O'Really?

September 26, 2012

Fellows of the Wiki Society? The Royal Society in London experiments with Wikipedia

Filed under: awards,communication,engineering,Science — Duncan Hull @ 1:20 pm
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wiki wiki

The wiki-wiki (quick) shuttle bus in Hawaii by xordroyd. Creative Commons licensed picture from Flickr.

Regular readers of this blog might remember that back in June of this year, I suggested that the Royal Society should employ a wikipedian in residence. After emailing, blogging and other ranting, Paul Nurse got in touch with me to say that the Society was sympathetic to the idea and would investigate. His email is reproduced below:

From: Paul.Nurse ate royalsociety.org
Subject: Re: An Open Letter to the Royal Society: Please employ a wikipedian in residence
To: hulld ate cs.man.ac.uk
cc: Aosaf.Afzal ate royalsociety.org

Dear Duncan

I floated your idea about Wikipedia in the Society and it is being looked at to see what might be possible. Thanks for your suggestion.

Best wishes.

Paul

Time passed and the English summer dripped by in it’s typically rainy fashion. Then, earlier this month, Francis Bacon (not that Francis Bacon, but this Francis Bacon) contacted me, to say the Society is organising an edit-a-thon. With help from Uta Frith, the society is going to investigate the possibilities of wikipedia using Women in Science workshop as a pilot project. See Women of Wikipedia edit planned on BBC News.

This is great news and the event was fully booked in less than a day. It’s good to see a venerable society embracing new and disruptive technology in this way.

Compare and contrast the Royal Society with the Wiki Society

It is informative (and entertaining) to compare and contrast the Royal Society with wikipedia as the two organisiastions share some aims but are very different beasts:

wikipedia.org royalsociety.org
Purpose A place where every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. To recognise, promote, and support excellence in science and to encourage the development and use of science for the benefit of humanity
Funding The Wikimedia foundation is a non-profit organisation that relies on donations to keep it going A registered charity in the UK, funding comes in the form of gifts and legacies from a range individuals and organisations
How to Join Egalitarian: any idiot one can click on the edit button to become a fellow of the wiki-society (FWS), also known as a wikipedian Elitist: Each year over 700 candidates are proposed by the existing Fellowship. From this pool, 44 Fellows, 8 Foreign Members and up to 1 Honorary Fellow are elected by a rigorous process. You have to do some pretty remarkable science or engineering to become an FRS
Age Only 11 years old in 2012, not even a troublesome teenager (yet). Has wisdom beyond its years. Over 350 years old, some of it’s members invented the modern world and continue to shape it today
Location Virtually the wiki-society is anywhere there is an internet connection. Physically, the head quarters are in San Francisco Based just off The Mall in London, many members cluster in the supposed Golden Triangle of London, Oxford and Cambridge. Other fellows are scattered around the provinces with expats and Foreign Members dispersed around the globe.
Who’s a member 35 million editors, not all of whom are active. About 1500 living fellows including Jocelyn Bell Burnell, Richard Dawkins, Stephen Hawking, Harry Kroto, Tim Berners-Lee, Paul Nurse, David Attenborough and over 80 Nobel prize winners. Thousands more deceased members including Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, Robert Boyle etc
Profile Ordinary: Most wikipedians are ordinary and reasonable people, but internet trolls, spammers, snake oil sellers, lunatics, bigots, pedants, global village idiots, OCD sufferers other interesting characters are quite common on wikipedia Extraordinary: Most Fellows are extraordinary but reasonable people, some may also be Mad Scientists [citation needed]
Praised for Many things, see praise for the wikipedia and wikimedia projects. Funding excellent scientists and their Science. Engaging the public and young people in science through various events.
Criticised for The worlds biggest database of half-truths and white lies, see criticism of Wikipedia. Patrolled by annoying or partial editors and administrators. It can be frustratingly difficult to verify sources and wikipedia often lacks scientific credibility [1]. Being a nepotistic old boy network with an absence of women and very little in the way of youth. Ouch. Too many members have or currently work in, Oxbridge and London, possible geographic bias.
Origin The name wikipedia comes from the Hawai’in word for quick Wiki, see picture top right. The Royal Society is named after the British Monarchy, set up with help from Charles I. The name is a bit of a misnomer as you don’t need to be a royalist to join – republicans are welcome. In Middle English, the word Royal means s-l-o-w, traditional and painfully conservative [citation needed].

So there you have it, the Wiki Society and the Royal Society are unlike each other in many ways but they share a common goal of spreading knowledge. Perhaps the scientific content of wikipedia will be greatly improved through edit-a-thons and other events like this. Hopefully, the days where wikipedia will tell you everything you ever wanted to know about David Beckham but (at the time of writing) has absolutely nothing to say about leading scientists like John Aggleton, Garret FitzGerald and Margaret Robinson are numbered.

