copyleft – Data Science, Data Analytics and Machine Learning Consulting in Koblenz Germany

My List of People who I admire and which I find truly inspiring

Rene — Wed, 27 Aug 2014 14:44:59 +0000

This is my personal list of people that I admire. In a sense I would say if you want to know what I stand for you can just have a brief look at this list and at the values, norms and ideas the people of the list stand for. I have been heavily criticised that this list contains too many white men and not people from other cultures and sex. I think the main reason is that I am a western person and even though I lived in China I can just see to the horizon of my culture and of course I am being influenced by my culture. This is also where my values come from. So if you know people with a similar set of ideas and beliefs from other cultures feel free to contact me or leave a comment and point them out to me. I am very excited to “meet” more exciting people especially outside of my current horizon.
Also the following list has a randomised order.

Tank man

from:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tank_Man

A man who stood in front of a column of tanks on June 5, 1989, the morning after the Chinese military had suppressed the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 by force, became known as the Tank Man or Unknown Protester. The tanks manoeuvred to pass by the man, and he moved to continue to obstruct them, in something like a dance. The incident was filmed and seen worldwide.

further info:

own reason:
This is an unbelievable example of civil courage. Obviously his actions did not really change how things have been going on around tiananmen but I think this is truly heroic and brave.
I wish I will always have a similar courage when it comes to the point of fighting for a good thing or idea.

Aaron Swartz

from:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz

Aaron Hillel Swartz (November 8, 1986 – January 11, 2013) was an American computer programmer, writer, political organizer and Internet Hacktivist.
Swartz was involved in the development of the web feed format RSS, the organization Creative Commons, the website framework web.py and the social news site, Reddit, in which he became a partner after its merger with his company, Infogami.
Swartz’s work also focused on sociology, civic awareness and activism. He helped launch the Progressive Change Campaign Committee in 2009 to learn more about effective online activism. In 2010 he became a research fellow at Harvard University’s Safra Research Lab on Institutional Corruption, directed by Lawrence Lessig. He founded the online group Demand Progress, known for its campaign against the Stop Online Piracy Act.
On January 6, 2011, Swartz was arrested by MIT police on state breaking-and-entering charges, after systematically downloading academic journal articles from JSTOR. Federal prosecutors later charged him with two counts of wire fraud and 11 violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, carrying a cumulative maximum penalty of $1 million in fines, 35 years in prison, asset forfeiture, restitution and supervised release.
Swartz declined a plea bargain under which he would serve six months in federal prison. Two days after the prosecution rejected a counter-offer by Swartz, he was found dead in his Brooklyn, New York apartment, where he had hanged himself.
In June 2013, Swartz was posthumously inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame.

further info:

own reason:
Just read the Guerilla open access manifesto. Writing something like this and understanding the impact of open access is terrific. But living it through the PACER project and also through the JSTOR case at MIT is a complete different story.
I strongly believe that unjust laws exist but we have to understand that law is a relative thing. It is us in our society who make the laws. So it is also us to change them. I think norms and values of a society should stand above a particular law. So what Aaron did is following a very strong set of norms and values and fighting for a better law. One might doubt if his actions have been to radical and not in the way how we as a society decided to live our democratic processes but I am sure Aaron was driven by the deep wish to make the world a more place with more justice.

Lawrence Lessig

from:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Lessig

Lawrence “Larry” Lessig (born June 3, 1961) is an American academic and political activist. He is a proponent of reduced legal restrictions on copyright, trademark, and radio frequency spectrum, particularly in technology applications, and he has called for state-based activism to promote substantive reform of government with a Second Constitutional Convention. In May 2014, he launched a crowd-funded political action committee which he termed May Day PAC with the purpose of electing candidates to Congress who would pass campaign finance reform.
Lessig is director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University and a Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. Previously, he was a professor of law at Stanford Law School and founder of the Center for Internet and Society. Lessig is a founding board member of Creative Commons and the founder of Rootstrikers, and is on the board of MapLight. He is on the advisory boards of the Democracy Café, Sunlight Foundation and Americans Elect. He is a former board member of the Free Software Foundation, Software Freedom Law Center and the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

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own reason:
I have to admit that I did not come around to read his book code2.0 which is said to be excellent. But from his talks and actions I love how Lessig points out problems within society and how he is trying to educate people about it. He seems to have a very similar set of norms and values as Aaron did (and I do) but he is following “the protocol” of our society to fight for them. Especially he seems to be a true intellectual and not just a person who made a career in academia.

Geschwister Scholl

from:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geschwister_Scholl

Hans and Sophie Scholl, often referred to in German as die Geschwister Scholl (literally: the Scholl siblings), were a brother and sister who were members of the White Rose, a student group in Munich that was active in the non-violent resistance movement in Nazi Germany, especially in distributing flyers against the war and the dictatorship of Adolf Hitler. In post-war Germany, Hans and Sophie Scholl are recognized as symbols of the humanist German resistance movement against the totalitarian Nazi regime.

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own reason:
It always is hard to pick a single person or in this case siblings when it comes to role models in opposing a regime that is harmful for the people of a society. Of course the Geschwister Scholl have not been the only people in the resistence movement of Nazi Germany and there have been other regimes in other places that also had resitence movements. Still I believe their actions are very remarkable. I think it is the role of students to point out problems in our society. Nowadays many students seem to just accept everything that is happening. Distributing the fliers with the “truth” about Nazi Germany was not only brave but also at the university attracting many people that could multiply the message
I think it is similar to Aaron Swartz. Students and young people are in the role of more radically pointing out problems within society and the Geschwister Scholl most certainly fulfilled this role.

Randy Pausch

from:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randy_Pausch

Randolph Frederick “Randy” Pausch (October 23, 1960 – July 25, 2008) was an American professor of computer science, human-computer interaction, and design at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Pausch learned that he had pancreatic cancer in September 2006, and in August 2007 he was given a terminal diagnosis: “3 to 6 months of good health left”. He gave an upbeat lecture titled “The Last Lecture: Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams” on September 18, 2007, at Carnegie Mellon, which became a popular YouTube video and led to other media appearances. He then co-authored a book called The Last Lecture on the same theme, which became a New York Times best-seller. Pausch died of complications from pancreatic cancer on July 25, 2008.

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own reason:
It might be the American optimism that is behind Randy Pausch’s lecture and talk but I actually do not admire him for giving an inspiring lecture even though he was dying. I admire him much more for the fact that he seemed to have lived his life in a very positive way. His goal of enabling the dreams of others sounds very honest to me. I also like the statements that he made about “If you life your life in the right way, the dreams come to you”. I think Randy is a very good example to show that no matter what fate did with a person it is the person’s responsibility to answer to this. When people cry out they might receive pitty but probably not really improve their situation. I guess one can summarise Randy with his quote:

We cannot change the cards we are dealt with only the way we play them.

By the way I especially like the idea that he gave this talk for his kids to teach them a lesson at a time when they are grown up and he would not be around anymore.

