Sharing raw data

The impetus comes from genomic sequence data, which requires big, expensive machines, and can be used to answer many diverse questions.  But the principle is quite general: sharing experimental data on line is a huge boost to science.  Any individual researcher may not want to share his data, because it gives others the opportunity to interpret it, stealing some of his thunder.  But we all want the other guy to share his data.

It’s coming.  Scientific journals have space for ‘supplemental materials’ on the web, and are starting to expect that authors post the data from which their conclusions are drawn.

This is a big and important trend.  Science is politicized to a greater extent than any of us wants to admit, and, of course, politics is poison to the workings of science.  The trend toward expensive equipment and large grants to fund it has centralized scientific investigation to everyone’s detriment. The trend toward cheap computing power has democratized science, to everyone’s benefit.  As data sharing becomes an expected part of the process, there will be less opportunistic interpretations of data and more diverse and creative modes of analysis.

— JJM

Old article in Science magazine.  New articlein Science magazine.
What Wikipedia has to say.

The widest human collaboration since the Great Wall of China
(and I don’t think the Great Wall was built by volunteers)

Across the world, Wikipedia is consulted 50-80 thousand times per second.  There are 3 million English language articles, and 10 million more in other languages.  There are thousands of people who devote substantial portions of their working lives to editing and researching Wikipedia articles (the top 4,000 are listed here, and each one of them has contributed at least 10,000 edits.)

Wikipedia’s open structure inherently makes it an easy target for Internet trolls, spamming, and those with an agenda to push.  Nevertheless, it is found to be among the most reliable general sources of knowledge on the planet.

‘Wikipedia’s potential lies in harnessing the “wisdom of crowds”; however, those crowds are only as wise as they are diverse.’

‘Why do Wikipedians spend countless hours improving the site, often doing mundane, repetitive tasks they would never do for money?’  You may as well ask why JJM puts an hour or so each day into the Daily Inspiration.

Boston Review article by Evgeny Morozov
‘Wikipedia works well in practice, but not necessarily in theory.’ 

Are you serious?

“A man sufficiently gifted with humor is in small danger of succumbing to flattering delusions about himself, because he cannot help perceiving what a pompous ass he would become if he did”

— Konrad Lorenz, born this day in 1903

“It is a good morning exercise for a research scientist to discard a pet hypothesis every day before breakfast. It keeps him young.”

Not bored

I believe that yawning should be integrated into exercise and stress reduction programs, cognitive and memory enhancement training, psychotherapy, and contemplative spiritual practice...

Several recent brain-scan studies have shown that yawning evokes a unique neural activity in the areas of the brain that are directly involved in generating social awareness and creating feelings of empathy...Numerous neurochemicals are involved in the yawning experience, including dopamine, which activates oxytocin production in your hypothalamus and hippocampus, areas essential for memory recall, voluntary control, and temperature regulation. These neurotransmitters regulate pleasure, sensuality, and relationship bonding between individuals, so if you want to enhance your intimacy and stay together, then yawn together. 

...Try it right now... Your eyes may start watering and your nose may begin to run, but you’ll also feel utterly present, incredibly relaxed, and highly alert.

— Andrew Newberg, UPenn Center for Spirituality and the Mind
     read full article in Pennsylvania Gazette

Variation On A Theme By Rilke
(The Book of Hours, Book I, Poem 1, Stanza 1)

A certain day became a presence to me;
there it was, confronting me — a sky, air, light:
a being. And before it started to descend
from the height of noon, it leaned over
and struck my shoulder as if with
the flat of a sword, granting me
honor and a task. The day’s blow
rang out, metallic — or it was I, a bell awakened,
and what I heard was my whole self
saying and singing what it knew: I can.

~ Denise Levertov

Not so easy being a heretic

It’s the 400th  anniversary of the telescope.  When Galileo looked at Jupiter, he discovered four companion dots - the largest four of Jupiter’s moons, which followed Jupiter through the sky, and changed their positions periodically with respect to the planet.  The obvious conclusion was that Jupiter’s moons are revolving around Jupiter.

But this was wrong, as everyone knew.  The earth is the center of the universe, and everything revolves around the earth.  The telescope must be a flawed instrument, and if it offered such clearly-fallacious views of the heavenly bodies, then nothing that it revealed was to be trusted.  (Among the astronomers who considered deceptive the telescope of Galileo, the best known is Martin Horky.)

We laugh at the ways scientists deceived themselves 400 years ago, but experience tells us that it is easy to see our mistakes once we are surrounded by people who see our mistakes.  It is a good rule of thumb to take observations more seriously than theories, but experiments, too, can be flawed.  At what point do we discard a broad, well-established theory that has served us well and say that it has been falsified by observation?

Truth is a social phenomenon.  Even those of us who regard ourselves as rugged individualists and dyed-in-the-wool positivists rely more than we like to think on the views of our community of enlightened individuals for judgments about what is real.

