http://medusa.as.arizona.edu/lbto/AO/AOpressrelease.htm

Now, correcting atmospheric disturbance is definitely not at point of being applicable in your purposed 3-inch distributed telescope array, but to claim its impossible is ridiculous. It wasn’t a question to ask an astronomer anyways, it was a question you should of asked an engineer. Scientists usually only have a working knowledge of the devices they use and their pitfalls, considering the devices they use often require teams of PhDs to design.

“The “open” part of this (that makes it appropriate for an open science summit.) seems like its mostly that folks are building their own PCR machines and gels, for Christmas sake, and are — wonder of wonders — sharing the plans for how to build one in your kitchen … On The Internet (of course)! Sharing the plans for a technology that’s been well understood for 20+ years — Wow!”

Taking understood software and slashing the price down to something affordable by a home user is what open source has always been best at – how is that not a useful thing? In fact, open source -innovation- is something relatively new.

http://medusa.as.arizona.edu/lbto/AO/AOpressrelease.htm

Now, correcting atmospheric disturbance is definitely not at point of being applicable in your purposed 3-inch distributed telescope array, but to claim its impossible is ridiculous. It wasn’t a question to ask an astronomer anyways, it was a question you should of asked an engineer. Scientists usually only have a working knowledge of the devices they use and their pitfalls, considering the devices they use often require teams of PhDs to design.

“The “open” part of this (that makes it appropriate for an open science summit.) seems like its mostly that folks are building their own PCR machines and gels, for Christmas sake, and are — wonder of wonders — sharing the plans for how to build one in your kitchen … On The Internet (of course)! Sharing the plans for a technology that’s been well understood for 20+ years — Wow!”

Taking understood software and slashing the price down to something affordable by a home user is what open source has always been best at – how is that not a useful thing? In fact, open source -innovation- is something relatively new.

Cred: I am a computer scientist, computational biologist, and psychologist of science. I do science, study science, and publish science and on science in many venues. I have published over 70 peer reviewed papers in all of these fields. Moreover, I am the inventor and PI of the world’s earliest and probably still best cloud-based integrated bioinformatics platform (see: http://www.biobike.org) — and, yes, it’s open source, of course! Look me up — I’m sure you will.

Creed: I strongly believe in open science in its largest sense. Many of my publications are about open science, and many are in open journals. (I recognize that open journals is not all of open science.)

Okay, enough for cred and creed, on to …

Comment: I have high expectations for Open Science, but I had low expectations for this summit. Unfortunately, my expectations greatly exceeded reality. Yes, I wrote that correctly; If this meeting represents the the state of the field of open science, I’m afraid that I have no better word for it than: “Ugh!” What a bunch of ignorant fanboys (and girls); there were so many stupid claims about what makes science work or not work, and so many dumb ideas about what to do about it, that I found myself yelling at fora.tv at least once during almost every talk (sometimes out loud, which startled the folks in my office). I was also watching the fora.tv chat and backchan.nl discussion, which was even lamer than the talks. The CoLab thing that you called the “high point” was pretty much a plain vanilla forum. (With voting and all! Please spare us!) Later that afternoon Michael Nielsen gave a talk which started out by listing the pile of similar things that had failed. Fail. Fail. Fail. Fail. And Fail.

(I thought that Neilsen was going someplace sensible — to the point that successful science is a management problem, not a technical problem — but his contribution turned out to be equally simplistic: credit preprints….uh, okay, but all that does is to push the politics of publication into preprints, as demonstrated by the fact that the arXiv preprint repository isn’t actually open, but has its own set of rules of contribution and credit assignment (unmentioned by Nielsen). Next idea!)

Let me say again out of the parens: Making science work is a MANAGEMENT problem, NOT a technical problem. There is, of course, technology involved, but technology is only an enabler. Regardless of how efficiently you can dump your crap online and pull it down, and regardless of how many people you can talk to at the same time, what one needs to make science — open or otherwise — go is leadership and management (and, of course, money helps). BTW, this is the case for ANY project, large or small. Really small projects can be lead and managed by sole investigators, but just because amateur astronomers can spot comets in our solar system (as one person gave at some point as a dumb analogy to open science) doesn’t mean that everyone on earth with a 3 inch telescope will be able to do what the Hubble does! No one’s 3 inch telescope can do that. (And no, you can’t just wire them all together to make a giant distributed telescope bigger and better than the Hubble — Nice try! I had that obvious idea too, and asked a leading astronomer who said to forget it for some reason that I didn’t completely understand — something about the impossibility of accounting for distributed interference.)

This dumb remark came up in a session on DIY Biotech, which is sort of fun, but has nothing to do with open science. (All that stuff has been “open” for years.) The “open” part of this (that makes it appropriate for an open science summit.) seems like its mostly that folks are building their own PCR machines and gels, for Christmas sake, and are — wonder of wonders — sharing the plans for how to build one in your kitchen … On The Internet (of course)! Sharing the plans for a technology that’s been well understood for 20+ years — Wow!

Then there were some random cybersecurity folks trying to tell us not to worry about the DIY Biologists. Why? (a) It’s hard to make anything dangerous. (I’m a molecular biologist, and I can tell you that it’s not.) And (b) because someone out there — we being the eyes and ears of Big Brother — will notice it and tell the feds before it’s too late. Uh, right. Thank you for these deeply moving insights. These folks were not at all reassuming regarding who is protecting us!