Thanks to Paul Nurse, Francis Bacon, Aosaf Afzal and Uta Frith for making it happen. If you can’t attend the edit-a-thon, watch this wiki-space via the twitter hashtag #WomenSciWP: interesting wiki-things might wiki-happen.

References

  1. Wodak, S.J., Mietchen, D., Collings, A.M., Russell, R.B. & Bourne, P.E. (2012). Topic Pages: PLoS Computational Biology Meets Wikipedia, PLoS Computational Biology, 8 (3) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1002446

August 20, 2012

Digital Research 2012: September 10th-12th at St. Catherine’s College, Oxford, UK

Filed under: conferences,engineering,publishing,Science,technology,web of science — Duncan Hull @ 12:09 pm
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The Radcliffe Camera, Oxford by chensiyuan

The Radcliffe Camera, Oxford by chensiyuan via wikipedia

The UK’s premier Digital Research community event is being held in Oxford 10-12 September 2012. Come along to showcase and share the latest in digital research practice – and set the agenda for tomorrow at Digital Research 2012. The conference features an exciting 3-day programme with a great set of invited speakers together with showcases of the work and vision of the Digital Research community. Here are some highlights of the programme – please see the website digital-research.oerc.ox.ac.uk for the full programme and registration information.

New Science of New Data Symposium and Innovation Showcase  on Monday 10th: Keynotes from Noshir Contractor [1] (Northwestern University) on Web Science, Nigel Shadbolt (Government Information Adviser) on Open Data and a closing address by Kieron O’Hara (computer scientist) – with twitter analytics, geolocated social media and web observatories in between. Also the launch of the Software Sustainability Institute’s Fellows programme and community workshops.

Future of Digital Research on Tuesday 11th: Keynotes from Stevan Harnad on “Digital Research: How and Why the Research Councils UK Open Access Policy Needs to Be Revised” [2], Jim Hendler (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute) on “Broad Data” (not just big!), and Lizbeth Goodman (University College Dublin) on “SMART spaces by and for SMART people”. Sessions are themed on Open Science with a talk by Peter Murray-Rust, Smart Spaces as a Utility and future glimpses from the community, all culminating in a Roundtable discussion on the Future of Digital Research.

e–Infrastructure Forum and Innovation Showcase on Wednesday 12th opens with a dual-track community innovation showcase, then launch the UK e-Infrastructure Academic Community Forum where Peter Coveney (UK e-Infrastructure Leadership Council and University College London) will present the “state of the nation” followed by a Provider’s Panel, Software, Training and User’s Panel – an important and timely opportunity for the community to review current progress and determine what’s needed in the future.

There’s a lot more happening throughout the event, including an exciting “DevChallenge” hackathon run by DevCSI, software surgery by the Software Sustainability Institute (SSI) and multiple community workshops – plus the Digital Research 2012 dinner in College and a reception in the spectacular Museum of Natural History in Oxford. Digital Research 2012 is very grateful to everyone who has come together to make this event possible, including e-Research South, Open Knowledge Foundation, Web Science, the Digital Social Research programme, our Digital Economy colleagues and the All Hands Foundation.

We look forward to seeing you at Digital Research 2012 in Oxford in September.

References

  1. Lazer, D., Pentland, A., Adamic, L., Aral, S., Barabasi, A.L., Brewer, D., Christakis, N., Contractor, N., Fowler, J., Gutmann, M. & (2009). Social Science: Computational Social Science, Science, 323 (5915) 723. DOI: 10.1126/science.1167742
  2. Stevan Harnad (2012). Open access: A green light for archiving, Nature, 487 (7407) 302. DOI: 10.1038/487302b

August 17, 2012

What is the collective noun for a group of Systems Biologists?

Filed under: Science — Duncan Hull @ 11:03 am
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From helix to hairball

According to Arthur Lander, “hairball” networks like the one of human proteins above, are the new icon of biology, taking over from the famous double-helix. Image originally published in BMC Biology [1].

What happened was, I was looking for a creatively commons licensed picture of Pedro Mendes to upload to commons.wikimedia.org. Not the footballing Pedro Mendes who played for Rangers, Spurs, Pompey and Porto but the systems biologist Pedro Mendes who plays for Virginia Tech and Manchester. Thankfully, another systems biologist, Michael Hucka kindly pointed to his impressive collection of pictures, taken at various events over the years which include some shots of Pedro. Looking at these pictures made me idly wonder: What is the collective noun for a group of systems biologists?

