Following up on my previous post about community efforts and collective intelligence. I recreated some figures from my notes on a presentation by Jooyoung Lee. He talked about how we are approaching problems in the sciences.
In mathematics, scientists work together on some fundamental problem A. So there’s community-wide efforts.
In physics, scientists work together on problems that are closely related to original problem A. So there’s still community-wide efforts.
Biology is somehow different. In biology, it seems that every scientist is working on their own problem, and some even have more than one!
I love me some O’Reilly books. After recently reading Beautiful Code (I should write a review soon). I am eagerly awaiting a new book I just bought from Amazon called Programming Collective Intelligence.
It was written by Toby Segaran, a developer at Genstruct
“This fascinating book demonstrates how you can build web applications to mine the enormous amount of data created by people on the Internet. With the sophisticated algorithms in this book, you can write smart programs to access interesting datasets from other web sites, collect data from users of your own applications, and analyze and understand the data once you’ve found it.”
Some of the most successful spots on the web are winning on this exact principle. Google, Facebook, Digg, MySpace, Flikr, Twitter, YouTube, and the list goes on and on. As much as I hate the almost cliched phrase Web 2.0, there is clearly a difference in how successful web applications are designed today as opposed to 5 years ago. We need more community based efforts in biology. Educational efforts like Bioscreencast. Or competitions like CASP which I have participated in. The tools are in place. Given the grand challenges to our health and understanding of life, we can no longer afford to work alone.
Science blogs are emerging everywhere. The-Scientist did an article about biomed at the PSC in the August issue. They’re now running a ‘Top Science Blogs’ poll which I found through Deepak’s post. Here’s my top 5 list according to my Google Reader trends view
by number of items read:
- business|bytes|genes|molecules
- What You’re Doing Is Rather Desperate
- Depth-First
- chem-bla-ics
- Propeller Twist
It’s not fair to stop at 5, since there’s so many other great science blogs that I read frequently..
BleedingEdgeBiotech is now listed in the wiki at Nodalpoint thanks to Greg. The community there is fantastic and I am often inspired by the high quality content throughout. There’s even a nodalpoint facebook group that is growing rapidly.