Tim Berners-Lee

from:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Berners-Lee

Sir Timothy John “Tim” Berners-Lee, OM, KBE, FRS, FREng, FRSA, DFBCS (born 8 June 1955), also known as “TimBL”, is an English computer scientist, best known as the inventor of the World Wide Web. He made a proposal for an information management system in March 1989, and he implemented the first successful communication between a Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) client and server via the Internet sometime around mid November of that same year.
Berners-Lee is the director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which oversees the Web’s continued development. He is also the founder of the World Wide Web Foundation, and is a senior researcher and holder of the Founders Chair at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). He is a director of the Web Science Research Initiative (WSRI), and a member of the advisory board of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence.
In 2004, Berners-Lee was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II for his pioneering work. In April 2009, he was elected a foreign associate of the United States National Academy of Sciences. He was honoured as the “Inventor of the World Wide Web” during the 2012 Summer Olympics opening ceremony, in which he appeared in person, working with a vintage NeXT Computer at the London Olympic Stadium. He tweeted “This is for everyone”, which instantly was spelled out in LCD lights attached to the chairs of the 80,000 people in the audience.

further info:
Even though he is a bad talker and reading his book (weaving the web) will help much more I link a video here:

own reason:
In my opinion there are many reasons to admire Tim Berners Lee. Of course he is famose for inventing the world wide web. But I think the time was due for this invention. Internet itself was not very useful. The ideas of hypertext where around and similar systems existed. As always on the internet we have a strong the winner takes it all phenomenon. So bringing us the world wide web is certainly something Tim should get credit for but it is not the main reason why I admire him.
What is really cool about Tim Berners Lee is that he seems to have a very clear sense and abstraction of technical things and especially about their impact. Maybe it is easy to develop this sense after creating a technology that literally everyone on the Internet is using but still I like his activism for openess, ineroperability, net neutrality and freedom in general but freedom of speech in particular. Also he addressed me directly after asking a question in a Q&A session at a conference. His attitude of saying if you want to change the world you have the tools don’t talk just go geek and do it will certainly stick to me for the rest of my life.

Other than that I like that he does not fear to make a political statement about the problems with the web and where it should go and that he seems to have no interest whatsoever in becoming a multi billionaire which he could have easily achieved after sitting on the invention of the world wide web and being so central in its development.

Albert Einstein

from:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein

Albert Einstein (/ˈælbərt ˈaɪnstaɪn/; German: [ˈalbɐt ˈaɪnʃtaɪn] ( listen); 14 March 1879 – 18 April 1955) was a German-born theoretical physicist and philosopher of science. He developed the general theory of relativity, one of the two pillars of modern physics (alongside quantum mechanics). He is best known in popular culture for his mass–energy equivalence formula E = mc2 (which has been dubbed “the world’s most famous equation”). He received the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics “for his services to theoretical physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect”. The latter was pivotal in establishing quantum theory.
Near the beginning of his career, Einstein thought that Newtonian mechanics was no longer enough to reconcile the laws of classical mechanics with the laws of the electromagnetic field. This led to the development of his special theory of relativity. He realized, however, that the principle of relativity could also be extended to gravitational fields, and with his subsequent theory of gravitation in 1916, he published a paper on the general theory of relativity. He continued to deal with problems of statistical mechanics and quantum theory, which led to his explanations of particle theory and the motion of molecules. He also investigated the thermal properties of light which laid the foundation of the photon theory of light. In 1917, Einstein applied the general theory of relativity to model the large-scale structure of the universe.
He was visiting the United States when Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933 and, being Jewish, did not go back to Germany, where he had been a professor at the Berlin Academy of Sciences. He settled in the U.S., becoming an American citizen in 1940. On the eve of World War II, he endorsed a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt alerting him to the potential development of “extremely powerful bombs of a new type” and recommending that the U.S. begin similar research. This eventually led to what would become the Manhattan Project. Einstein supported defending the Allied forces, but largely denounced the idea of using the newly discovered nuclear fission as a weapon. Later, with the British philosopher Bertrand Russell, Einstein signed the Russell–Einstein Manifesto, which highlighted the danger of nuclear weapons. Einstein was affiliated with the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, until his death in 1955.
Einstein published more than 300 scientific papers along with over 150 non-scientific works. His great intellectual achievements and originality have made the word “Einstein” synonymous with genius.

further info:

own reason:
He was probably one of my first role models. I admire him for two reasons.
The first – which I nowadays actually find a stupid reason to admire someone – is just his pure intellect. Creating relativity theory was an amazing achievement of ignoring what we seem to know and just following the facts (as all good mathematicians and computer scientists should do all the time) But the list of his physical achievements does not stop at relativity theory (actually David Hilbert brought us general relativity much quicker and before Einstein (after he had talked to him on a conference) DOUBLE CHECK FACT) Further than that the list of various independent fields that he was working on in physics is just incredibly long.
The second reason is the way Einstein behaved about the development of the nuclear bomb. He first pointed out – by signing a letter to the American president of that time Roosevelt – that there is the danger that Nazi Germany might create a nuclear weapon. This led to the Manhatten project. The interesting part comes at the moment where Einstein regrets signing the letter. He said that if had known that this weapon would have been used against civil people and that Nazi Germany would not be successful in developing such a bomb he would have done nothing.
Many scientists have a great responsability. Knowledge can quickly become very dangerous or can be misused for a strategic advantage in harmful actions. Unfortunately I have the feeling that many scientists do not have the time or courage to think about ethics and the real impact of their research (I mean the impact that is not measured by citations and impact factors…). Even Einstein seemed not to be aware of his impact by writing this letter that led to the Manhatten project. Still he took responsibility after the Bombs had been used in Japan. I think many people in Einsteins position would have found a way of justifying how the americans had used the bomb against Japan. He did not. He publicly regreted what he did and had started. Finally he was a key player and intellectual of this open letter which pledges to the governments of this world to resolve conflicts in a peaceful way

Chelsea Manning

from:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chelsea_Manning

Chelsea Elizabeth Manning (born Bradley Edward Manning, December 17, 1987) is a United States Army soldier who was convicted in July 2013 of violations of the Espionage Act and other offenses, after releasing the largest set of classified documents ever leaked to the public. Manning was sentenced in August 2013 to 35 years confinement with the possibility of parole in eight years, and to be dishonorably discharged from the Army. Manning is a trans woman who, in a statement the day after sentencing, said she had felt female since childhood, wanted to be known as Chelsea, and desired to begin hormone replacement therapy. From early life and through much of her Army life, Manning was known as Bradley; she was diagnosed with gender identity disorder while in the Army.
Assigned in 2009 to an Army unit in Iraq as an intelligence analyst, Manning had access to classified databases. In early 2010, she leaked classified information to WikiLeaks and confided this to Adrian Lamo, an online acquaintance. Lamo informed Army Counterintelligence, and Manning was arrested in May that same year. The material included videos of the July 12, 2007 Baghdad airstrike, and the 2009 Granai airstrike in Afghanistan; 250,000 U.S. diplomatic cables; and 500,000 Army reports that came to be known as the Iraq War logs and Afghan War logs. Much of the material was published by WikiLeaks or its media partners between April and November 2010.
Manning was ultimately charged with 22 offenses, including aiding the enemy, which was the most serious charge and could have resulted in a death sentence. She was held at the Marine Corps Brig, Quantico in Virginia, from July 2010 to April 2011 under Prevention of Injury status—which entailed de facto solitary confinement and other restrictions that caused domestic and international concern—before being transferred to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, where she could interact with other detainees. She pleaded guilty in February 2013 to 10 of the charges. The trial on the remaining charges began on June 3, 2013, and on July 30 she was convicted of 17 of the original charges and amended versions of four others, but was acquitted of aiding the enemy. She is serving her sentence at the maximum-security U.S. Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth.
Reaction to Manning’s disclosures, arrest, and sentence was mixed. Denver Nicks, one of her biographers, writes that the leaked material, particularly the diplomatic cables, was widely seen as a catalyst for the Arab Spring that began in December 2010, and that Manning was viewed as both a 21st-century Tiananmen Square Tank Man and an embittered traitor. Reporters Without Borders condemned the length of the sentence, saying that it demonstrated how vulnerable whistleblowers are.

