2009 Minne Web Con Social Connections In Scientific Research

Social Connections
in Scientiﬁc Timothy M. Kunau, MS
kunau@umn.edu
Research timk@relres.com
twitter.com/tkunau

MinneWebCon 2009
April 6, 2009

Agenda

•Introduction

•Story

•Deﬁnitions

•Examples

•Tips

•Questions

Introduction

Timothy M. Kunau

•technologist

•social animal

•explorer

Jim Gray: Tenacious

• 7:00AM, Sunday, January 28, 2007

http://helpﬁndjim.com/

The Problem

• Common

• Most resolve within
24hrs.

• USCG search-and-
rescue scoured 132,000
square miles of Paciﬁc
over 5 days.

• Boats and aircraft were
equipped with thermal-
imaging radar.


TODD & ASSOCIATES, INC.
MARINE SURVEYORS, CLAIMS SETTLING AGENTS & INVESTIGATIONS

LOST AT SEA
Lost at Sea 1983 40’ C & C sailboat
• Hull: Red hull w/silver/gray graphic
• Decks: White
• Monday morning the Intended course - West of Farrallon Islands &
USCG issued a press return to San Francisco Bay
release for the missing Vessel Owner: Jim Gray
Age: 63
sailor.

• The Press made the Vessel Name: “Tenacious”
Microsoft connection HIN #: ZCC40183M83B
Documentation #: 661 459
and arrived with TV
LAST KNOWN LOCATION: 15 miles West of Golden Gate Bridge
cameras. DATE LAST SEEN: January 28, 2007
INVESTIGATING AGENCY: United States Coast Guard

REWARD
• Email started to circulate TBD TBD
between the “Friends of A reward is being offered by the insurance company for information leading to the safe return and recov-
Jim” ery of the above vessel. Reward amounts for information leading to the safe return and recovery shall be
determined based on the strength of information and shall be at the sole discretion of the carrier. Assured,
relatives of assured, or employees of entity offering reward, are ineligible for reward for recovery. With any
information, call collect or immediately notify your local law enforcement agency.
TODD & ASSOCIATES, INC.
(800) 325-8061 or (619) 226-1895 Fax: (619) 223-8942
stolenboats@boatman.com http://www.boatman.com

BSIS #21305
February 2, 2007; 07-1030
! !
San Diego, CA 92106 www.boatman.com
2390 Shelter Island Drive #220

Volunteer resources

• World-wide effort

• Bill Gates at Microsoft
personally provided
access to corporate
NetJets.

• NASA scheduled ER-2
training missions in the
search area.

• Sergey Brin, of Google,
worked with DigitalGlobe
to re-task satellites.

http://www.sigmod.org/sigmod/record/issues/0806/p21.olson.pdf

Amazon’s Turk

• Werner Vogels, CTO of
Amazon.com, offered
Amazon’s Mechanical Turk
for distributing tasks.

• Satellite data ultimately
covered a 30,000 square
mile search area.

• 560,000 images

• 12,000 online volunteers

• 20 ‘likely’, 1 ‘very likely’

https://www.mturk.com/mturk/welcome

Lost at Sea

Search suspended: February 16, 2007 2:00 PM PT

Bio: Jim Gray

• Manager of Microsoft Research eScience Group.

• ACM Turing Award Winner for transaction
processing.

• Interests in databases and transaction processing
- with particular focus on using computers to
make scientists more productive.

• Projects included the world-wide telescope and
online databases like TerraService.net and
SkyServer.sdss.org.

“Jim Gray is one of the
• Many of the tools his work made possible were
world’s best listeners.”
marshaled in the massive search.
Ed Lazowska

Social Media:

Internet and mobile-based
tools for sharing and discussing
information among humans.

Social connections in scientiﬁc research require

• Diversity of opinion: from multiple perspectives.

• Independence: opinions aren't determined by the opinions of
those around them.

• Decentralization: supporting specialization and drawing on
local knowledge.

• Aggregation: Some mechanism exist for turning private
contributions into a collective story.

• Seek Relationships.

• Start Conversations.

• Create connections to support Stories.

ARPANET
August 1964

http://www.rand.org/pubs/research_memoranda/2006/RM3420.pdf

ARPANET

August 1964

ARPANET

December 1969

ARPANET

December 1970

ARPANET

July 1975

ARPANET

July 1976

ARPAnet

• Unix to Unix Copy (UUCP)

• USENET news groups


ARPANET

• Survivability.

• Designed to support defense research during
the Cold War.

• While the hardware was interesting (PDP-10/11
systems linked by IMPs), the connection
between people was more important.

• Unix to Unix Copy (UUCP), with the rise of
supporting technologies, became the method
of transmitting ﬁles from one site to another.

• USENET news groups

Networks critical to humans
are Social, not Electronic.

Social bookmarking

• Flickr: photo sharing and tagging.

• YouTube: video sharing and tagging.

• digg.com: technology news link sharing and tagging.

• Technorati: technology news link sharing and tagging.

• Del.ic.io.us: news link sharing and tagging.

Flickr

http://www.ﬂickr.com

Flickr

• Open invitation to comment on
the images provided by others.

• Users can assign arbitrary
descriptive tags to the image.

• There is little constraint over
what a tag can be. A word, a
group of words.

