Sydney eResearch Australasia Conference

[tcpip]

Have returned from Sydney where I spent the last few days at the eResearch Australasia 2009 conference, a well attended gathering with almost five hundred of the country's senior IT/research managers present, although the suffix -asia is a bit of a misnomer. The conference was held opposite Manly Beach a site which is most quintessentially Australian and reminds me of Midnight Oil's Power and the Passion (original video clip available on YouTube). I wonder if Minister Garrett remembers saying "it's better to die on your feet than live on your knees ... sometimes you've got to take the hardest line?"). First day of the conference was spent at the annual ARCS all-hands meeting which could have been improved with earlier and more complete reporting from management on operational and strategic activities.

My paper, Social Networking and Weblog Sites for Researchers apparently went quite well; standing room only and people being very attentive and furiously writing notes during the presentation. I argued several points; that reducing the cost of replicated research is worth billions to the Australian economy, knowledge is proximal and networked, for researchers networking and 'blogging tools need to be combined (e.g., Livejournal/Dreamwidth), content moderation and public exposure is required, that content networks are more important than social networks (Flickr rather than Facebook) and that provision must be made to automatically assign researchers to content groups they require. The next step after this is convincing my managers that this is worth throwing some money at.

Microsoft attempted to make a big splash at the conference with the release "The Fourth Paradigm: Data-Intensive Scientific Discovery", a collection of some twenty extended abstracts of scientific research involving high quantities of data and using MS tools. The claim that there even is a fourth paradigm (science via empiricism, then theory, then simulation, then data) receives some significant criticism in the scholary communications chapter from Clifford Lynch and John Wilbanks, the former arguing that the third paradigm is far from complete and the latter arguing that this in no way represents a paradigm in the sense of Thomas Kuhn. To think I had to read almost the entire book to find these remarks. Whilst the research is vaguely interesting, the theoretical grounding of the text is very weak.

Comments

[niamh-sage.livejournal.com]

My paper, Social Networking and Weblog Sites for Researchers apparently went quite well

Congratulations! I still think this is a hugely cool idea. I hope it gets picked up; it'd be fantastic if Australia could be at the forefront with something like this.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the kind words.

I'm in the process now of writing up the proposal as an actual project plan. It will require a few staff (an admin person, a Perl coder, a systems/network admin, a project manager) and agreement by the various research communities to release the names and disciplinary interests of their researchers.. Then there's the matter of encoding the disciplinary areas as 'communities', assigning the individuals, hacking the LJ/DW codebase to concentrate on content networks rather than social networks.

The hardware and network is the easy part :)

If it all succeeds however, it will be enormously important.

[fluffyblanket.livejournal.com]

I can't find it now but recently I said something like , "I think you're a genius and should run for parliament". I wasn't joking ! Thank God the Cheney clone has gone ! Your present PM is a vast improvement - who wouldn't be ? However , I think you have a huge contribution to make . I realize that , as an (A)narchist , I'm against parliaments , but I can't see Anarchism on the agenda anywhere just yet .

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

There was a time - around 2001 - where I considered and was being considered by others for such a position. But the contribution I wish to make now is different and in hindsight, parliamentarianism would have been a deadening hand. Far better, at this stage, to build non-party and international social action grounded in principled theory.

[fluffyblanket.livejournal.com]

I @gree !

[hilliebilly.livejournal.com]

Ah! Its always very good indeed when people in the audience are taking notes! I remember an event, when I was doing the introduction for Senator Christopher Dodd , U.S.A., & it was in an ornate & fake- gilded Nineteenth Century theatre. Part way thru my intro., I was shocked to see that the audience as actually LISTENING to me! For years I had been lecturing to undergraduates, & they had never manifested much interest!

Heya! Is Livejournal a part of it all? Cool! And, lastly, I don't think much at all of Facebook. Inferior platform, hard to use. I deleted my account.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

Different technologies are good at different things. Facebook, and related sites, do social networking quite well, but their journaling tools are not very good. Journaling software (like WordPress) is good at that, but is poor at the networking side.

LJ/DW has good journaling and networking tools and that it why it, with some modifications, it will be an ideal platform for researchers wanting to know what other researchers are doing.