further info:

own reason:
Obviously I did not have the time to read everything that Manning has made public so I might be blinded by media coverage of his case. From what I know I can say that many others on the list Manning was bound to her moral and not to what she was allowed to do or not. I think she was truly trying to point out unjust things and I think especially the way she did it was actually pretty smart. I guess there is a lot of structural violence in politics and military. Pointing out problems in the “correct way” seems to not really change something. Therefor she just had to release the video of american soldiers randomly shooting civilians. Did she have to make public everything else? Who knows. Actually who cares? Making this video itself public is heroic and should have a much bigger impact than it did.
Going to jail for 35 years and having the society accepting this makes me just said. I really wonder what has to happen for people to make a revolution. Not that I believe in such a drastic action but having Manning in prison for 35 years is f*** up. I strongly hope that one day Chelsea Manning will receive the peace nobel price at some time.

Noam Chomsky

from:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noam_Chomsky

Avram Noam Chomsky (/ˈnoʊm ˈtʃɒmski/; born December 7, 1928) is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, logician, political commentator and activist. Sometimes described as the “father of modern linguistics”, Chomsky is also a major figure in analytic philosophy. He has spent most of his career at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he is currently Professor Emeritus, and has authored over 100 books. He has been described as a prominent cultural figure, and was voted the “world’s top public intellectual” in a 2005 poll.
Born to a middle-class Ashkenazi Jewish family in Philadelphia, Chomsky developed an early interest in anarchism from relatives in New York City. He later undertook studies in linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania, where he obtained his BA, MA, and PhD, while from 1951 to 1955 he was appointed to Harvard University’s Society of Fellows. In 1955 he began work at MIT, soon becoming a significant figure in the field of linguistics for his publications and lectures on the subject. He is credited as the creator or co-creator of the Chomsky hierarchy, the universal grammar theory, and the Chomsky–Schützenberger theorem. Chomsky also played a major role in the decline of behaviorism, and was especially critical of the work of B.F. Skinner. In 1967 he gained public attention for his vocal opposition to U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, in part through his essay The Responsibility of Intellectuals, and came to be associated with the New Left while being arrested on multiple occasions for his anti-war activism. While expanding his work in linguistics over subsequent decades, he also developed the propaganda model of media criticism with Edward S. Herman. Following his retirement from active teaching, he has continued his vocal public activism, praising the Occupy movement for example.
Chomsky has been a highly influential academic figure throughout his career, and was cited within the field of Arts and Humanities more often than any other living scholar between 1980 and 1992. He was also the eighth most cited scholar overall within the Arts and Humanities Citation Index during the same period. His work has influenced fields such as artificial intelligence, cognitive science, computer science, logic, mathematics, music theory and analysis, political science, programming language theory and psychology. Chomsky continues to be well known as a political activist, and a leading critic of U.S. foreign policy, state capitalism, and the mainstream news media. Ideologically, he aligns himself with anarcho-syndicalism and libertarian socialism.

further info:

own reason:
Chomsky is very new on the list so I cannot say very much about him. I have watched several interviews and talk by him and I just find it amazing how he turned completely towards ethics and political activism and is highly educated, rational and fact driven (he seems always to just have the better argument). In particular I like his point of view on power systems (As far as I understand him he is not blaming single people for injustice but he is seeing the problem of structural violence). I also like his critical view on mass media therefor I am eager to read his book: manufacturing consent
I particular like his very clear view on fundamental issues and how certain policies inevitably lead to certain abuse.

Melinda Gates (also Bill Gates)

from:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_%26_Melinda_Gates_Foundation

Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF or the Gates Foundation) is one of the largest private foundations in the world, founded by Bill and Melinda Gates. It was launched in 2000 and is said to be the largest transparently operated private foundation in the world. It is “driven by the interests and passions of the Gates family”. The primary aims of the foundation are, globally, to enhance healthcare and reduce extreme poverty, and in America, to expand educational opportunities and access to information technology. The foundation, based in Seattle, Washington, is controlled by its three trustees: Bill Gates, Melinda Gates and Warren Buffett. Other principal officers include Co-Chair William H. Gates, Sr. and Chief Executive Officer Susan Desmond-Hellmann.
It had an endowment of US$38.3 billion as of 30 June 2013. The scale of the foundation and the way it seeks to apply business techniques to giving makes it one of the leaders in the philanthrocapitalism revolution in global philanthropy, though the foundation itself notes that the philanthropic role has limitations. In 2007, its founders were ranked as the second most generous philanthropists in America, and Warren Buffett the first. As of May 16, 2013, Bill Gates had donated US$28 billion to the foundation.

further info:

own reason:
Ok I admit it is not fair to just name her. I mean it is still the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation. But from my perception it is Melinda who was the driving force and the eyeopener for Bill Gates. I always realised Bill Gates as one of the coldest and disgusting business man out there (On the same list as Steve Jobs and Marc Zuckerberg). Using Patents and Licence agreements and closed systems just for the purpose of becoming incredibly rich. Like other computer scientists he already had a deep impact on people and bringing us the operating systems and office suite was probably not that bad after all. I mean they were still useful tools for most people. Still he could have chosen a more ethical business model. Well how should he have seen these things when he was young. I guess he was even bound to investors and to what they wanted.
I guess with the help of Melinda he also realised that it would be to late to make drastic changes to Microsoft so he changed the focus in his life to create something new. Something that is much more sustainable and that feels very good.
Now using their wealth Bill and Melinda Gates start to tackle really important issues that we as humans can all tackle but which seem economically unimportant to tackle. This feels a little bit like a modern version of Robin Hood. Microsoft is pulling money out of the rich part of the world with nowadays ok software at high cost and vendor lockin but Bill and Melinda are distributing this money e.g. to fight diseases in areas of the world where the western world simply doesn’t care to fight these diseases. Also they act as multipliers to convince other rich people to do similar. I think this contributes a lot to more justice and progress.
Besides my love for technological topics the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation is besides the Wikimedia Foundation probably the only interesting NGO I am aware of and that I would be willing to work for and sacrifice my tech career. But I guess this could still even be done after a successful tech career (:
By the way fun fact: The rich get richer principle holds so incredibly in the case of bill and Melinda gates. Warren Buffet the “opponent” to Gates of being the wealthiest person in the world donated almost all his money to the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation which I think is an incredible trust provider to what Bill and Melinda are doing.

