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How Earth Resembles a Gooey Confection
Ant contributes a link spotted on Neatorama that may upset middle school Earth Science teachers, writing "LiveScience says Earth's simple schematic is not core, mantle, and crust anymore. It is more like the gooey center of a chocolate morsel harboring peanut butter and honey. Inner Earth is far more nuanced than outward appearances would suggest. A new model is proposed in the May 2, 2008, issue of the journal Science."
from the old model. If it were, it would not match all the old data. We might understand a lot more today, but new theories must not contradict all that factual data of the past! Former scientists were not idiots.
(sigh) I know you're trolling, but I'll bite, anyway.
Evolution has little to do with the origin of life. You would do well to remember that Darwin called his book "On the Origin of Species", not "On the Origin of Life". I think it's interesting that creationists and intelligent design (sorry, it doesn't merit capitals) advocates try to confuse evolution with the origin of life. Somewhat like trying to say that electricity made no sense when it's ruling equations were unknown. Deal with it: evolution happens and it has little to do with the origin of life (as it deals with the ways in which a species turns into another), which is an interesting subject of itself without needing to mix it with evolution.
You know, I appreciate that we need incentives for effective peer review, widespread reproduction, and integrity. One of the most powerful aspects of the Internet, however, is the proliferation of communities of practice.
Expert photography, graphic design, 3D modeling, and UNIX system administration are all things that used to require intensive training begetting membership in a professional class. Nowadays, you can pick these things up by hanging out and contributing in online forums, newsgroups, mailing lists, and IRC chat channels. These communities of practice learn expert-grade information, but it also allows techniques to evolve and for new techniques to propagate quickly; in this sense, these communities can actually be better than classic forms of learning.
We're even seeing interesting communities of practice being built up around legal studies, which is a domain that is firmly held by one of the most exclusive professional classes - lawyers. It'll be interesting to see what happens with that in the next five years.
But one place where communities of practice are being squelched is science. You can't go into a forum and ask, "Hey, the Donovan lab group at Boston University suggests foo in this article, but that doesn't jibe with Mulkasey's findings at Stanford in this article. What's the deal?"
I mean, you could. But then the number of people who could contribute to the conversation would be tiny, and nobody else would pay attention.
So here's the position I'm advancing. Communities of practice are the single best way to create a dialog around science, and has the potential to:
1) Integrate the knowledge of disparate labs
2) Drive questions in scientific inquiry
3) Become a major center of debate, and a referencable, living repository of ongoing issues
4) Generate interest in the sciences
5) Give direction to students (who see thousands of articles with no coherent "story" to tie them together except for biased and incomplete review articles)
6) Finally create real connections with the public consciousness in a way that's a million times better than current science journalism.
The lack of public availability of these articles prevents the creation of these communities of practice.
PS: I think this approach would make conferences virtually obsolete, except in mode of presentation.