Waste in administering science: Buildings

Michael Roseblum, at RoseblumTV has an interesting post contrasting the old ways of doing business with the new: A Visit to The Facebook Building

Outside my livingroom window is 30 Rock, the headquarters for NBC. It’s a very big building and they pay a very big rent to be there.

It’s remnant from another era.

Have you ever seen The Facebook Building?

Have you ever been inside it?

Have you ever even seen a picture of it?

Where is Facebook?

It is nowhere, and it is everywhere.

Where is the Craigslist Building? Craigslist, the website that destroyed the newspaper business in the US.

You don’t need the building to gather, curate, edit and distribute information.

You don’t need the overhead.

The New York Times building on 8th Avenue and 40th Street is a stunning tombstone to $800 million that could have been spent on content, instead of steel and glass.

I've talked about this before: Keeping your offices and losing your people. Now ask yourself the same questions about big science. How may more scientists could we fund if we administered it differently? That NSF building: really necessary? Aren't they just gathering, curating, editing, and distributing information? What about those huge overhead charges imposed by our universities?

Will big science implode?

Image via Wikipedia

I'm going to be blogging more about science-- not the actual research, but the bloated bureaucracies that surround it.

The current system is broken. Seriously broken. There is massive waste, and the various entities all taking their cuts means less dollars available for actual research.

It's getting worse. When everything is becoming more open, big science is becoming more closed. Less accessible to the public which pays for it. We do have a few bright spots, the Public Library of Science, and the new NIH Open-Access mandate to name a couple, but there is a lot more that needs fixing. Especially the funding.

We don't have a shortage of scientists. We produce a massive number of new scientists each year. The problem is that only a small number of them ever work for entities where they can actively practice the science for which they were trained. We're wasting a ton of talented cognitive cycles by maintaining the current closed system. It needs to be opened-up. Completely redesigned.

This post at Science in the open: Fantasy Science Funding: How do we get peer review of grant proposals to scale? raises many of the issues.

For grant review, the problems that are already evident in scholarly publishing, fundamentally the increasing volume, are exacerbated by the fact that success rates for grans (sic) are falling and that successful grants are increasingly in the hands of a smaller number of people in a smaller number of places.

The problems with big science won't be fixed by rearranging the deck chairs. There are too many people, getting too fat, for a systemic change to occur. Entrained systems don't tend to fix themselves--they usually implode.

Spreading nasty bugs in virtual worlds

We had a meeting in Second Life this afternoon. Yes, we meet on Saturdays. When you freerange you meet anytime, and in lots of different places. When you have a group of people comfortable with the Second Life interface there is no place better to meet than Second Life. It totally shines over the other virtual environments.

That said, during the meeting today I had to sneeze, and before I could click on the mute button I let it rip. Everyone said, GBY and I apologized for not being quick enough with the mouse. Then someone said, "At least in here we don't have to worry about you spreading your germs to the rest of us."

Great point! Just one more reason why meeting in virtual space makes so much sense: less travel cost, always available, no spreading of nasty office bugs...

Is GChat crushing the IM competition?

Image via CrunchBase

What's up with GMail?: Visits to Gmail surpass YouTube

For the past two weeks, the market share of US Internet visits to Gmail has been higher than visits to YouTube. Previously, YouTube consistently ranked 10th among all websites by market share of visits until the week ending Jan. 10, 2009, where Gmail moved up one rank to reach #10. The websites have been swapping positions regularly ever since.

So why is this? You don't have to go to GMail to get your mail. Is this being driven by GChat? I've mentioned before that many people were abandoning AIM for GChat. Is Google on the brink of owning the instant messaging space? Is that where you do your chatting now?

The We the People Wiki: that ain't working that's the way you do it

Image via Wikipedia

This is a perfect example of using MediaWiki to engage citizens: We the People Wiki

We the People began with the live data feeds provided by the D.C. Government and its Office of the Chief Technology Officer. But We the People will grow based on contributions and collaboration by everyone who cares about Washington, D.C. Together, we can make We the People a living reference and a new form of citizen participation in D.C. democracy.

We've entered an era where distributed cognition, and socially constructed knowledge rule the day. This is exactly the sort of participatory use of technology that people are demanding. If you're in the knowledge business you really have no choice but to invite the people to the table.

Google Knol: It's way too early to be calling for its shuttering

Image via CrunchBase

There has been a lot of discussion about the poor quality of Google Knol articles. Even though the service has only existed for a little over six months that hasn't stopped people from calling for Google to pull the plug:

Why Has Knol Survived Google's Orphan-Project Killing Spree?

We admire Google's willingness to experiment with new ways to build cool (and potentially profitable) features onto their existing service. And we admire Google's willingness to realize when their experiments have failed and shut them down. So why still back Knol?

I visited Google in Washington, D.C. last week and one of the topics was Knol. I signed an NDA so I can't discuss what I learned, but I can tell you that it was very interesting. When I got home I was motivated, so I spent a good deal of time kicking-the-tires on Knol once again.

I read a bunch of Knol articles, and I have to admit that I was taken back by all the crap. Where I didn't come across the tons of spam that people talk about, I did experience some very poorly written stuff. I couldn't miss the obvious bias (non-NPOV) in many of the articles, and the lack of consistency in the style of writing. As I moved from article to article it became very distracting.

I also came across a lot of high quality articles written by people with impeccable credentials who I would trust. The articles were well written, informative, and enjoyable to read. When I was reading I had to remind myself that was I was doing, browsing Knol, was an abboration. People don't browse Knol anymore than they browse Wikipedia. Not happening! They'll come to a Knol article the same way they come to all content today-- from search. Every article stands alone. (See: Searchable wads of content: Pulling the plug on the Web site)

That Knol articles don't rank high in search is more a reflection of the age of Knol than their quality. It will take time for the good Knol articles to start ranking higher. They won't be returned high in search results until people start linking to them. That's how it works. The crap articles will fall by the wayside and no one will ever see them. They'll be relegated to the Knol dead-pool, and the fact that they exist at all is irrelevant. If a tree falls in the forest.... The high quality articles, however, will eventually rise to the top.

Anyone who understands the most basic principles of Search Engine Optimization knows that it takes time for an article to rank high in search. To be calling for Knol's shuttering half a year into its existence is absurd. Knol solves some very significant issues for people who have expertise, and want to share it with others. Given more time (5 years?) I have no doubt that Knol is going to be a force to be reckoned with.

Our New CIO-- YAY!!!!!!!

Interesting interview with the new (and first) CIO for the United States: Vivek Kundra: Federal CIO in His Own Words

VK: I think you look at open source, as a technology, whether it's mediawiki, for example... with Wikipedia what we did in the District of Columbia was that we had a wikipedia solution that allowed every single employee to collaborate and have access to information.

snark-on MediaWiki? Horror of horrors! Everyone knows it's way too hard for government workers much less scientists. snark-off

It's a new day.