Uncertain candidates – since its had to say

There are some borderline candidates which I am still not sure about.

Julian Assange

I do not even know how to make up my mind. On the one hand Julian Assange seems to be an incredible important person and really doing a lot of good. On the other hand he seems very self centered and sometimes not authentic. I understand that he of has course operational costs and no fixed income. Still I am not sure how much is real

RAF – resp. Ulrike Meinhof

I guess in Germany it is almost as impossible to say that one sympathises with the RAF as it would be to state that one sympathises with the NSDAP. Yet I liked the fundamental problems the RAF addressed. Their methods where stupid and I guess there where a lot of “dead fish” swimming with the RAF and pursuing all the terror the RAF did but from their core beliefs and problems with the German society they seemed to have some really valid points.

Richard Stallman

Inventing the GPL was an an incredible smart move. I am not sure if this was the first copyleft licence and if Stallman really came up himself with the idea. Still he probably could and would have if he didn’t.
Stallman is often perceived to be too radical and not able to make a compromise. From what I understand (and within this article I believe that this is the topic with my biggest expertise) this is just the only way. There cannot be such a thing as “half free software” you are free or you are not free. The impact of being free is so incredibly big that I think it is indeed one of the view points in life where people really should not make a compromise. So I think that what Stallman is frequently being criticised for is actually one of his strongest points.

Linus Torvalds

I am not sure if he is just a winner takes it all guy or if there is more to him. Besides linux bringing git to the hacker community is the second and maybe on the long term even more impactful innovation by Linus Torvalds. Also the processes how he seems to work how he seems to understand the dynamics and social processes of the open source community is crazy.

Larry Page

People might ask: “Rene why is Steve jobs and Zuckerberg on your bad list and Larry page not? Where did he donate his money do and did he do all the philantropic work like Bill Gates?” My only response is: Yes that is a problem and that is part of the reason why I am still undecided about Page. What speaks for Page is his creativity combined with his strong will to use technology, and financial power to change the world and make it more automised and efficient. By pursuing this goal he seems to ignore economical principles. Google has released a bunch of products that are hard to monitise (even indirectly) or really “moonshot” projects. I have the feeling that page cannot donate money or give up power within google unless he has brought the amount of innovation to the world that he wanted.

Self driving cars (probably as shared economy with taxi, logistics, online shopping and not for sale)
a better “semantic” search (in combination with android and more knowledge of user context)

Big step towards open access by Great Britain and a comment from Neelie Kroes

Rene — Sun, 19 Aug 2012 18:33:39 +0000

During my vaccation a lot of stuff has been happened and it was just for today that I came along the following article and discussion: http://royalsociety.org/policy/projects/science-public-enterprise/report/. Yes you read correctly the royal society wants to create open access to all publications financed by the British government. What a big step! Congratulation to all British people for being such a role model.
It fits perfectly to my project related work and other discussions I was joining e.g.

Even though this development is very good to see I am not happy about how the following discussion is going on about models how to fulfill the goals from the royal society.

Neelie Kroes from the European comission posted a really nice answer!

I am glad to see this step forward. After my successful submission of Graphity and reading the copyright form of IEEE which I had to sign I really did have concerns publishing my work with them.
I am still considering not submitting to big journals and conferences anymore but just publishing on my universities website, my blog and/or on open preprint archives.

How Tim Berners Lee told me in front of thousand people: “Go geek and do it”

Rene — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 12:50:12 +0000

The statement already got twittered by my colleague Thomas Gottron and retweeted by many others

I am at www2012 conference and after the keynote by Neelie Kroes there was a panel discussion with her, Tim Berners Lee and Gille Babinet.
The discussion was about the question “Weather access to an open internet should be a human right?”
Clearly knowing where I am standing on this issue (yes it should be!) I was very happy that this question was discussed in front of such an audience. Tim Berners Lee obviously agreed on this point and Neelie Kroes really had some great and very diplomatic insights.
But for some reason the discussion always drifted up to the drawbacks of the web like copyright infringement. I was starting to get annoyed by this. Especially because it was always going as Free web vs copyright protection. So I decided to ask a question during Q&A which I am now about to blog.

During Q&A I also gave a litte background on the actuall question but I want to be a bit more detailed in my blog:

So yes I wish the “open web” to be a human right.
And I also think it is really important to protect the copyrights of artists, musicians and other people creating stuff. Working together with In Legend I really know how hard it is for a musician to survive and it is really important that he gets paid for what he does and shares.
BUT: the discussion is always an “eather – or” discussion and goes in the wrong direction! Bastian Emig from In Legend is very open minded about new ways to use the web working for the musician. Already in the plenary session Tim pointed out that he did not invent the Web to harm the record industry. But it is rather the record industry that refuses to think about new business models and just wishes everything to stay in the old ways which used to work quite well for them.
I made the experience that a band still needs to have a record label. You don’t get booked without the label. You don’t get articles in big print mags. The label gives you trust within the industrie and without that you are not seen by many people. And so on…
But just in my experience I see that the record label does big harm to a musician. As a member of this musicband I want to share our music on the web. Since there is piracy – which I cant change – I just have to think about a way how I could profit from it. Obviously by sharing the music myself I can increase my reach. This could significantly increase my chances for direct marketing (making the record label kind of obsolate) and this is what the labels seem to be afraid of. The web offers several huge opportunities for musicians to become recognized and an established act. But Labels own the licences and block musicians in doing smart and wise moves on the web.
I realize this problem exists due to the fact that labels have a monopoly on the product and too much power but pretending to protect the interests of the artists. Thereby hiding the fact that they are just fighting for their very own interests which do not neccessarily correlate whitch those from artists.

Here my question / point

It is not about copyright vs free / open internet. It is much more about a new model of copyright that can coexist with a free internet. In This new model licence owners (e.g. the labels) wouldn’t build those exclusive monopolies giving them such a high power. I asked what can be done to establish a new way of thinking about copyright. Since it really does not make sense that itunes gets 50% royalties for a digital distribution that is almost free of cost which I could easily run myself!
First of all – to my surprise – this won me a big applause from the audience which happened very rarely during the conference.

The full panel and discussion can be found at: http://www2012.wwwconference.org/media/videos/keynote-neelie-kroes/
Gille – to whom the question was originally directed – who is very friendly to the record industry answered some stuff I don’t even remember but he was basically stumbling around.
But then two really great answers came along:
Neelie:
“We are working on this and we see that the biggest issue is the record industrie. They pretend to protect the artists and they are not! We need legislation but maybe we need new forms of legislation. Models that worked well in the past may not serve our needs in todays world. I agree with you that you are pointing to the most cruicial point in this discussion.”
Me being totally satisfied with her answer sat down but Tim Berners Lee wanted to say something:
“You know it! Think of a world that you want. Just imagine it!

