What’s about Flattr and science / scientific communication? Until Michael’s tweet I didn’t consider it as an option and embedded Flattr buttons only in my coding related blog. Somehow I had a weird feeling putting them on this science related blog (although this is not the only topic of it). Maybe this was due to my personal understanding that science is not about money. Maybe it was due to the fact that scientist have usually (or do I need to say ideally?) a fixed income and don’t need extra money. What ever it was I guess we should give it also in this field a try. As for the generation of other content Flattr could give new impulses and opportunists for scientific activities and communication. The currency of science is usually attribution not necessarily money. Flattr is a mixture of both. People pay attribution to your work but also are willing to give you a little piece of their resources.

The main application of Flattr in the scholarly field might be to motivate more scientist to communicate their research to the public. And this hopefully without locking content away but making the knowledge a common good by using open licenses. It might be a long way but maybe this service could enable some scientist to become semi-professional communicators of science. I am not sure if it will be a driving force for the communication of scientists to scientists. I also doubt that it can be used to fund (semi)-professional research in the near future. We will see – let’s give it a chance.

Photo by David Goehring.

It has been quite a while since I was working in a wet lab the last time but I still have a lot of respect for the busy bees generating data there. It’s hard to imagine such a lab without personal computers which get data automatically from the detecting apparatus or manually from the experimenter. But as far as I am informed the stream of information of an experiment is mostly going in one direction – from the experimenter to the computer. Using the channel from the data pool to the experimenter could offer interesting opportunities to improve research. There are devices like electronic lab journals but I think about a further step: Augmented reality (AR) for the wet lab.

I prepared two quick and dirty mock-ups (upper part = raw image, lower part = image + data layer) and hope they are sufficient to give a rough impression of the idea. In both cases QR codes would be used to identify the object. A smartphone with a camera would detect these items (e.g. microtrubes or petri dishes) and overlay the given image with information about the experiment. In the case of the petri dish the size of the colony could be measured (assuming that the petri dish can be used as a reference) additionally and stored as part of the experiment. The applications of such systems are endless and all the technologies are available for low cost. It’s just about connecting everything. Is any project bringing this to reality already? It’s somehow hard to believe that this is not the case but I couldn’t find anything like it. This could be a cool community project.

PS: I have to admit there are some small technical hurdles in my examples. The QR codes are pretty small and my smartphone was unable to interpret the code correct if they are bend around something.

Attribution: Original images “32-day-wristband-culture” by Flickr user justinbaeder and Bacteria solution by Flickr user kaibara.

Additionally we are open for suggestions and feedback. I have also some points in mind to improve the tree and the underlying system. To mention some:

• A new logo (the one I took is just a initial solution)
• RSS for changes
• SSL login
• Show image source
• Pubmed links
• Show history of an entry
• ORCID (if this ever comes true it would have many implication to this project e.g. they could be used a base id)
• (RESTful) API
• SVG generation
• Frequent data dumps in different formats
• Publish the software under a open source license

All of these points are nothing more than my wishes and have to be discussed with Stephen. I cannot promise anything at this point only that any feedback is welcome. Apropos feedback and communication: I first thought about creating a blog and a mailing list for updates about the tree but Micheal convinced me that this is not necessary currently. So far I created a Friendfeed group. If there is the need at some point maybe OpenWetWare could be a place to set up a blog and page for collecting ideas.

Image by Jim Linwood

A screen shot of the web client

A web client and a client for Android will follow soon (I had luck – Laurent Eschenauer provide me with an account for an installation of the rudimentary web client). If you play around with the programs you will recognize that they have many rough edges and miss many functions so far – they are in a very early stage. Despite this OneSocialWeb is in my opinion on of the most promising projects in this field and a look at the protocol specification made me quite exited. Everything is build on XMPP (=> real-time) and other open standards. On the list of functions are Activity Stream over XMPP (which works currently), VCard4 over XMPP, Social Relationships and a Personal Eventing Protocol (PEP) Inbox. If you like to play around with early stage (console) tools have a look at the github repositories of the project and help to improve them.