Which of the favorite theories that form the foundation of our world view in the 21st Century will ultimately be discarded and discredited? 

If I had to bet, my answer would be:  all of them.

Being Heretic in the Knowledge Society, by Emanuela Scridel

Pride

— Dahlia Ravikovitch, born this day in 1939

Wherever You lead me, I will follow

Instead of going to the choir to wait for the others she, returned to her cell, knelt down on the floor again, and unfocused her eyes.

Blessed is that servant whom the master finds awake when he comes.

Pure awareness stripped her of everything. She became an ember carried upward by the heat of an invisible flame. Higher and higher she rose, away from all she knew. Powerless to save herself, she drifted up toward infinity until the vacuum sucked the feeble light out of her.
A darkness so pure it glistened, then out of that darkness,

Nova.

More luminous than any sun, transcending visibility, the flare consumed everything, it lit up all of existence. In this radiance she could see forever, and everywhere she looked, she saw God’s love.

The above excerpt is from Lying Awake, by Mark Salzman.  It is a book which describes quite convincingly the experiences of a California Carmelite nun from two perspectives: Sister John has direct experiences of God, which she records effortlessly as ecstatic poetry.  Sister John has a benign tumor in the brain which causes intermittent delusions and headaches.

Astronomical Slide Show

from Seed Magazine

This is the story of how Chinese villagers took matters into their own hands and ended the Cultural Revolution.

ON the night of November 24, 1978, farmers of 18 households from Xiaogang, a village in Fengyang County, Anhui Province, signed a secret agreement using their thumb prints. They agreed to divide the land of the local commune into household plots in return for delivering fixed output quotas to the government with the condition of never asking for money or grain from the state. It was also written into the contract that if the cadres went to jail for this proposition, the other villagers would take care of their kids until they were 18. The household contract responsibility system was strictly forbidden at that time.

Xiaogang was notorious locally for its poverty. Every resident received only 50 kg of grain every year, forcing many to roam the countryside begging after each harvest. One reason for this was the system of people's communes, or collective land ownership. The production team decided all matters regarding the land, so farmers had little incentive to work hard and good harvests weren't expected. ‘All we wanted was to feed our families,’ one of the signatories recalled. ‘If we could provide enough food, it was OK even if we ended up beheaded.’

In 1979, the village’s grain output was increased to 90,000 kg, roughly equal to the aggregation of all yields in the previous 20 years. The grain the village delivered to the government was seven times the fixed quota. Per capita annual income reached RMB 400, 18 times the previous year. The national average income for farmers that year was only RMB 113.6.

The model was soon copied by neighboring villages. The central authorities gave their approval for the trial in 1980. The household contract responsibility system was popularized nationwide four years later, officially raising the curtain on rural reform. Xiaogang was called the ‘Number One village of China's reform.’

In recent years, Xiaogang has undertaken a second experiment: practicing land circulation and pooling plots into a cooperative operation.

On September 30, 2008, Hu Jintao, general secretary of the Communist Party of China, praised the new trial when inspecting the village. Since then, land circulation has been implemented across the country. Farmers are entitled to transfer their rights of land use in return for compensation, making intensive agriculture possible.

— Shuang Shuang, writing for China Today

Gratitude is its own reward

Gratitude, he thinks, is the highest form of worship; perhaps its only true form. One needs no intermediary to practice—no preacher or pope, no dogma or liturgy. It is efficient, effulgent, easy. The sole function of gratitude is to cast a light on the perpetual dance between souls. It is breath and intuition, sight and smell, taste and touch illuminated. Nothing is more satisfying that gratitude, he thinks, because it is love in practice. It licks clean all wounds and readies one for better things. It laughs at itself. Like its sister “forgiveness,” it cannot be denied. Nothing heals like gratitude.

Gratitude is its own reward, its own perpetual garden. He knows that of the few that read this meditation fewer will take this matter to heart directly. Yet he is not deterred. He knows the power of words. Each one leaps off the page and into the consciousness and nests until it is ripe and ready for consumption.

— Steven G. Fullwood

The upper half of time

Time is earth and water.

The lower half of time where most people live is solid stone, a hard mass of cause and effect confining human life in walls of inevitability; the stone of time has many strata with gems and metals and a thousand varied riches buried in the multitude of layers that comprise the hard crust of treasured temporality.

The upper half of time is an ocean of clear water, rippling with tides of action and change, created wave upon wave by those few people who live in that eternal sea. The waters of atemporality follow the tides from past to future, rippling and crashing with the surf of man-made change. The ocean is varied in calm and storm with neap tide and riptide, with safe swimming currents of alternation and killing whirlpools of transformation, but everywhere from the shallows of time to the deeps the ocean is one and the same water.

No one is born into the waters of time; each ocean dweller lived first in the earth of time, before either pulling himself or being pulled out of the hard strata, yanked away from the prison of causality into the freedom of change.

—from  All of an Instant by Richard Garfinkle