What would be the distribution?
what would be the user interface?
What would be the processes?
What third parties would be involved.

Go out and build it! Talk to the people here. Install an apache server and just go geek and make it happen!”

what a great statement!

It is always nice to have ideas and see solutions to problems. And yes you can always wine around and do nothing. But as a matter of the fact right now the web is still open an free! The technology is there. It really is just a matter of going out an building it. This is what I always said: This is why big traditional media companies didn’t built the youtube, google, facebooks, twitters, flickr,… applications in this world.
This statement gave me a lot of confidence to stronger believe in my ideas and even one day later I am really feeling that this statement will change my future life. It is really interesting that a man – who I value a lot – tells me something I always felt, hardly did and hits right a way to one of my weekest points!
After the sesion I got my copy of Tim Berners Lee’s book signed and he asked me to send him an email once my site is up. It is really amazing to receive this kind of feedback by such a great person.
That was one of the most inspiring moments in my life! So anyone who wants to join me going geek on the next generation music web app is very welcome to contact me or leave a comment! There really is a lot of stuff in my mind and I have already dreamt a lot and seen what is possible…

Tim Berners Lee signing my Copy of his book at www2012 in Lyon

Related-work.net – Product Requirement Document released!

Rene — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 10:26:50 +0000

Recently I visited my friend Heinrich Hartmann in Oxford. We talked about various issues how research is done in these days and how the web could theoretically help to spread information faster and more efficiently connect people interested in the same paper / topics.
The idea of http://www.related-work.net was born. A scientific platform which is open source and open data and tries to solve those problems.
But we did not want to reinvent the wheel. So we did some research on existing online solutions and also asked people from various disciplines to name their problems. Find below our product requirement document! If you like our approach you can contact us or contribute on the source code find some starting documentation!
So the plan is to fork an open source question answer system and enrich it with the features fulfilling the needs of scientists and some social aspects (hopefully using neo4j as a supporting data base technology) which will eventually help to rank related work of a paper.
Feel free to provide us with feedback and wishes and join our effort!

Beginning of our Product Requirement Document

We propose to create a new website for the scientific community which brings together people which are reading the same paper. The basic idea is to mix the functionality of a Q&A platform (like MathOverflow) with a paper database (like arXiv). We follow a strict openness principal by making available the source code and the data we collect.
We start with an analysis how the internet is currently used in different fields and explain the shortcomings. The actual product description can be found under the section “Basic idea”. At the end we present an overview over the websites which follow a similar approach.
This document – as well as the whole project – is work in progress. We are happy about any kind of comments or other contributions.

The distribution of scientific knowledge

Every scientist hast to stay up to date with the developments in his area of research. The basic sources for finding new information are:

Conferences
Research Seminars
Journals
Preprint-servers (arXiv)
Review Databases (MathSciNet, Zentralblatt, …)
Q&A Sites (MathOverflow, StackOverflow, …)
Blogs
Social Networks (Twitter, Google+)
Bibliograhpic Databases (Mendeley, nNode, Medline, etc. )

Every community has found its very own way of how to use this tools.

Mathematics by Heinrich Hartmann – Oxford:

To stay up to date with recent developments I check arxiv.org on a daily basis (RSS feed) participate in mathoverflow.net and search for papers over Google Scholar or MathSciNet. Occasionally interesting work is shared by people in my Google+ circles. In general the speed of pure mathematics is very slow. New research often builds upon work which has been out for a few years. To stay reasonably up to date it is enough to go to conferences every 3-5 months.
I read many papers on myself because I am the only one at the department who does research on that particular topic. We have a reading class where we read papers/lecture notes which are relevant for more people. Usually they are concerned with introductions to certain kinds of theory. We have weekly seminars where people talk about their recently published work. There are some very active blogs by famous mathematicians, but in my area blogs play virtually no role.

Computer Science by René Pickhardt – Uni Koblenz

In Computer Science topics are evolving but also changing very quickly. It is always important to have both an overview of upcoming technologies (which you get from tech blogs) as well as access to current research trends.
Since the speed in computer science is so fast and the review process in Journals often takes much time our main source of information and papers are conferences and twitter.

Usually conference papers are distributed digitally to participants. If one is interested in those papers google queries like “conference name year papers” are frequently used. Sites like http://www.sciweavers.org/ host and aggregate preprints of papers and organize them by conference.
The general method to follow a conference that one is not attending is to follow the hashtag of the conference on Twitter. In general Twitter is the most used tool to share distribute and find information not only for papers but also for the above mentioned news about upcoming technologies.

Another rich source for computer scientists is, of course, the related work of papers and google scholar. Especially useful is the method of finding a very influential paper with more than 1000 citations and find newer papers that quote this paper containing a certain keyword which is one of the features of google scholar.
The main problem in computer science is not to find a rare paper or idea but rather to filter the huge amount of publications and also bad publications and also keep track of trends. In this way a system that ranks and summarize papers (not only by abstract and citation counts) would help me a lot to select what related work of a paper I should read!

Psychology by Elisa Scheller – Uni Freiburg

As a psychologist/neuroscientist, I receive recommendations for scientific papers via google scholar alerts or science direct alerts (http://www.sciencedirect.com/); I receive alerts regarding keywords or regarding entire journal issues. When I search for a certain publication, I use pubmed.org or scholar.google.com. This can sometimes be kind of annoying, as I receive multiple alerts from different sources; but I guess it is the best way to stay up to date regarding recent developments. This is especially important in my field, as we feel a big amount of “publication pressure”; I work on a method which is considered as “quite fancy” at the moment, so I also use the alerts to make sure nobody has published “my” experiment yet.
Sometimes a facebook friend recommends a certain publication or a colleague points me to it. Most of the time, I read articles on my own, as I am the only person working on this specific topic at my institution. Additionally, we have a weekly journal club where everyone in turn presents work which is related to our focus of research, e.g. a certain part of the human brain. There is also a weekly seminar dedicated to presentations about ongoing projects.
Blogs (e.g. mindhacks.com, http://neuroskeptic.blogspot.com/) can be a source to get an overview about recent developments, but I have to admit I use them mainly for work-related entertainment.
All in all, it is easy to stay up to date using alerts from different platforms; the annoying part of it is the flood of emails you receive and that you are quite often alerted to articles that don’t fit your interests (no matter how exact you try to specify your keywords).

