New Year. New Science.
 

http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar...ar-new-science




Exciting stuff. The list goes on.

All good stuff, some exciting, some just plain needed, and there is still lots more that will come to the fore in 2013. :yeah:

I'm very interested in the underwater network. As much as we like to think space is the final frontier I'm inclined to believe the oceans depths have much to be discovered.

It's amazing to see how fast science makes progress. Think about it...there probably wasn't a lot of change in the way that people did things or the things that people knew in say, year 500 to year 501. Probably not a whole lot of change from 500 to 600 even. But today, the world is changing faster than ever. It's an exciting time to be alive.

Do you think the internet is a driving force in the speed of advancement in the sciences? Let's face it, I can share information with you in a matter of seconds.

Well, I wouldn't think in categories like good or bad when it comes to scientific research. As everthing is interconnected, science and philosophy should not be seen as totally seperate entities. I wish scientists would more often look over the edge and consider morale too, everyone who read Dürrenmatt's The Physicists knows what I mean. However science mostly looks for a breakthough and new discoveries in their field, the driving force behind it is not necessarily the common good.

That being said, I am very critical when it comes to patenting genes. Just for this I wish god would exist and sue the crap out of everyone who would attempt to do so.

Of course does the net speed up things, it was one of the driving forces behind its developement.
The so called "information problem" was already phrased when we were confrontated with exponentially growing knowledge, in the beginning of the 19th century. It was impossible to keep up with the knowledge, this is where the scientific specialization began. A big downer was that the scientific exchange was pretty difficult, the exchange of discoveries not as much as the exchange of research. For a scientist it was for instance nearly impossible to find out if others are already working on a problem - or already found a solution. Good examples for many working simultaneously on the same stuff with similar results would be the telephone or the automobile. If all those teams which worked on that would have had the possibility to exchange information, it would have certainly speeded things up.
So when one of the early US computer pioneers, Vannevar Bush, wrote his ground-breaking essay "As Me may think" in 1945 the prob, which he called the "library problem" was still existing. What made the essay so great is not only the content, but also the inspiration it gave to others. When you compare the developement of the web, with building a house, it led to the foundation.

A pretty good essay about it can be read here . On page 3 there is some good info about the library problem. Though I can highly recommend to read Bush's essay too, as he was a radio operator in the pacific when he wrote the stuff, there are also some references to science and war/the military.
You can see an animation of the device that Bush though about to access and exchange information, called the Memex, here .

I will print up the essay and read! :salute: When I think of the internet and what I had as a kid(library and encyclopedias), the internet is light years far and away better.

The information exchange is incredibly fast. The sheer amount of information available is incredible.

Thanks for the links!

Edit: the Memex and Vannevar was way ahead of the times. He had a good vision. Microfilm did become a form of information storage.

Your welcome, AVG :salute:. Actually I recently did some research on the whole subject of the development of the web, so this is one of my areas of interest atm. :know:
Having grown up without the web and with the same devices of information exchange like you, I think of the immigrant kid I had in my class. He spent about 2 years on his project to read the German equivalent to the Encyclopædia Britannica, the Brockhaus, from A-Z. In retrospective I think what he did was wikipeding 1.0, a common sport for us today, where you click on an article about bananas and eventually land on an article about quantum mechanics. :)

I do the same with a dictionary (call me sad).

I know of many people who will pick one word a day from the dictionary. Learn the meaning, spelling, etc. Keeps the mind sharp!

Well I don't know about my colleagues, but I am not in any rush to pick up the new DSM V. Certainly not in paper format if they are indeed planning for this to be a "living document" which to me suggests continuous updates which they can resell.

Ah the ol' college textbooks model. "Oh, we changed a stock picture on page 392. Time for a new edition!"

You forgot "and rearrange all the chapters and everything so people can't possibly use the previous edition".

Ever play "Wiki Ladders"?

Funny in a thread about the advances in science we are still talking about information delivery in terms of a 15th Century paradigm of the printed word on a page.:hmmm: Particularly in a medium that releases us from that paradigm.

This medium is a useful tool, but it has released me from nothing. Sure, it is handy and has many uses. I look up information every day about Medieval, Renaissance and Baroque composers, and am glad I can, yet I just bought a new book on British batlleships from 1905-1920, and it is full of information not available online at all.

Things on the web can only be trusted as far as the people who put them there can be trusted. I'll keep my books, thank you, and I'll keep buying them.

Exactly. The hoops that one has to jump through with publishers and distributers usually results in the printed medium being more reliable than the digital one. Any fool can put up a website. It is much harder to get a book published.

I personally prefer a paper book myself. However I find myself reading much more online than I do offline and I don't see that abating. There are almost no barriers to publishing now. The trend that has started with e-Books continues to grow and ultimately will overtake and supersede paper based books despite our generations wish that it won't.

My post was highlighting the humour I found in the situation.

Certainly each form of media has flaws in and of it's own. I would believe books would contain more factual information than say Wikipedia. I like my books as well. I have downloaded a few to read but it just seems to be missing something.

Tekada:
Copyright infringement. Plagiarism, etc. These keep one honest.

Yes sir it sucked. Students could not purchase used books at a lower cost. One semester I went to Laurel Raceway. I parlayed a few dollars into $250.00 betting on the ponies. I paid for my college books that semester on the good fortune of fast horses. :D