Slashdot Mirror
YouTube for Science?
Shipud writes "The National Science Foundation, Public Library of Science and the San Diego Supercomputing Center have partnered to set up what can best be described as a "YouTube for scientists", SciVee". Scientists can upload their research papers, accompanied by a video where they describe the work in the form of a short lecture, accompanied by a presentation. The formulaic, technical style of scientific writing, the heavy jargonization and the need for careful elaboration often renders reading papers a laborious effort. SciVee's creators hope that that the appeal of a video or audio explanation of paper will make it easier for others to more quickly grasp the concepts of a paper and make it more digestible both to colleagues and to the general public."
One of my faves is fora.tv which has lots of really good lectures and readings. A lot of it is from CSPAN, but I like CSPAN, so I'm not one to complain.
This kind of refinement in the online video space is a great great thing, and as online advertising increases in value (At the expense of broadcast advertising dollars) these kinds of websites will have greater and greater viability and from there, increased depth of programming.
Some websites have tried to do this in an entertainment sphere, and for the most part, aren't realy doing too well - audience expectations are high and the material presented is often iffy in quality. OF course, that changing, slowly - better stuff is arriving, but there needs to be filtering systems. Things like the site in TFA and fora.tv are just such filters.
This is a very exciting time for online video!
Now, if we can only keep the bandwidth up before it all chokes itself to death...
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
This sounds like a good idea.
s mallernk5.jpg
I personally work on a digital hologram printer, and wouldn't mind recording a short video describing how it works etc.
Here's an example hologram that I've done: (Yes, I'm a KDE developer as well. It's the KDE dragon, konqi.)
http://img267.imageshack.us/my.php?image=pict0044
(Excuse the mess of my room)
There is a reason why research papers take the format that they take - to make it easy to locate the pertinent information that another researcher is trying to find. Most readers will be interested in the results section of a paper - where significant findings are listed. If the findings seem too good to be true, you might read the methodologies section to see how the researcher validated their study tools and to see if the methods used to arriving at their conclusions are suspect. If you are a layman to the field of study or you want to see what literature directed the researcher to this research question, you might be interested in reading the background section of the paper. If you found the topic interesting, and want to continue this line of questioning, you would read the discussions section to learn interesting aspects about what the researcher would do differently had they the opportunity to do the research over again or to perform the research again in the future. A lot of the discussion section might pertain to how they might change their methodology, or change their survey instrument in order to increase the return of relevant data.
Now, having said all of that, I do think that a site which offers video presentations of papers would be a more interesting way of learning information. In acadamia, a lot of professors and researchers are expected to become involved in their area of research, which means that they perform research, present research, and attend presentations of other researchers. In many areas you could attend presentations almost every day of the week. While this is encouraged, it does take up valuable time, and many in acadamia have to be selective about which presentations would be most valuable to attend, as presentations take more time than would reading the relevant portions of the paper. Finally, I have seen enough awful presentations to realize that just because the information is presented in another format does not mean that the author has become any less dry.
I haven't lost my mind!
It is backed up on disk...somewhere...
It currently only takes papers from the PLOS family of journals. Most of the PLOS journals have a biological bent because they were started by a group of Biologists/Biochemists at UC Berkley and their editorial staff is mostly biology centric. PLOS One is a general subject journal and accepts publications from any field of science. You pay to publish in PLOS journals because they are open access. PLOS does not sell subscriptions or charge for access to articles, instead it charges authors a small fee (few thousand dollars, small for science) to help defray the costs of hosting, editing, etc. Then it publishes them on the web and allows access to anyone. If you do not have the research funds available to pay for publication and can prove such, they will wave the publication fee. All PLOS journals are rigorously Peer Reviewed, it's not like you can buy access or anything. My group has an article published in PLOS One, check it out if you want http://www.plosone.org/article/fetchArticle.action ?articleURI=info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.00 00467.
Maybe someone with some bucks should pay for click-through "ads" that have messages like "DID YOU KNOW that Evolution doesn't claim to know how life originated on Earth? No? Click here for more info!" or "Creationism is an untestable hypothesis, not a scientific Theory. Do you want to know more?" or maybe "Science is not in the God business. Why should God be in Science's business?" I'm sure you folks can think of a bunch more good teasers to bring in the undecided. Could even make some money for sites that show them. If nothing else, something good might come out of the advertising quagmire that passes for a World Wide Web nowadays.
... who knows, maybe we can keep a few young minds from going over to the Dark Side. One thing's for sure: if we let these people have their way, the next Dark Age will come just that much sooner.
Many religions spend plenty of time and money on bombarding people with their message, on getting the Word out. Maybe it's time we did the same
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.