Biomedical Research by Johanna Goldmann – MIT

In the biological sciences, in research at the bench – communication is one of the most fundamental tools a scientist can have. Communication with other scientist may open up the possibilities of new collaborations, can lead to a completely new view point of a known question, the integration and expansion of methods as well as allowing a scientist to have a good understanding of what is known, what is not known and what other people have – both successfully and unsuccessfully – tried to investigate.
Yet communication is something that is currently very much lacking in academic science – lacking to the extent that most scientist will agree hinders the progress of research. Nonetheless the lack of communication and the issues it brings with it is something that most scientists will have accepted as a necessary evil – not knowing how to possibly change it.
Progress is only reported in peer-reviewed journals – many which are greatly affected not only but what is currently “sexy” in research but also by politics and connections and the “publish or perish” pressure. Due to the amount of this pressure in publishing in journals and the amount of weight the list of your publications will have upon any young scientists chances of success, scientist tend also to be very reluctant in sharing any information pre-publication.
Furthermore one of the major issues is that currently there really is no way of publishing or communicating either negative results or minor findings, which causes may questions or methods to be repeatedly investigated as well as a loss of information.
Given how much social networks and the internet has changed communication as well as the access to information over the past years – there is a need for this change to affect research and communication in the life science and transform the way we think not only about solving and approaching research questions we gather but the information and insights we gain as a whole.

Philosophy by Sascha Benjamin Fink – Uni Osnabrück

The most important source of information for philosophers is http://philpapers.org/. You can follow trends going on in your field of interest. Philpapers has a list of almost all papers together with their abstracts, keywords and categories as well as a link to the publisher. Additional information about similar papers is displayed.
Every category of papers is managed by some editor. For each category it is possible to subscribe to a newsletter. In this way once per month I will be informed about current publications in journals related to my topic of interest. Every User is able to create an account and manage his literature and the papers of his he is interested in.
Other research and information exchange methods among philosophers consist of mailing lists, reading clubs and Blogs. Have a look at David Chalmers blog list. Blogs are also becoming more and more important. Unfortunately they are usually on general topics and discussing developments of the community (e.g. Leiter’s Blog, Chalmers’ Blog and Schwitzgebel’s Blog).
But all together I still think that for me a centralized service like Philpapers is my favourite tool because it aggregates most information. If I don’t hear about it on Philpapers usually it is not that important. I think among Philosophers this platform – though incomplete – seems to be the standard for the next couple of years.

Problems

As a scientist it is crucial to be informed about the current developments in the research area. Abstracting from the reports above we divide the tasks roughly into the following stages.

1. Finding and filtering new publications:

What is happening right now? What are the current hot topics my area? What are current trends? (→ Check arXiv/Twitter)
Did a friend of mine write something? Did a “big shot” write something?
(→ Check meta information: title, authors)
Are my colleagues excited about a new development? (→ Talk to them.)

2. Getting more information about a given paper:

What is actually done in a given paper? Is it relevant for me? Is it really new? Is it a breakthrough? (→ Read abstracts. Find a good readable summary/review.)
Judge the quality of a paper: Is it correct? Is it well written?
( → Where is it published, if at all? Skim through content.)

Finally there is a fundamental decision: Shall I read the whole paper, or not? which leads us to the next task.

3. Understanding a paper: Understanding a paper in depth can be a very time consuming and tedious process. The presentation is often very short and much knowledge is assumed from the reader. The notation choices can be bad, so that even the statements are hard to understand. In effect the paper is easily readable only for a very small circle of specialist in the area. If one is not in the lucky situation to belong to that circle, one usually applies the following strategies:

Lookup references. This forces you to process a whole tree of older papers which might be hard to read, and hard to get hold of. Sometimes it is worthwhile to consult a textbook to polish up fundamentals.
Finding additional resources. Is there a review? Is there a related video lecture or slides explaining the material in more detail? Is the author going to a conference in the near future, or even giving a seminar in the area?
Join forces. Find people thinking about the same paper: Has somebody at my department already read the paper, so that I can ask some questions? Is there enough interest to make a reading group, or more formally, run a seminar about that paper.
Contact the author. This a last resort. If you have struggled with understanding the paper for a very long time and really need/want to get it, you might eventually write an email to the author – who might respond, or not. Sometimes even errors are found! – and not published! An indeed, there is no easy way to publish “errata” anywhere on the net.

In mathematics most papers are not getting read though the end. One uses strategies 1 & 2 till one gets stuck and moves on to something more exciting. The chances of survival are much better with strategy 3 where one is committed putting a lot of effort in it over weeks.

4. Finding related work. Where to go from there? Is the paper superseded by a more recent development? Which are the relevant papers which the author builds upon? What are the historic influences? What are the founding ideas of the subject? Finding related work is very time consuming. It is easy to overlook things given that the references are often vast, and sometimes hard to get hold of. Getting information over citations requires often access to commercial databases.

Basic idea:

All researchers around the world are faced with the same problems and come up with their individual solutions. There are great synergies in bringing these people together with an online platform! Most of the addressed problems are solved with a paper centric service which allows you to…

…get to know other readers of the paper.
…exchange with the other readers: ask questions, write comments, reviews.
…share the gained insights with the community.
…ask questions about the paper.
…discuss the paper.
…review the paper.

We want to do that with a new mixture of a traditional Q&A system like StackExchange or MathOverflow with a paper database and social features. The key features of this system are as follows:

Openness: We follow a strict openness principle. The software will be developed in open source. All data generated on this site will be under a creative commons license (like Wikipedia) and will be made available to the community in form of database dumps or an API (open data).

We use two different types of content sites in our system: Papers and Discussions.

Paper sites. A paper site is dedicated to a single publication. And has the following features:

Paper meta information
– show title, author, abstract, journal, tags
– leave a comment
– write a review (with wiki option)
– vote up/down
Paper resources
– show pdfs, slides, notes, video lectures, etc.
– add a resource
Related Work
– show the reference-tree and citations in an intelligent way.
Discussions:
– show related discussions
– start a new discussion
Social features
– bookmark
– share on G+, twitter

The point “Related Work” deserves some further explanation. The citation graph offers a great deal more information than just a list of references. Together with the user generated content like votes and the individual paper bookmarks and social graph one has a very interesting data set which can be harvested. We want this point at least view with respect to: Popularity/Topics/Read by Friends. Later on one could add more sophisticated, even graphical views on this graph.

Discussion sites. A discussion looks more like a traditional QA-question, with the difference, that each discussion may have related (many) papers. A discussion site contains:

Discussion meta information (title, author, body)
Discussion content
Related papers
Voting
Follow/Bookmark

Besides the content sides we want to provide the following features:

News Stream. This is the start page of our website. It will be generated from the network consisting of friends, papers and authors. There should be several modes like:

hot: heavily discussed papers/discussions
new papers: list new publications (filtered by tag, like arXiv feed)
social: What did your friends do lately
default: intelligent mix of recent activity that is relevant to the logged in user

Moreover, filter by tag should be always available.

Search bar:

Searches contents of the site, but should also find papers on freely available databases (e.g. arXiv). Adding a paper should be very seamless process from there.
Search result ranking uses vote and view information.
Personalized search information. (Physicists usually do not want sociology results.)
Auto completion on paper titles, author, discussions.

Social: (hard to implement, maybe for second version!)

Easily refer to users by @-syntax familiar from Twitter/Google+
Maintain a friendship / trust graph
Friendship recommendations
Find friends from Google+ on the site

Benefits

Our proposed websites improves the above mentioned problems in the following ways.
1. Finding and filtering new publications:This step can be improved with even very little community effort:

Tell other people, that you are interested in the paper. Vote it up or leave a comment if you are very excited about it.

