Science 2.0

I received a nice letter from an editor at The Scientist asking for permission to reprint a comment I wrote regarding an article about the American Chemical Society titled "Unrest At The ACS" by Andrea Gawrylewski.

The most emails I ever received about an article was Social Science And Social News Sites because of a very small part of the article where we mentioned that we swapped out the Digg submission button with Slashdot.
My take was that our kind of serious science content is just not right for Digg, since the last hundred or so articles were buried by readers and thus not a good fit for their audience. Not so, said the people who wrote. They contended Digg has an internal bury list and that it was probably marketing related rather than being done by users.

Before political science existed as a discipline it was assumed all countries wanted the same thing; land and security. The Industrial Revolution brought a new focus on strategic resources.
In the late 1800s America was already producing more strategic resources than anyone and in World War 2 the USA asserted its industrial might geopolitically. In the post-World War Two era the American focus as a superpower was on ideology and trade.
Since that time, the recurring question has been 'who's next?' Rome fell from power, as did Mongolia and Great Britain. America would fall too, it was said. Some country would replace it.

Albert Fert of Université Paris-Sud and Peter Grünberg of Forschungszentrum received the Nobel Prize in Physics for 2007 for their independent work on Giant Magnetoresistance (GMR), which basically blazed the trail for high-capacity storage devices in small form factors like MP3 players.

The Mandala is a detailed sand representation of the residence of the Medicine Buddha and one will be constructed by Tibetan monks over four days in Paris while simultaneously being displayed virtually in Second Life.
This confluence of technology and religion will get the message out about the situation in Burma, according to members of the Mind Science Institute and executives at a London think tank called Unfrozenmind, who have collaborated on the Second Life simulcast of the actual event.
Not everyone - okay, no one outside the Chinese government - is all that happy about things in Burma these days so they believe this will promote awareness of the situation there and aid Monks and Nuns of Burma in their efforts at independence.

'Social science' is not like the social sciences - economics, psychology, etc. - rather it's a mix of science and 'social news.' We're in the social news business but a niche part of it. We stick to science yet we're social news because a great part of the content is decided by you: you write it, you read it and your interest in specific articles is what decides the content on the main page. The more people that like an article and comment on it, the higher up it appears on our site.
Web 2.0, Science 2.0, whatever we call it, it's catching on. From the beginning of our private beta in February until now we have gone from no readers to hundreds of thousands per month.

Another article last week, Do Inferior Numbers Scare Women Away From Science And Engineering?, expressed concern that there aren't enough women ( and minorities ) in science, engineering and math. A lot of math and science and engineering is getting done, it is just getting done primarily by men and that is a concern.
But why? I know why it should be a concern. I have enough of a liberal leaning to reflexively know it is supposed to be a concern but that is balanced out by age and the hard-earned realization that spending more money, in the case of awareness programs, or implementing quotas won't actually produce better science.

A new infrared imaging system that automatically counts the number of people in cars could offer a cost effective solution to help lower congestion and carbon emissions - or it could be a handy government monitoring system.
Carpool lanes are not popular. In Britain 20% of the road capacity is used by multi-occupancy vehicles. In a state like California that percentage is even less, around 7%, yet every highway has 'carpool' lanes.

A workshop organized by European Action on Global Life Sciences (EAGLES ) issued a report on the Chinese consumption and production of meat and it states that meat consumption in China is expected to reach 73 kilo per person per year in 2020 compared with just over 26 kg in 2004. Nearly triple.
This increase in meat consumption means that the environmental impact of the Chinese population will skyrocket if the rapid growth continues.

In yacht racing, a one percent difference in boat resistance leads to a gain or loss of more than 30 seconds in a match race.
Computational fluid dynamics research done by the winning Swiss Alinghi America's Cup syndicate led to gains of 2-5 percent in drag reduction on appendages like the keel, bulb and winglets, absolutely essential gains when you take into consideration that opponent Emirates Team New Zealand won two of the first three races but lost when the wind was more difficult.
Advanced numerical methods have come a long way, it seems.
The 2007 America's Cup was the first time every major contender used applied mathematics and computer simulation. As competition gets more fierce, the optimization of every part becomes more important.

By fomenting dissent against genetic engineering, opponents are furthering the cause of democracy, says Dr. Franz Seifert, who did a recent study for the Austrian Science Fund FWF project.
What does that mean? What Science 2.0 has said all along. Science decisions need to influence policy, so if you want to make the most informed decisions, get all of the facts first.
Obviously there's a controversy regarding genetic engineering. Unlike most science sites, here you can find arguments for it and against it, both backed by science data. Seifert did his study in the EU where some decisions are made on the continental level but most debates take place at the local and national level. It then requires those local decisions to filter up to the bureaucracy.

There's a war happening in science but you may not know about it, and it's stranger than most because it is pitting some people with HIV and their loved ones against the scientists and medical community trying to cure it. In other words, it's a war that makes even less sense than most wars.
Did you know there was even a debate about whether or not HIV causes AIDS? I didn't. You might as well have walked up and told me puppies and free money don't cause happiness - I was that shocked - but a debate there is and I learned about it when I read an editorial in PLoS ( Public Library of Science) Medicine titled HIV Denial in the Internet Era.