And today there are some people flaming about how they are going to discover their own drugs because the pharmas won’t because they won’t make their money back on it. (Ever wonder whether there’s actually a good reason for this — if you don’t think that drug discovery is hard, think again!) [Full disclosure, I not only work in that field, but I actually believe this argument; I just don't think that the speakers did any justice at all to the complexity of the project.]

As I said above, I have high hopes for Open Science, but wasn’t hoping for much from this summit, and got far less than I had hoped for from it. Mostly it seemed like a love fest for twitter fanboys (and girls) who think that everything’s a Web 2.0 problem. My theory: If you go into this field with that attitude, you can expect: Fail. Fail. Fail. Fail. And Fail.I hope I’m wrong because so far it looks like that’s where things are going.

Cred: I am a computer scientist, computational biologist, and psychologist of science. I do science, study science, and publish science and on science in many venues. I have published over 70 peer reviewed papers in all of these fields. Moreover, I am the inventor and PI of the world’s earliest and probably still best cloud-based integrated bioinformatics platform (see: http://www.biobike.org) — and, yes, it’s open source, of course! Look me up — I’m sure you will.

Creed: I strongly believe in open science in its largest sense. Many of my publications are about open science, and many are in open journals. (I recognize that open journals is not all of open science.)

Okay, enough for cred and creed, on to …

Comment: I have high expectations for Open Science, but I had low expectations for this summit. Unfortunately, my expectations greatly exceeded reality. Yes, I wrote that correctly; If this meeting represents the the state of the field of open science, I’m afraid that I have no better word for it than: “Ugh!” What a bunch of ignorant fanboys (and girls); there were so many stupid claims about what makes science work or not work, and so many dumb ideas about what to do about it, that I found myself yelling at fora.tv at least once during almost every talk (sometimes out loud, which startled the folks in my office). I was also watching the fora.tv chat and backchan.nl discussion, which was even lamer than the talks. The CoLab thing that you called the “high point” was pretty much a plain vanilla forum. (With voting and all! Please spare us!) Later that afternoon Michael Nielsen gave a talk which started out by listing the pile of similar things that had failed. Fail. Fail. Fail. Fail. And Fail.

(I thought that Neilsen was going someplace sensible — to the point that successful science is a management problem, not a technical problem — but his contribution turned out to be equally simplistic: credit preprints….uh, okay, but all that does is to push the politics of publication into preprints, as demonstrated by the fact that the arXiv preprint repository isn’t actually open, but has its own set of rules of contribution and credit assignment (unmentioned by Nielsen). Next idea!)

Let me say again out of the parens: Making science work is a MANAGEMENT problem, NOT a technical problem. There is, of course, technology involved, but technology is only an enabler. Regardless of how efficiently you can dump your crap online and pull it down, and regardless of how many people you can talk to at the same time, what one needs to make science — open or otherwise — go is leadership and management (and, of course, money helps). BTW, this is the case for ANY project, large or small. Really small projects can be lead and managed by sole investigators, but just because amateur astronomers can spot comets in our solar system (as one person gave at some point as a dumb analogy to open science) doesn’t mean that everyone on earth with a 3 inch telescope will be able to do what the Hubble does! No one’s 3 inch telescope can do that. (And no, you can’t just wire them all together to make a giant distributed telescope bigger and better than the Hubble — Nice try! I had that obvious idea too, and asked a leading astronomer who said to forget it for some reason that I didn’t completely understand — something about the impossibility of accounting for distributed interference.)

This dumb remark came up in a session on DIY Biotech, which is sort of fun, but has nothing to do with open science. (All that stuff has been “open” for years.) The “open” part of this (that makes it appropriate for an open science summit.) seems like its mostly that folks are building their own PCR machines and gels, for Christmas sake, and are — wonder of wonders — sharing the plans for how to build one in your kitchen … On The Internet (of course)! Sharing the plans for a technology that’s been well understood for 20+ years — Wow!

Then there were some random cybersecurity folks trying to tell us not to worry about the DIY Biologists. Why? (a) It’s hard to make anything dangerous. (I’m a molecular biologist, and I can tell you that it’s not.) And (b) because someone out there — we being the eyes and ears of Big Brother — will notice it and tell the feds before it’s too late. Uh, right. Thank you for these deeply moving insights. These folks were not at all reassuming regarding who is protecting us!

And today there are some people flaming about how they are going to discover their own drugs because the pharmas won’t because they won’t make their money back on it. (Ever wonder whether there’s actually a good reason for this — if you don’t think that drug discovery is hard, think again!) [Full disclosure, I not only work in that field, but I actually believe this argument; I just don't think that the speakers did any justice at all to the complexity of the project.]

As I said above, I have high hopes for Open Science, but wasn’t hoping for much from this summit, and got far less than I had hoped for from it. Mostly it seemed like a love fest for twitter fanboys (and girls) who think that everything’s a Web 2.0 problem. My theory: If you go into this field with that attitude, you can expect: Fail. Fail. Fail. Fail. And Fail.I hope I’m wrong because so far it looks like that’s where things are going.