Systems biology is the study networks of various kinds [2,3] so it’s ripe for a collective noun, and there were several suggested on twitter. Since twitter has recently developed a nasty habit of disappearing tweets, here is a collection gathered and preserved for posterity from the twitterome*:

A jamboree of systems biologists?

Tom Williamson and Mike Hucka initially plumped for a Jamboree of systems biologists:

A loop or an ome of systems biologists?

Mike Hucka and Nathan Pearson voted for a Loop or an Ome of systems biologists:

A cluster of systems biologists?

Then again, maybe it should be a cluster of biologists?

A network of systems biologists?

Douglas Kell reckoned on a network of systems biologists:

A system of systems biologists?

Ewan Birney thought it had be be a system:

So there you have it, according to the twitterome, the collective noun for a group of systems biologists is a system, network, cluster, ome, jamboree or loop (delete as appropriate). No doubt there are many more, that’s what twitter hashtags are for, #SysBiologists.

References

  1. Arthur D. Lander (2010). The edges of understanding, BMC Biology, 8 (1) DOI: 10.1186/1741-7007-8-40
  2. Hiroaki Kitano (2002). Systems Biology: A Brief Overview, Science, 295 (5560) 1664. DOI: 10.1126/science.1069492
  3. Trey Ideker, Timothy Galitski & Leroy Hood (2001). Systems Biology: A new approach to decoding life, Annual Review of Genomics and Human Genetics, 2 (1) 372. DOI: 10.1146/annurev.genom.2.1.343

* That’s another #badomics award for Jonathan Eisen’s growing collection…don’t blame me, blame Leonid Kruglyak

August 15, 2012

Fancy becoming a Software Fellow?

Filed under: engineering,Science — Duncan Hull @ 3:48 pm
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Airplane by By Kuster & Wildhaber Photography

Airplane by By Kuster & Wildhaber Photography

The Software Sustainability Institute www.software.ac.uk has launched a Fellowship programme that recognises outstanding UK-based researchers who use software. The Fellowships come with £3000 funding which can be used for travel, collaboration and running events.

Fellows advise the Institute on important software, evangelise software practices and champion the adoption of best-of-breed software. Fellows will contribute to the software blog, and are supported in advertising their own research.

You can apply to become a Fellow online. Keep an eye on the software.ac.uk blog and Twitter account @SoftwareSaved for further information.

Launch event

A Fellowship Launch event will be held at the Digital Research 2012 in Oxford on 10th September 2012. Attendees at the launch event will receive free entry to the conference on 10 September and, if they choose to stay on, a 50% reduced fee for the rest of the conference. Applicants to the Fellowship Programme put themselves in an advantageous position if they have attended the workshop.

Who should apply

The SSI is seeking fifteen outstanding researchers at different  stages in their career, from PhDs to Professors, and from a wide range of research disciplines in science, technology and engineering. Successful Fellows will have a demonstrable knowledge and visibility in their community and have excellent communication skills.

Funding

The £3000 funding is flexible and can be used for travel to conferences, setting up and running workshops, starting new collaborations or hosting/teaching at Software Carpentry training events.

Application details

The Software Sustainability Institute is a national facility that helps researchers and developers to build and use better research software.

The closing date for applications is Thursday 20 September 2012 at 5pm.

Fellowships last eighteen months and are available from the 1st of January 2012 through the 30th of June 2014.

Successful recipients of the Software Sustainability Institute’s Fellowships will be announced in November 2012.

Questions?

If you have any questions, please contact the Institute: info@software.ac.uk.

August 3, 2012

Where did all the BBC programme metadata go? The Infax catalogue online

Filed under: data mining,engineering,informatics,publishing,search,technology — Duncan Hull @ 8:25 am
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BBC Logo in QR Code

bbc.co.uk/programmes as a QR Code by /Sizemore/ Mike Atherton on Flickr available under a creative commons licence

Over at @BBCSport and @BBC2012 there are some Olympian feats of big data wrestling going on behind the scenes for London 2012 [1]. While we all enjoy the Olympics on a range of platforms and devices, a team of twenty engineers is busy making it all happen. It’s great that the BBC, unlike other large organisations, can talk openly about their technology and share hard-won knowledge widely.

Back in 2006 the BBC published another impressive application that allowed users to search and browse over 75 years of programme data. The programme was built from  metadata, not the actual audio and visual data from the TV and Radio, but the data that comes after-data, information about the programmes from an internal database known as Infax [2,3].

