, Democracy, and the Role of Civil Society” brings a valuable perspective to the discourse of civic engagement, examining the relationship between cultural and community engagement, and a broader notion of citizenship. By stepping out of the normative model of the Big Media / Big Politics spectacle, Varshavsky offers an inspiring view of civic engagement, at once pragmatic and idealistic, which would give even Robert Putnam a glimmer of hope.

I was having dinner with a colleague earlier this week who in a hushed and slightly embarrassed voice admitted that she just didn’t understand Twitter. Normally I would have assured her that Twittering is not a social requirement, but in her case, it was part of her job. Twitter, Blogs, Facebook – these are the bread and butter of an emerging professional class of “social media consultants.” Maybe it is a D.C. thing. After admitting to her that I am more confused about these jobs than the technologies they rely on, I happily agreed to help get her up to speed.

Internet culture, however, is incredibly memetic. I suppose this makes Dawkins the philosopher of choice for contemporary geekdom, but it also means that the distinction between popular and unpopular, in and out, can be dizzying.

Point and case: This video from CrunchGear. Somehow they managed to capture the simultaneous love, disdain, and absurdity of Twitter. And it only took Hitler to pull it off.

“I have to admit something. Sometimes I like to read the missed connections section in the paper, just for fun. And I really like them. Is that so bad?”

Without fail, every time I tell someone new that I am doing a research project on Missed Connections, they quickly interrupt me to exclaim how much they love reading these little messages. It is funny, I certainly can relate to how they feel, but I frequently am so “down in the trenches”, if you will, that I miss the beautiful potential embedded in each post.

While stumbling around the net this weekend I ran across a video that seemed to tug on this very point. An episode of Val’s Art Diary, this video gets right to the heart of the matter, and gives one artist’s interpretation of this suspended form of romance. In her words:

Every couple you talk to has a story of them meeting, and it is usually is a pretty random thing… what if your moment already happened and none of you did anything about it? It seems to me that as much as we like to shape our lives, somethings are simply beyond our control.

I hope you enjoy the video as much as I did.

When writing about the troubles Apple had last week during their v2.0 launch, I reminded about some of the load challenges we had with the MCAT system under heavy volume, and, of all things, software patents. should point out that the The following is a brief post that I wrote last semester after giving a presentation on the Amazon One Click patent case in a class on Internet policy. It never quite made it up, so I am sharing it now.

(I should point out that the load issues I talk about here were resolved with a rather popular queuing system that we build for the MCAT registration system that managed load throughout the system. I loved that project, and a great lessons learned about performance services oriented architecture! Okay, enough geek talk – carry on…)

I got to work at 6:30 am the day after a class presentation on the Amazon “One Click” legal issue, and walked into what we loving call “the war room.” It is exactly what you would expect. Computers are everywhere, monitors, projectors, and a conference phone I am determined to paint red. This, however, was not a military operation, although pretending sometimes helps us do a better job. This was a launch day for the MCAT software. We were opening over 50,000 testing seats, and war or not, pre-med students fighting for their future always results in blood. (more…)

The self is gone. What was once wrapped up in the confines of our skin has been scattered across a communication network that is so broad, and so tangled, that we don’t have any hope of getting it back. Our identities are not only continually mediated through the diverse technologies by which we communicate, but it seems quite plausible that they are no longer our own.

Thousands of databases across the world hold small pieces of our psyche. Separate, this data claim to represent some domain specific aspect of the self (a credit report here, an online profile there). Together, they create an endless and invisible representation of the self that Mark Poster aptly calls “the digital unconscious.” In an era comprised of social networking sites and online living, this can be unsettling. If our most essential pieces are in those databases, then we have inevitably relinquished control over our self-definition.

The policy debate over the Clipper Chip in the 1990s foreshadowed this modern dilemma of the self. (more…)

So minutes after “publishing” my last post, I found this image. Maybe our first interdisciplinary project should be with some academics in a Marketing department.

(via Academic Productivity)