Google Wave May 30, 2009
Posted by Andre Vellino in Open Source, Social networks.1 comment so far
The Google Wave communication architecture makes a lot of sense: integrate all your interpersonal communications applications (currently served by Email, IM, Blogs, Wikis, Twitter, FriendFeed) into one application hosted in the cloud and every correspondant / commentator / friend becomes a “contributor” to a common collaborative application (see this overview if you don’t want to spend 80 minutes watching the painful video).
While it’s a fine idea whose time has no doubt come, it appears to me to be simply a natural evolution of Facebook with finer grained access-control rather than a truely revolutionary platform.
I’m guessing that Wave’s achilles heel might be the current ubiquity of good old fashioned store-and-forward e-mail. If Wave is going to succeed in supplanting e-mail, it’s going to have to co-exist with it somehow and provide an interface to SMTP …. which opens the door to spoofing and spam.
On the other hand, Google may be able to induce corporations and governments to throw away their piles of Microsoft Exchange servers and replace them with open-source Wave servers. Who knows, miracles sometimes happen.
Relativity is Absolute May 25, 2009
Posted by Andre Vellino in Philosophy of Science.4 comments
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is perhaps the best known book by Thomas Kuhn. But I think his most interesting book is The Copernican Revolution. In it Kuhn defends the thesis that Copernicus was more of a Platonist about the importance of circular motion in celestial bodies than Greek astronomers were.
The Greeks also believed that circular motion was the only way to explain celestial motion, but in order to accomodate the additional principle that the earth is at the center of the universe, they had to explain the movement of heavenly bodies in terms of circles moving around circles (epicycles) without worrying too much about whether the physical entities themselves were actually moving incircles.
Copernicus, on the other hand, held the view that the bodies themselves had to be moving in circles. And if that becomes the core of your theory of the heavens, then explaining the phenomena (e.g. the retrograde motion of mars) is “merely” a matter of ”shifting paradigms”, i.e. setting the sun at the center of the universe and putting the earth in motion. So the core of Khun’s thesis is that Copernicus was more of an “absolutist” about circular motion than ptolemaic astronomers.
Similarly, I would argue that Einstien too was more of an “absolutist” about the laws of nature than his predecessors and that the theory of ”relativity” is a misnomer. In fact, it is a theory about the “absoluteness” of the laws of nature. Einstien’s insight was that all the laws of nature are the same in all frames of reference. For instance, no matter how fast you are moving, the speed of light is a constant. And for Einstein there nothing that is exempt from being subject to laws of nature, not even “space” or “time” (which are thereby relinquish their role as “absolutes”).
MS Libra Academic Search Engine May 19, 2009
Posted by Andre Vellino in CISTI, Citation, Data Mining, Search.add a comment
Microsoft Research Asia appears to have taken over where Microsoft Live Academic left off with Libra Academic Search. Libra’s collection is limited to computer science (although, with 1.8M articles to data-mine, it appears to be quite comprehensive) it proves that one can do better than Google Scholar by implementing simple facets (Papers / Authors / Conferences / Journals / Communities) that cluster or order results according to different criteria.
I don’t think Libra is new (it appears to have started in April 2007) and it may be that no on is working on it actively any more – perhaps because CiteSeerX (also supported by Microsoft!) dominates the (limited) market. But I hope it’s core features are not forgoten.
Cost of NSERC Grants May 17, 2009
Posted by Andre Vellino in CISTI.1 comment so far
A recent paper in Accountability in Research by Richard Gordon and Bryan Poulin, entitled “Cost of the NSERC Science Grant Peer Review System Exceeds the Cost of Giving Every Qualified Researcher a Baseline Grant” has the following abstract:
Using Natural Science and Engineering Research Council Canada (NSERC) statistics, we show that the $40,000 (Canadian) cost of preparation for a grant application and rejection by peer review in 2007 exceeded that of giving every qualified investigator a direct baseline discovery grant of $30,000 (average grant). This means the Canadian Federal Government could institute direct grants for 100% of qualified applicants for the same money. We anticipate that the net result would be more and better research since more research would be conducted at the critical idea or discovery stage. Control of quality is assured through university hiring, promotion and tenure proceedings, journal reviews of submitted work, and the patent process, whose collective scrutiny far exceeds that of grant peer review. The greater efficiency in use of grant funds and increased innovation with baseline funding would provide a means of achieving the goals of the recent Canadian Value for Money and Accountability Review. We suggest that developing countries could leapfrog ahead by adopting from the start science grant systems that encourage innovation.
Wolfram’s new Search Engine May 16, 2009
Posted by Andre Vellino in CISTI, Search, Semantics.add a comment
The new “search engine” Wolfram Alpha by Stephen Wolfram is interesting. It’s neither a typical query-based search engine nor a question answering system. But it also isn’t (yet) a “computational knowledge engine” as the web site would have us believe. It’s something in between perhaps.
There’s no question that Wolfram Alpha’s goals for the future are lofty:
Wolfram|Alpha’s long-term goal is to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone. We aim to collect and curate all objective data; implement every known model, method, and algorithm; and make it possible to compute whatever can be computed about anything. Our goal is to build on the achievements of science and other systematizations of knowledge to provide a single source that can be relied on by everyone for definitive answers to factual queries.
But we’re not quite there yet – not in May 2009 anyway.
I was interested by the results for “Multiple Sclerosis”, even though what I wanted to know were it’s known causes:
But if you try ” collaborative filtering” or “statistical semantics” or “demdemyelinating disease”, Wolfram Alpha is stumped and you are given subject areas (that it knows about) to browse.
Within a subject area that it does know something about (e.g “Quantum Physics”) you are presented with template question-types for whichl Wolfram Alpha will produce answers:
Which is quite educational, as far as it goes.
All of this uses what they call “curated data” – which presumably means that lots of formulas and equations have been entered into a web-based version of Mathematica and annotated with subject-area metadata. Is this enough, though? And can we trust the “objectivity” of the knowledge (e.g what Wolfram Alpha knows about cellular automata)?
To be a really useful tool, it sounds like a lot of people are going to have to contribute a lot of information. And even then that information will only be retrievable in a very particular way.
This effort seems more likely to succeed at codifying all human knowledge than Cyc, but it still seems like an impossible task.