Point out a paper to a colleague.

2. Getting more information about a given paper:

Write a summary or review about a paper you have read or skimmed through. Maybe the introduction is hard to read or some results are not clearly stated.
Can you recommend reading this paper? Vote it up!
Ask a colleague for his opinion on the paper. Maybe he can write a summary?

Many reviews of new papers are already written. E.g. MathSciNet and Zentralblatt maintain a large database of Reviews which are provided by the community and are not freely available. Many authors would be much more happy to write them to an open system!
3. Understanding a paper:Here are the mayor synergies which we want to address with our project.

Ask a question: Why is the author using this experimental method? How does Lemma 3.4 work? Why do I need this assumption? What is the intiution behind the “virtual truncation”? What implications does this work have?
Start a discussion: (might involve more than one paper.) What is the difference of these two papers? Is there a reference explaining this more clearly? What should I read in advance to understand the theory?
Add resources. Tell the community about related videos, notes, books etc. which are available on other sites.
Share your notes. If you have discussed a paper in a reading class or seminar. Collect your notes or opinions and make them available for the community.
Restate interesting statements. Tell the community when you have found a helpful result which is buried inside the paper. In that way Google may find it!

4. Finding related work. Having a well structured and easily navigable view on related papers simplifies the search a lot. The filtering benefits from the content generated by the users (votes) and individual information, like friends who have written/bookmarked a paper.

Similar Sites on the Web

There are several discussions in QA forum which are discussing precisely this problem:

Quora.com: Where can I comment on sci papers?
MathOverflow: Good websites for discussions of mathematical papers?
MathOverflow: Is a free alternative to MathSciNet possible?
MathOverflow: Errata-Database

We found three sites on the internet which follow a similar approach which we examined more carefully.
1. There is a social network which has most of our features implemented:

researchgate.net
“Connect with researchers, make your work visible, and stay current.”

The Economist has dedicated an article to them. It is essentially a facebook clone, with special features for scientist.

Large, fast growing community. 1.4m +50.000/m. Mainly Biology and Medicine.
(As Daniel Mietchen points out, the size might be misleading due to institutional accounts)
Very professional Look and Feel. Company from Berlin, Germany, funded by VC. (48 People involved, 10 Jobs advertised)
Huge Feature set:

Profile site, Connect to friends
News Feed
Publication Database, Conference Finder, Jobmarket
Every Paper its own page: with

Voting up/down
Comments
Metadata (Title, Author, Abstract, Preveiw)
Social Media (Share, Bookmark, Follow author)

Organize Workgroups/Reading Classes.

Differences to our approach:

Closed Data / Closed Source
Very complex site which solves a lot of purposes
Only very basic features on paper site: vote/comment.
QA system is not linked well to paper database
No MathML
Mainly populated by undergraduates

2. Another website which comes reasonably close is:

http://www.sciweavers.org/

“an academic network that aggregates links to research paper preprints
then categorizes them into proceedings.”

Includes a large collection of online tools for various purposes
Have a big library of papers/software/datasets/conferences for computer science.
Paper sites have:

Meta information and preview
Vote functionality and view statistics, tags
Comments
Related work
Bookmarking
Author information

User profiles (no friendships)

Differences to our approach:

Focus on computer science community
Comment and Discussions are well hidden on paper sites
No News stream
Very spacious design

3. Another very similar site is:

journalfire.com – beta
“Share what your read – connect to colleagues – create journal clubs.”

It has the following features:

Comment on Papers. Activity feed (?). Follow articles.
Host Journal Clubs. Create Events related to papers.
Powerful search box fetching papers from Arxiv and Pubmed (slow)
Social features on site: User profiles, friend finder (no fb/g+ integration yet)
News feed – from subscribed papers and friends
Easy paper import via Bookmarklet
Good usability!! (but slow loading times)
Private reading clubs cost money!

They are very skilled: Maintained by 3 PhD students/postdocs from Caltec and MIT.

Differences to our approach:

Closed Data, Closed Source
Also this site misses (currently) misses out ranking features
Very Closed model – Signup required
Weak Crowd sourcing: Cannot add Meta information

The site is still at its very beginning with little users. The project started in 2010 and did not gain much momentum since.

The other sites are roughly classified in the following categories:
1. Single people who are following a very similar idea:

annotatr.appspot.com. Combines a metadata-base with the disqus plugin. You can comment but not rate. Good usability. Nice CSS. Good search function. No MathML. No related article suggestion. Maintained by two academics in private time. Hosted on Google Apps. Closed Source – Closed Data.
r-Forum – a resource where mathematicians can collect record reviews, corrections of a resource (e.g. paper, talk, …). A simple Vanilla-Forum/Wiki with almost no content used by maybe 12 people in US. No automated Data import. No rating system.
http://math-arch.org/ – Post comments to math papers. very bad usability – get even errors. Maintained by a group of russian programmers LogicSun. Closed Source – Closed Data.

Analysis: Although the principal idea to connect people reading papers is there. The implementation is very bad in terms of usability and even basic programming. Also the voting features are missed out.

2. (Semi) Professional sites.

Public Libary of Science very professional, huge paper data base for mainly biology, medicine. Features full text papers, lots of interesting meta information including references. Has comment features (not very visible) and news stream on the start page.
No QA features (+1, Ask question) on the site. Only published articles are on the site.
Mendeley.com – Huge Bibliographic database with bookmarking and social features. You can organize reading groups in there, with comments and notes shared among the participants. Features a news stream with papers by friends. Nice import. Impressive fulltext data and Reference features.
No QA features for paper. No comments for paper. Requires Signup to do anything useful.
papercritic.com – Open review database. Connected to Mendely bibliographic libary. You can post reviews. No rating. No comments. Not open: Mendely is commercial.
webofknowledge.com. Commercial academic citation index.
zotero.org – features programm that runs inside a browser. “easy-to-use tool to help you collect, organize, cite, and share your research sources”

Analysis: The goal of all these tools is to simplify the reference management, by providing metadata like references, citations, abstracts, author profiles. Commenting features on the paper site are not there or not promoted.
3. Vaguely related sites which solve different problems:

citeulike.org – Social bookmarking for papers. Closed Source – Open Data.
http://www.scholarpedia.org. A peer reviewed open access encyclopedia.
Philica.com Online Journal which publishes articles from any field along with its reviews.
MathSciNet/Zentralblatt – Review database for math community. Closed Source – Commercial.
http://f1000research.com/ – Online Journal with a public, post publish review process. “Open Science – Open Data – Open Review”
http://altmetrics.org/manifesto/ as an emerging trend from the web-science trust community. Their goal is to revolutionize the review process and create better filters for scientific publications making use of link structures and public discussions. (Might be interesting for us).
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiScholar – one of several ideas under discussion at Wikimedia as to a central repository for references (that are cited on Wikipedias and other Wikimedia projects)

Upshot of all this:

There is not a single site featuring good Q&A features for papers.

