Circus 2.0

My commenters are obsessing over the woes of STFC as usual, but I can’t quite get in the swing of it.   Instead, I am enjoying two weeks of astro-geekery. First up was the .Astronomy Conference in Cardiff; then a workshop in Cambridge to work out how to take forward the VO agenda in the UK ; and this coming week, the twice yearly VOTECH meeting.

Various folk have already blogged about .Astronomy  – Stuart Lowe, Chris Lintott, Sarah Askew, and the Master of Ceremonies, Robert Simpson (aka Orbiting Frog)  keeping the twitter going. It was a very virtual meeting, with a distributed audience following the meeting on Ustream, and intercontinental video  talks by Phil Plait,  Pamela Gay, Alberto Conti and others.  Apparently Alberto invented Google in a bar one evening, or something like that. Highlight for me was learning about the WETI Institute. Their big idea is that there is no point searching for extraterrestrial intelligence. Just wait for it. They have a screensaver you can download. There is no need to be connected to the Internet, because the aliens will find a way to contact you anyway.  Check out the WETI web page. Its a hoot.

Of course everybody under thirty was dead keen on all the Web 2ish things – blogs, twittering, YouTube, Facebook, adding your own stuff to Google Sky and so on. Unlike the old fashioned plain brown Web, Web 2.0 is famously democratic and participatory. Its the people’s Web ! You don’t just read stuff, you change it ! Call me an old cynic, but I’m not so sure. All this stuff relies on an infrastructure provided by a handful of massive corporations. They set the parameters. They can switch it off any time they like. They can change the rules so you can only write about approved subjects. They can do a deal with the FBI. You won’t even know. The illusion of participation is really just a Circus. Every time you update your status on FaceBook thats another five minutes you have avoided thinking about who has the power and why.

But lets not get depressed. Next week Wakeham reports, and we will have such fun.

Bad Manners

My apologies for the absence of posts in recent days. I have been a bit swamped, not so much with work as with domestic stuff – finding a house, buying a car, passing my California driving test, getting phone and internet arranged, and about a million other things, including arranging medical insurance, and then getting vaccinations for my kids so they can go to school here. Of course, you can’t just sign up, you have to choose from about sixteen different confusing options. Do you want an HMO or a PPO ? Is it better to pick a plan with a large deductible and small co-pay, or the other way round ? Do you want that on rye, wheat, or sourdough ? Extra cheese ? I DON”T CARE JUST GIVE ME A SANDWICH !!! Brits find this aspect of US culture very stressful. Give me the Nanny State any day.

I found a website that had customer reviews of the local medical facilities. But as usual, these were close to useless because they were bi-modal. Half of them gave four or five stars and said “these people were so much better than my last hospital ! I am so glad I changed ! They were professional and courteous.”. The other half gave no stars or one star and said “Do NOT use this hospital ! They are rude and overpriced !”. Of course, there is an obvious selection effect here. If you feel the correct statement is “well, they were pretty much run of the mill” then you don’t go to the bother of typing up your comments. But its more than that. Somehow the sight of those empty boxes waiting for your thoughts brings on the red mist. Its even worse than email. On the web people are just so aggressive.

The great unwashed were certainly kinda rude about the whole Pluto thing, as I noted in this post from July last year. And many of you will recall that there was a rather sticky episode on this blog when some posts went rather beyond rude and I had to issue a disclaimer.

It seems that neuroscientists too get rude on the web. Today I got my free copy of Nature, having published in it last week. (And of course my half price subscription offer .. but I don’t think I will take that up.. sorry Phil). A short printed article referred to this discussion by the Nature neuroscience blog editor Noah Gray, following an outburst of mudslinging. The worry is that web based technologies for science won’t work if they become dominated by exclusive, agressive types. The article suggests that anonymity of comments is a bad idea, and that the intolerance of online communities will put off others contributing, and will discourage online scientific collaboration.

This blog has not been about fostering scientific collaboration, but about comment on science politics. (That isn’t how it started, but its how it ended up.) Its pretty clear that the anonymous comments are much more aggressive than the non-anonymous ones. Is this good or is this bad ?

Over to you.

Overtagging

Tagging is one of the key features of Web 2.0, but sometimes it seems to be getting out of control.

The idea is just great – no need for an authority defining categories, no need for standardised metadata structures – just let users make up their own keywords and share them. As well as being simple and spontaneous, a kind of order can naturally emerge – as people see each other’s tag clouds, the keywords they choose will gradually converge. Folksonomies and all that.

I’ve seen two snags recently. The first is that people can use puzzling and even bizarre tags. This was the origin of my strange brush with the world of mystic rectangles, as desribed in this recent post. Kristina filed her post, about finding Golden Rectangles in Leonardo’s pictures, as follows :

Consciousness, Sacred geometry, Quantum physics, Symbols, New paradigm, Love, Philosophy, Life, Science, Relationships, Spirituality, News

It then appeared on the WordPress FrontPage under “Whats Happening in Science” – otherwise I would never have discovered this strange parallel universe. The appearance of the tag “Quantum Physics” kinda threw me as well. Anyway, I don’t want to go on about Kristina and her chums as I already sullied the purity of their Mysterium by introducing a sceptical note. (Not only has she stopped accepting my comments, some of them have even been deleted now…. )

However we can also see the second problem – too many tags !! This morning I found a nice wee blog, 1000 petals, with a good short post about how misleading map projections can be, and the political implications. Very nice. But its filed under :

geography, spirituality, world, enlightened management, women, thoughts, blogging, Religion, Travel, politics, personal

Why ? whats all that for ? It looks like a good summary of what the whole blog tends to be about, but only two of those tags describe the post.

So why does this happen ? It could be a market thing. Everybody can see, but maybe nobody’s looking. You want to put out lots of hooks in case they catch fish. It could be a worry about matching others. Do I use “Astronomy” or “Astrophysics” ? Better use both. It could be a need to capture the feeling that every post is in a context. I am writing this post about foot and mouth in cows, but its really part of a grand series about farming, society, and mammals in general, and its very important that its seen in a context of evolution and the immune system. (I think this is the reason that hits the spot for Kristina’s blog and 1000 petals).

Does it matter ? Maybe not. And maybe Web 2.0 is still young, and we are learning how to do this stuff. Is there a really good tag-browser tool out there ?

Partly I am musing on this because of recent Virtual Observatory work. A lot of thought and effort has gone on world-wide, through the IVOA, into agreeing a standardised set of metadata for describing astronomical resources, services, datasets, column descriptors etc, so that they can be published in a Registry, and so found, browsed, and used. I have been working with one of our ace engineers, Noel Winstanley, who has been developing a browser for VO Registries. (Its called VOExplorer and is still in alpha, but coming up to beta soon).

Its such hard work getting data centres to publish compliant registry entries, with all the metadata entries nicely filled in, that you start to wonder whether its better just to let people make up free form tags and let a useful Registry gradually emerge…

But now I am not so sure…