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Category Archives: Policy
Not a kickstarter for science, a prize clearinghouse
Yesterday’s post on the reversible random number generators received some interesting reactions from my colleagues. They were uniformly impressed with the solution to what everyone thought was a hard problem, but surprisingly, most of the scientists I talked to were … Continue reading
Fantastic news on the Open Access front
The White House just posted a new policy memorandum in response to the Open Access petition: Expanding Public Access to the Results of Federally Funded Research. This is great news for Open Science!
Posted in Open Access, open science, Policy, Science
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Why aren’t voting machines required to be Open Source?
If ever there was a need for the transparency that open source software brings it is in the realm of voting machine technology. This story makes that point crystal clear. There may or may not be shenanigans going on in … Continue reading
Posted in Policy, Software
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On Reproducibility
I just got back from a fascinating one-day workshop on “Data and Code Sharing in Computational Sciences” that was organized by Victoria Stodden of the Yale Internet Society Project. The workshop had a wide-ranging collection of contributors including representatives of … Continue reading
Posted in Conferences, Open Data, open science, Policy, Science
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What, exactly, is Open Science?
I was recently asked to define what Open Science means. It would have been relatively easy to fall back on a litany of “Open Source, Open Data, Open Access, Open Notebook”, but these are just shorthand for four fundamental goals: … Continue reading
Posted in Open Data, open science, Policy, Science
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Scientific Software Wants To Be Free
Go read this wonderful manifesto over at arXiv: Astronomical Software Wants To Be Free: A Manifesto by Weiner et al. The authors talk about some of the barriers to astronimical software development that are true in all scientific fields. The … Continue reading
Posted in open science, Policy, Science
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Earmarks for Science
At the debate last night, John McCain brought up (twice!) for special scorn an example of spending on earmarks. His target? The “overhead projector for a planetarium”. It wasn’t the first time he’s brought up this earmark request up either. … Continue reading
Posted in Policy, Science
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Cool finds at the NCCB2008 workshop
Some of the cooler online resources that have been discussed at the NCCB2008 workshop: OpenWetWare The international genetically engineered machines competition (IGEM) Registry of Standard Biological Parts Nature Precedings Proteopedia The Open Protein Structure Annotation Network (TOPSAN) SciVee.tv FriendFeed
New Communication Channels for Biology Workshop
I’m going to be giving a talk at the “New Communication Channels for Biology” Workshop run by the CalIT2 folks at UCSD. The workshop is Thursday and Friday, and there are going to be some interesting folks like Michael Nielsen, … Continue reading
Posted in Policy, Science
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A physics teacher begs for his subject back
I used to think that math and physics education in US secondary schools was worse than in any other industrialized country. Expectations and standards seem to have fallen so low that some of our best students are showing up at … Continue reading
Posted in education, Policy, Science
3 Comments