Update: If you need an account for a running server – ping Laurent.

Let’s talk tech for the case that I still could not make myself understood: I want a combined, real-time, non-redundant stream of

• http://friendfeed-api.com/v2/feed/<username>/friends
• http://twitter.com/statuses/friends_timeline.xml and
• http://identi.ca/konrad/all

If you step back now and have a look at what I just have described you see that this is kind of a real-time RSS reader (time for PubSub, isn’t it?) including all the other goodies that friendfeed offers (e.g. sending to multiple platforms, commenting). An other description would be a multi-service client for status services.

My question: I this already possible to do so with friendfeed or one of it’s clones and I just missed it? Or am I the only one interested in that? Is there something around like this? Even Regine who is usually quite informed about the options of such tools could not help me (but inspired me to do a little visualization). … Maybe the solution will be Google buzz that just arrived (not yet available for me).

Update: Google buzz seems to be more a part of the problem than a part of the solutions. Maybe Cliqset was not a too bad hint. It offers a FeedProxy for many other services and makes it very easy to harvest the streams nicely wrapped using Activity Streams. This could be easily used to write something from scratch. But I still hope to find a ready solution.

Another issue is the following: As far as I understand the profile data would be displayed in the browser for users that use this networking functionality. But in many cases it would be needed to present parts of the identity to the public e.g. on a plain web page. So based on the privacy setting the underlying identity data would have to be rendered to HTML and send to a server. Sounds technically trivial but might have further privacy implications.

For me there is also the burning question of how the concepts could be applied to replace specialized networks with many different purposes and requirements (like Couchsurfing) to get “one to rule them all”.

Currently it is not clear that decentralized networks will win against their centralized counterparts in the near future. The raising awareness of privacy and of the value of online identities might be driving forces to make that shift happen. I expect that we will observe quite some development in this area soon.

References:
[1] Cutillo, Leucio Antonio;Molva, Refik;Strufe, Thorsten,
Leveraging social links for trust and privacy in networks, INetSec 2009. Open Research Problems in Network Security. April 23-24, 2009. Zurich, Switzerland

Photo by fadderuri.

I often thought about the problem of the possibility that people could be identified by their writing style. Especially today as many people generate a huge online available corpus that could be used to train detection algorithm (which are similar to the ones used e.g. in bioinformatics). Accidentally I was stuck (this wasn’t planned but it was my great luck :)) in a talk by Mike Brennan about stylometry that shed light upon this issue. In the first part of his talk Mike presented how sophisticated this field is. There are e.g. unsupervised pairing methods with 95% accuracy even if only with a short text is available. Mike also presented methods to protect against such privacy attack: A very successful method is the imitation of the writing style of another person (e.g. a famous author). He proposed assisting software to increase the success rate of this approach.

If you are interested in one of the many talks just have a look at the stream dumps that are already available. I assume there will be further processed versions in the near future.

Many thanks to everybody who made the HAR such a great event!

After the official opening the WikiLeaks project presented some highlights of their published whistle blower documents and pointed to the recently created list of most wanted documents. Due doe the growing trend of censorship that is going on in many countries in the recent time there was the need for some follow up sessions. Yesterday was a panel discussion just about this topic. It was a fine line up of known people from the scene. It would have been interesting to have somebody from the other side who a pro-censorship. Still this was an informative session that ended with the conclusion that this global trend to (internet) censorship has to be fought by global, united voice against it. The Internet Society might offer a umbrella for that.

Another early talk was hold by Michael Nielsen. After being in contact with him now for some years it was great to see him in person. In his talk he was covering the current trends and future of scientific communication. He pointed out that it the new technologies are mainly used by young researchers but also by selected already established individuals like Terence Tao who might have a lighthouse function.