If you like our approach you can contact us or contribute on the source code find some starting documentation!
So the plan is to fork an open source question answer system and enrich it with the features fulfilling the needs of scientists and some social aspects which will eventually help to rank related work of a paper.
Feel free to provide us with feedback and wishes and join our effort!

Open Access and the Boycott of Elsevier! Let uns not stop here and take the digital revolution one step further!

Rene — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 13:48:22 +0000

Believing in open models and supporting ideas of copy left I am more than happy to see the current developement of scientists worldwide publicly making statements of not supporting Elsevier in the future which I will obviously join!
You can find the page where scientists make thos statements under: http://thecostofknowledge.com/
And you find much more resources on the whole discussion under http://michaelnielsen.org/polymath1/index.php?title=Journal_publishing_reform

Is this enough or do we need to go even further?

in my oppinion we need to take much more steps. Journals and publications where good institutions in times 50 years ago. Where it took mankind much efford to spread valuable information. But heaving the web and network technologies a scientific journal seems to be pointless in a certain way. The entire reviewing process of course gives some trend of what papers have good quality and what papers don’t. Afterall science is envolving at a faster and faster speed after all.
But as we can see from open projects like wikipedia, linux, wordpress and many more those procedures also yield amazingly good results. They take less effort and are much faster in their deciession process. I have observed that open repositories like http://arxiv.org/ helped mathematicians a lot. But as I know from my good friend Dr. Heinrich Hartmann who is a postdoc at Oxford is that many advanced scientific research discussions among the younger generation already proceed on http://mathoverflow.net/ an “unscientific”, not citeable, not driving your citation count webservice. There people can ask questions and post answers. The best thing is they can rate the answers and receive “carma points” for providing good answers and receiving much feedback.
We see this outside of academia envolving even faster. When I have a question about anything I type it into google search. Chances are high that someone asked the question on yahoo answers or some similar service where best answers are voted and crowed sourced! If the entire society has figured out the strength of this system, why not using it in academia as well?
Obviously these kind of communications and collective intelligence efforts are possible in todays world. So why do we still stick to our old fashoined “good” working methods despite the fact that everyone I talk too is complaining about the reviewing process? Never heard someone complaining about mathoverflows feedback mechanisms!

It is also much cheaper!

It is unbelievable that Elsevier is making a revenue of $3 bn / year. This money comes from our education system! This money could be invested to researches. Maintaining a reliabale citeable academic website compared to mathoverflow would cost us a fraction of this money. Making it possible to afford more researchers actually working on problems!
But actually the best part is, we don’t even need to maintain such a site. Servieces exist. Maybe not designed specifically for academic research but we could still use them. Why do we need a conference or e journal. Every idea every solution can be made publicly and discussed with a broad audience. My first research paper about graphity is still in the reviewing process where some comitee decides weather the idea and results are good enough to be published. This is happening while the corresponding blogpost already received 1465 views on my blog and about twice as much on dzone and made quite some buzz already setting me in the discussion with some co’workers from linked in, yahoo and microsoft… proving that my research results are actually of interest to people. All this happens with me being a new fish in science having no precompiled trust or authority on any topic at all.
So everyone it is your descission how you act. Of course it is easy and probably efficient as well as time saving to rely on some authority to select high quality information sources for you. And I am not saying that the quality in top conferences and journals is not high. But – besides the money – you might pay a very high price in the sense that these authorities filter a lot of also good information for you. Why not using todays modern technologies and have the crowd decide which resources and ideas are worthwile spreading among people and which ones are not?

Wikipedia to Blackout for 24 hours to fight SOPA and PIPA – Copy of the user discussion and poll on my blog

Rene — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 11:31:49 +0000

I am one of the web pioneers but this is about the most amazing thing that I will be witnessing on the web as long as I can remember. Tomorrow on January 18th the english version of Wikipedia will shut down for 24 hours to protest two upcoming (?) american laws (SOPA and PIPA) that set the legal foundations to censor the web. This is happening in the country that is so proud of it’s freedom of speech.

Press release: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_releases/English_Wikipedia_to_go_dark
Letter to Users: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/English_Wikipedia_anti-SOPA_blackout
User discussion: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:SOPA_initiative/Action see below for a saved copy!

This is such an important move of democracy that I was standing still for a couple of minutes after I heard of this! 1’800 active wikipedia authors moderators and administrators collectively agreed to make this move in order to show a protest! I am very excited to see where this will be going and what impact this has. Freedom of the internet is what makes this such a beautiful space. Everyone spread this word! discuss this! Don’t let anyone take the freedom of speech and information sharing from you!
Since the user discussion and poll won’t be available tomorrow I attached them to my blogpost.
http://www.rene-pickhardt.de/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/Wikipedia-SOPA-initiative-Action-Wikipedia-the-free-encyclopedia.html
I will not comment on this any further. Please everyone Have your own oppinion and act with responsability.

Look for love video: Did DJ Sammy steel the video story from jubilees Love Language video? Watch both clips!

Rene — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 09:51:56 +0000

UPDATE: (Feb. 8th. 2012) the originial love language video is now linked under the official look for love Video from DJ Sammy! Glad to see that and glad to see that protest on the web seems to be heared. Now I can finally completely enjoy DJ sammy’s work without worries!
Record industry as well as many companies that are in the business of publishing are complaining for years that illegal file sharing is killing their market and destroying culture and art. I don’t want to fall into the discussion about how copyleft is superior to copyright. Also not about how wrong all the whining is as there are many reasons that show, that the industry was just not smart enough to listen to the customers and adapt to the new possabilities given by the internet.
But then it is just sad to see how musicians like DJ Sammy (probably together with management and record labels) seemed to take a (viral) video from a charity organization and use the idea and story for their own music clip. That happened without giving public credit to this organization and as far as I know – please proove me wrong – without sharing profit from this song with the jubilee project – the organization that had the original idea. If this is true I am very disapointed since it has no moral at all and the ethics are just not given.
As I was active on the boarder of music industry I know that I should not even talk about this sad event as bad promo is also promo and therefor my blogpost is even supporting DJ Sammy and the people responsible for this video (well maybe they will even adjust their behaviour!). But I hope that this blog article will help even more to promote the good thing and really nice video by the jubilee project! Feel free to watch the original here:

And of course to show the similarity check out the DJ Sammy song look for love! I was thinking about re uploading the video and making a front screen and back screen giving credit to the original video but still link to i tunes and all the shopping possabilities. But I wasn’t couragious enough since I myself would commit a copy right violation and I have no interest in some annoying law suit.

final thoughts

I have to admit that the song is great (though I usually listen to heavy metal) and that the video is really well recorded and produced. I wish they had just officially helped to spread the good idea of the jubilee project. Anyway I hope the user discussion on youtube will last and maybe in this way the jubilee project will receive even more attention.
I can understand that musicians are frustrated and feel betrayed but I can only remind you to act with moral and good ethics on the web. There are so many great opportunities on the web also for musicians. Noone would have objected if DJ Sammy had used the video and worked together with the jubilee project!
If you know more about this topic please tell me in the comments. I’d love to be updated how the story continues!