The web app was published at open.bbc.co.uk/catalogue and built by a crack team of experts led by Matt Biddulph @MattB (and including Tom Coates @TomCoates, Ben Hammersley @BenHammersley, Gavin Bell @zzGavin, Tom Loosemore @TomskiTomski and several others – see comments below).

It allowed users to find weird and wonderful things. For example, you could browse all the programmes that Alan Turing or Albert Einstein had appeared in or search for all the programmes with Jennifer Ehle. You could query it as well, to list all episodes of Dr Who in the order they were aired. It wasn’t so much Big Data as Big Metadata, [4,5] potentially useful for improving the viewing and listening experience of the audience.

At the time of its launch, Dave Beckett @dajobe blogged about it, Matt Biddulph wrote some release notes, Tom Loosemore said a few words, backstage clocked it and I scribbled some notes too. Being a proof-of-concept “experimental prototype”, the app eventually disappeared into the great bit bucket in the sky. The only visible trace of the catalogue today is the blog posts above and the message below which greets you when you visit the site:

“Thank you for your continued interest in the BBC Programme Catalogue. The BBC is now looking into how this data can be incorporated into its programme information pages.”

You can still get some BBC programme metadata from bbc.co.uk/programmes and bbc.co.uk/archive. Every programme has publicly available metadata but only a fraction of what was in the open catalogue. Although the app has gone, lots of the data must still be there somewhere. Take for example, the opening ceremony for the Olympic Games…

The metadata that is currently available

The metadata for each BBC programme can be found via its own page, so the opening ceremony programme has metadata available in xml and rdf which tells you several things including this synopsis:

“Coverage of the opening ceremony, which officially starts at 9.00, with the eyes of the world focused on the Olympic Stadium as the 30th Olympiad is officially declared open by Her Majesty the Queen. Film director Danny Boyle is set to produce a stunning cultural show ahead of the athletes’ parade, during which over 200 countries are expected to be represented. This is followed by the official opening, the arrival of the torch and the lighting of the cauldron.”

The metadata also tells you that this particular programme was presented by Sue Barker, Huw Edwards, Gary Lineker, Jake Humphrey and Mishal Husain. The Executive Producer was Paul Davies and there’s a bunch of other stuff: date of first broadcast, links to related information and clips but that’s about it.

The metadata that used to be available

The great thing about the open catalogue was that it went into lots more detail than above. So, for the Olympics ceremony, the participants in the programme would have been listed as Danny Boyle, Daniel Craig, Thomas Heatherwick, Elizbaeth II, Paul McCartney, Rowan Atkinson, Bradley Wiggins, Kenneth Brannagh, Steve Redgrave, J.K. Rowling and so on. For each contributor, you could see what other programmes they had been involved in, not just recently broadcast ones, but those going back 75 years. You could also see who had collaborated with who and when their first broadcast was and so on. It didn’t just document the über-famous people either, it went into just as much detail about other people you might not necessarily have heard of like Frank Cottrell Boyce, Callum Airlie and Jordan Duckitt. It was great stuff, but neither the archive or current programmes seem to have this level of detail.

Meta-conclusions

It’s a bit of a mystery where all the lovely BBC metadata went, it’s probably just sitting on some servers somewhere, inaccessible to the outside world. With my licence fee paying hat on, this seems a bit of a waste. I’ve asked everyone I know, including people at the beeb, but have drawn a blank. Most have shrugged their shoulders and pointed to the useful but slightly impoverished /programmes and /archive which is why I’m writing this post on t’interwebs.

Maybe the Olympic task of curating all that data makes it un-sustainable. Perhaps somebody decided there is no point competing with wikipedia where wiki-nerds curate programme data for free? It’s possible you can’t justify serving big metadata without giving the actual data (programmes) too? Maybe there’s a shiny new application in the pipeline to replace the catalogue, currently being worked on or an upgrade to @ArchiveAtBBC & @programmes so they include much more data. Could there be issues with publishing this kind of personal data on the web which meant the whole thing got canned? Nasty copyright issues could probably sink a project like this too. Who knows…

Does anyone reading this know the answers? If you do, I’d love to hear from you.

[Update, In October 2014 the Big British Castle launched their BBC Geome project at genome.ch.bbc.co.uk which covers much of the same data as infax, from 1923 to 2009. There’s a pretty decent Wikipedia article on the BBC programme catalogue and its ancestors, including infax]

References

  1. David Rogers (2012). Building the Olympic Data Services, BBC Internet blog
  2. Ant Miller (2012). Opening up the Archives: Finding content using metadata from Infax catalogue and Radio Times, BBC Research & Development blog
  3. Ant Miller (2012). Opening up the Archives: New kinds of metadata, BBC Research & Development blog
  4. Karen Loasby (2006). Changing approaches to metadata at bbc.co.uk: From chaos to control and then letting go again, Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 33 (1) 26. DOI: 10.1002/bult.2006.1720330109
  5. Andrius Butkus and Michael Petersen (2007). Semantic Modelling Using TV-Anytime Genre Metadata, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 4471 234. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-540-72559-6_24

May 23, 2012

Who is the World’s Largest Advertising Agency?

