Slashdot Mirror
Modern Methods For Sharing Innovation
The New York Times is running a story about Johnny Chung Lee, a hardware hacker made famous for his projects which modified the Nintendo Wiimote to do things like positional head tracking and multi-touch display control. The article focuses on the suggestion that Lee's use of YouTube to demonstrate his innovations has done a better job of communicating his ideas than more traditional methods could. Quoting:
"He might have published a paper that only a few dozen specialists would have read. A talk at a conference would have brought a slightly larger audience. In either case, it would have taken months for his ideas to reach others. Small wonder, then, that he maintains that posting to YouTube has been an essential part of his success as an inventor. 'Sharing an idea the right way is just as important as doing the work itself,' he says. 'If you create something but nobody knows, it's as if it never happened.'"
And yell, loudly. Eventually, people start running from everywhere, the police show up, etc, just to see what I'm yelling about. Then after that, I know the people who heard me yelling talk about it for weeks.
As someone who works in R&D I can absolutely agree.
I stumbled across his valuable work in my own time though, since the Government of Canada blocks Youtube and other blog/social networking sites. Until workplaces and institutions relax/modernise internet policy usage, we won't be seeing the full benefit of these new methods of communication.
The Internet has made innovation much easier. You just have to be willing to do the appropriate reading. There is clearly alot of innovation going on behind the scenes by ordinary people but no one knows about most of it and it makes it seem as if innovation is in decline. If technical journals made it easier for ordinary people to get published it might alleviate the situation somewhat.
The innovation going on behind the scenes is trending to make the pay-per-view technical journals less relevant precisely because of their exclusionary nature which relies upon a monopoly on the accepted forms of professional communication.
And if they make me remember my registration, I'll never read their article.
and a video is worth a million.
Every paper I've read and every talk I've been to has been nearly useless for reproducing the results. The author/speaker always glosses over some crucial component as though it were common knowledge. "Here we used a 4th Order Adaptive Runge-Kutta solver to integrate the following equations for fluid dynamics." "Um, excuse me, but do you have any source code for that solver?" "That's left as an exercise to the reader." Last time I checked, professors would give you a much lower grade if you didn't show your work.
I recall that cold fusion got so much notice by the scientists holding a press conference ... before publishing their paper.
Presumably the next pseudoscience snake oil innovation will be publicised in a YouTube video incorporating phone footage of a hilarious injury and the word "FAIL" in Impact Condensed, to the tune of "Still Alive".
http://rocknerd.co.uk
Ever consider the concept of signal to noise? Sure, you can find almost anything on the Internet if you look hard enough. Sometimes, I just want to find what I'm looking for, organized in a coherent fashion and perhaps backed up by some organization with a real telephone number.
Or just somebody with some toehold to reality.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Who needs peer review when you got YouTube and the Internet? The entire world should be our peers, not just a small elitist group. Traditional peer review is mostly a censorship mechanism that is used to suppress minority opinions. It creates an incestuous situation whereby science becomes stuck in a rut of its own making from which only a Kuhnian revolution can extricate it. This is no good. The cross pollenization of ideas is essential to progress and should be welcome by all scientists. The writing is on the wall. The Internet will kill the old-style peer review system and I, for one, will not shed any tears. Just cast your idea upon the waters and see how it fares. If it's any good, it will grow. If not, it will die. That is the new trend. What could be better?
As a case in point, the Slashdot moderation mechanism is a prime example of an old-style peer review mechanism that is due for a serious revision. It allows a small group of regulars (with time on their hands) to change what others should perceive according to their perspective. Where is the freedom in that? We don't need chaperones, thank you very much. A private kill-file/rating system would be better, in my opinion.
OK. Now mod me down if you disagree and make my point for me.
One RK4 solver, with easy explanations of the steps.
http://code.google.com/p/nmod/wiki/int3
Its not adaptive (I fail to see why adding adaptivity helps, and I have yet to see satisfactory proof that it does).
A learning experience is one of those things that say, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.' - D. Adams
When you find something work related at youtube, send a link to your boss. Do this often when you work from home. As management makes a business case for it, it will happen.
Where I work, YouTube is blocked and rightly so. A true scientist has more effective communication methods than videos. That's why *writing* was invented in the first place. A set of abstract symbols is perfect for sending through ideas and findings.
I think it's a sad side effect of computers and the internet that people are forgetting how to write effectively, using icons and videos instead of clearly structured and written text.
Now get off my lawn.
Wikipedia is indeed patchy, but I wouldn't tar all of its technical content with the same brush. Certain fields are represented very well, e.g. mathematics. There are in some fields quite a solid core of people that watch edits on anything in certain categories and look at the changes, effectively performing peer review. Of course, things slip through, but if you look at the profiles of these people many of them are university professors, researchers, and so on. I think mathematics on wikipedia is possibly a bit of a special case though, since definitions are necessarily extremely precise, far more so than in other fields. This does, at least in part, ensure that a lot of the people who contribute have the kind of mindset needed to be editors. (Before a load of people flame me about how this applies in physics, computer science etc, my only reason for not using those as a reference is that as a mathematician myself, I thought I'd talk about what I know.)
Wikipedia is also often the *only* place you will find a page explaining what something actually is, first time. Search engines almost never achieve that.
Just take 30 seconds of time and bandwidth, by viewing this starting half-way through from 2:30-3:00
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jd3-eiid-Uw
Now tell me that those 30 seconds don't convey more via video than could be conveyed through 30 seconds of reading abstract symbols.
Fun fact: YouTube now lets you link to a specific time in a video, by added a time-index anchor at the end of the URL. For example, add #t=2m30 to the link you just posted.