• Patterns start to emerge.

http://www.ﬂickr.com

Connotea

http://www.connotea.org/

What is it?

• Reference management and social bookmarking service for
scientists

• Modeled on del.icio.us, recognizing scholarly reference
management was a similar problem space.

• Free

• On-line

• EndNote for the web, shared.


Connotea: key concepts

• Diverse collection of opinions, if not facts.

• Independent development and non-hierarchical organization: Avoid
‘group think’, anarchy of unconstrained vocabularies is a good thing.

• Decentralized discovery of bibliographic information: imports
external bibliographic references.

• Aggregating: bookmarks are visible to others. There is a provision for
private bookmarks, but the default is public. Patterns begin to
emerge. Multiple tags for each citation express facets.


The Basic idea


A tactile sense of Relationship,

reCAPTCHA Translation

• Carnegie Mellon University

• Channels the human effort spent solving
CAPTCHAs into helping to digitize books from the
Internet Archive (www.archive.org) and back
issues of the New York Times (www.nytimes.com).

recaptcha.net
• When you solve a reCAPTCHA, you help preserve
literature by deciphering a word that was not
readable by computers.

http://recaptcha.net/

reCAPTCHA: humor

http://recaptcha.net/

Fold.It

• Protein folding as
video game. (FPPF?)

• Welcome to the Fold:
Teams support for
group play.

• University of
Washington

• Defense Advanced
Projects Research
Agency (DARPA)

http://fold.it/

Fold.It

http://fold.it/

The old way creates a tree.
The new rakes leaves
together.

-- David Weinberger
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Weinberger

EBI: Ensembl Genome Browser

• Data, includes human and approximately 40 other
species (see www.ensembl.org for a list) as well as
comparative genomics data (550GB).

• Biomart, is a de-normalized, query-optimized
Ewan Birney
database that facilitates complex queries of one or
www.ensembl.org
more datasets (172GB).

• Data sharing on a massive scale.

• Track-based annotations preserve provenance.

• Not simply data, an API.

http://www.ensembl.org/Homo_sapiens/Location/View?db=core;g=ENSG00000180613;r=4:54660955-54662879;t=ENST00000326902

Encyclopedia of Life

• A series of websites,
one for each of the
approximately 1.8
million known
species.

• scientists and non-
scientists working
from museums and
research institutions
around the world.

• Wikipedia for
eol.org
Zoology.

Audubon Society

• National network of
community-based nature
centers and chapters,
scientiﬁc and educational
programs, and advocacy
groups.

• Social networks existed
before social media tools.

• 1900 ﬁrst annual
Christmas Bird Count
proposed as alternative to
traditional Christmas hunt.

Tips for better social connections
in scientiﬁc research.

Wisdom of Crowds

Author: James Surowiecki, New
Yorker business columnist

Hardcover: 320 pages

Publisher: DoubleDay (05/25/2004)

ISBN: 0385503865

Average customer review: 4 of 5
stars, based on 111 reviews.

Here Comes Everybody

Author: Clay Shirky


Publisher: Penguin Press HC
(02/28/2008)

ISBN: 1594201536

Average customer review: 4.5 of 5
stars, based on 39 reviews.

Wikinomics

Author: Don Tapscott
and Anthony D. Williams


Publisher: Portfolio
Hardcover (12/28/2006)

ISBN: 1591841380

Average customer
review: 4 of 5 stars,
based on 102 reviews.

Tribes

Author: Seth Godin


Publisher: Portfolio Hardcover
(10/16/2008)

ISBN: 1591842336

People, not ads, build
Average customer review: 4.2
social networks
of 5 stars, based on 101
reviews.

The Cluetrain
Manifesto

Authors: Rick Levine,
Christopher Locke, Rick
Levine, Doc Searls, David
Weinberger


Publisher: Basic Books
(01/09/2001)
95 Theses
ISBN: 0738204315

Average customer review: 4 of
5 stars, based on 153 reviews.

Communicate through humor

• Jorge Cham's comic Ph.D. or Piled Higher
and Deeper: Life (or Lack Thereof) in
Academia.

• Humanize academia through humor.

• Newton's First Law of Graduation states:
“a grad student in procrastination tends to
stay in procrastination unless an external
force is applied to it.quot;

phdcomics.com
Date: Thursday, April 23rd
Time: 6-8pm
Location: Anderson Hall, Room 210

Seek Relationships

•Make personal connections, but keep ties loose.

•Keep yourself exposed to as much information as
possible.

•Think ‘hive mind’ versus ‘org chart’.

•Share unpublished or unprocessed data.

•Share resulting data

•Share experiment design.

Start Conversations

•Become a bridge across hierarchies.

•Embrace new ways of connecting and aggregating
information.

•Increase your audience: communicate locally and
internationally. Intentionally.

•Provide opportunities for participation in division of
labor.

Create connections to support Stories

•Immerse yourself in your chosen ﬁeld.

•Maintain independence of opinion and avoid ‘group
think’.

•Acknowledge collaboration in your results.

•Develop endurance.

•Engage with Passion!

quot;Knowledge speaks, but
wisdom listens.quot;

Jimi Hendrix

Thank You.

Timothy M. Kunau, MS
kunau@umn.edu
timk@relres.com
twitter.com/tkunau

MinneWebCon 2009

2009 Minne Web Con Social Connections In Scientific Research

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