Filed under: engineering,technology — Duncan Hull @ 8:40 am
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Massive Golf Sale!

The British Monarchy are preparing to exploit new advertising opportunities and boost royal revenue during the 2012 Olympics in London. Photo credit: gokart.co.uk.

Advertising agencies are everywhere, there is no escaping them. But who’s the daddy of the advertising world? The mother of all ad agencies?

According to wikipedia, WPP is the “world’s largest advertising group by revenues”. This is hogwash. Some of the world’s largest ad agences are technology companies. For example, in descending order of revenue:

So Google Inc. is currently the world’s largest advertising agency by revenues, followed by WPP then possibly Facebook. It will be interesting to see if the “best minds” [1,2] on Planet Facebook can catch up with WPP and Google by encouraging it’s user’s to click on ads more and buy more stuff in their store.

“The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click on ads. That sucks.” — Jeff Hammerbacher [1]

References

  1. Ashlee Vance (2011) This Tech Bubble Is Different Bloomberg Business Week
  2. Bruce Robinson (1989) How to Get Ahead in Advertising Handmade Films

* Revenue figures from wikipedia. Can’t really vouch for their accuracy but they look reasonable.

March 11, 2011

Drop the Digital Dummy!

Filed under: informatics — Duncan Hull @ 7:51 pm
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Pacifier anyone?Here is an experiment to investigate dependence on your “digital dummy”. A digital dummy is any computer, smartphone or other digital device on which you suckle data like a baby. What you need to do is:

  1. Delete all your so-called “social networks” on LinkedIn, Facebook etc. Being sat in front of a computer is distinctly unsociable.
  2. Delete your twitter account.
  3. Don’t bother reading your email (90% of email is useless noise).
  4. Blast your blog into oblivion.
  5. Ignore your feed reader, or “mark all items as read” because if Internet Addiction Disorder (IAD) actually exists and you are a sufferer [1], the currently best known cure is to go cold turkey.

After completing all these steps, wait for at least one week and observe results. Hasn’t it gone quiet?  Is your life any better? Repeat as necessary until sanity returns…

References

  1. Flisher, C. (2010). Getting plugged in: An overview of Internet addiction Journal of Paediatrics and Child Health, 46 (10), 557-559 DOI: 10.1111/j.1440-1754.2010.01879.x

June 2, 2009

Who Are You? Digital Identity in Science

Filed under: conferences,data mining,lyrical — Duncan Hull @ 7:50 am
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The Who by The WhoThe organisers of the Science Online London 2009 conference are asking people to propose their own session ideas (see some examples here), so here is a proposal:

Title: Who Are You? Digital Identity in Science

Many important decisions in Science are based on identifying scientists and their contributions. From selecting reviewers for grants and publications, to attributing published data and deciding who is funded, hired or promoted, digital identity is at the heart of Science on the Web.

Despite the importance of digital identity, identifying scientists online is an unsolved problem [1]. Consequently, a significant amount of scientific and scholarly work is not easily cited or credited, especially digital contributions: from blogs and wikis, to source code, databases and traditional peer-reviewed publications on the Web. This (proposed) session will look at current mechanisms for identifying scientists digitally including contributor-id (CrossRef), researcher-id (Thomson), Scopus Author ID (Elsevier), OpenID, Google Scholar [2], Single Sign On, PubMed, Google Scholar [2], FOAF+SSL, LinkedIn, Shared Identifiers (URIs) and the rest. We will introduce and discuss each via a SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats). Is digital identity even possible and ethical? Beside the obvious benefits of persistent, reliable and unique identifiers, what are the privacy and security issues with personal digital identity?

If this is a successful proposal, I’ll need some help. Any offers? If you are interested in joining in the fun, more details are at scienceonlinelondon.org

References

  1. Bourne, P., & Fink, J. (2008). I Am Not a Scientist, I Am a Number PLoS Computational Biology, 4 (12) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1000247
  2. Various Publications about unique author identifiers bookmarked in citeulike
  3. Yours Truly (2009) Google thinks I’m Maurice Wilkins
  4. The Who (1978) Who Are You? Who, who, who, who? (Thanks to Jan Aerts for the reference!)

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