Dylan, who coincidentally is the eldest son of folk legend Bob Dylan, uses his familiar style to aggregate a quick selection of scientists explaining why a web-based revision of copyright policy is so important for the advancement of scientists. "Scientists are the ultimate remixers," one interviewee says, and we agree that Creative Commons in science is a very exciting idea.

Few media are as compelling as video and we hope that this new short work is helpful in garnering support for Creative Commons in the sciences.

Dylan's work joins a long list of well made Creative Commons videos, which have been helpful in explaining the movement to revise copyright to countless people, no doubt including even President Elect Barack Obama, whose own website was recently put under a Creative Commons license.

This should open up a whole world of new opportunities for online research. Readers outside of the academic world but aware of the financial future of health information online in the commercial sector can imagine the analogous excitement about this announcement for academic researchers.

The blog Open Access News has a good round up of science blog responses to the news.

Pubmed is the likely home for much of the research, though the law is likely to breathe more life into online sites of scientific activity like the Nature Publishing Group, the science blog search engine PostGenomic and the Public Library of Science.

Data miner Peter Suber from the Unilever Cambridge Centre for Molecular Informatics discusses just one of many reasons this is exciting news.

The hard work continues. But now all fulltext derived from NIH work will be available on PubMed. Other funders will follow suit (if they are not ahead). So our journal-eating-robot OSCAR will have huge amounts of text to mine.

The good news is that we believe that this text-mining will, in itself, uncover new science. How much we don’t know, but we hope it’s significant. And if so, that will be a further argument for freeing the fulltext of every science publication.

In related science news, tech and science lovers (many of whom have libertarian sensibilities) should take note of a new video floating around the interwebs - Ron Paul doesn't believe in evolution.

Web science will have both social and engineering dimensions. As the NY Times reported, it will include the emerging research in social networks and the social sciences that is being used to study how people behave on the Web. For example trust and privacy are two specific areas that can be studied more. Also Web Science will look at more technical areas, such as how huge decentralized Web systems work. In the conference call, it was made clear that researching the economic consequences of the Web (and "web 2" was mentioned) is part of the agenda too.

"What we're saying is that it's becoming so important that things like Wikipedia are being created, new business models are emerging and that it's changing our lives so much that we have to have a science to understand this."

In terms of how Web Science will shape the future Web, Sir Tim told the BBC that the Web is a creative medium - and so the Web has to develop new features that "express the social properties of information which specify what it is, where its from and how trustworthy it is."

Highlights from conference call

In the conference call Tim Berners-Lee started off by mentioning the 100 million Web sites milestone recently reached by the Web. He went on to say that Web Science is about understanding the macroscopic network-driven effects of the Web, which have evolved from the microscopic aspects of the Web which he created. Ultimately though, Sir Tim said that "the goal is social" and the Web is about helping humanity.

Berners-Lee spoke about how even in the field of economics, it's not just about studying the money part of the dot com era, but how things like Page Rank have influenced the system - "the way effectively the currency now flows across the links as kudos, as reputation of web sites". So with this initiative they want to bring together lots of different disciplines (computing, biology, economics, etc), as well as focusing on understanding and engineering the Web as one big system.

According to Tim, Web Science is about "building a new Web, a better Web, building things on top of the Web infrastructure" - making the Web infrastructure a space where things can happen and making that space more powerful. He spoke about how the Web started off with simple rules - e.g. http. But you can't tell the macroscopic effects of that by looking at the rules of http - "the macroscopic system is very complicated". He also mentioned building "a fractal society", which he's spoken about a lot before and I've written about in the past too.

In the Web Science initiative, Tim said they'll be "developing new ways of analyzing things and we'll be building systems which have completely new properties". But he made a point of saying that because the Web is about people, social aspects will be a very important part of it. Also the creativity aspect of the Web - Tim said at one point that "the really important thing about the Web is that it's a universal space".

Summary

I for one am very pleased that studying Web systems is now an official discipline - and who better to lead it than Tim Berners-Lee and MIT. In many ways, some of us tech bloggers have been unofficially studying the Web for quite some time, but of course you also need hard data and complex analysis as well - which is where Web Science will hopefully shine. As Tim Berners-Lee said, the Web system is huge and complicated. There's a lot we're still learning about the Web and its effects on society and business.

WorldWideScience is a science portal developed and maintained by the Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI), an element of the Office of Science within the U.S. Department of Energy. The WorldWideScience Alliance, a partnership consisting of participating member countries provides the governance structure for the WorldWideScience.org portal.

When it debuted back in June 2007, it linked to 12 databases from 10 countries. Today, the portal links to 32 national, scientific databases and portals from 44 different countries.

WorldWideScience Homepage

How To Use WWS

To use the portal, you just enter a search term, as you would with any search engine and click "search." An advanced search feature lets you specify more details like title, author, or year, and lets you specify which databases to query.

Unlike Google, where results are ranked based on an algorithm that essentially displays items by popularity, WorldWideScience provides only authoritative scientific information by relevance - a ranking that is noted by the number of stars next to the result. The higher the number of stars, the more relevant the result.

Another difference between WWS and other search engines is that WorldWideScience's results are retrieved in real time. So, as you search and results come in, you may see a box appear with a "include these results" button. Clicking this will update the list with the latest information.

On your search results page, there are several features that make finding the answers you need easy to do. On the left, are "clusters," which let you narrow down a broad subject by specifying topics or dates. On the right, a snippet from Wikipedia provides a quick definition and link to an article about the subject you queried. Below that, a "EurekAlert!" section provides links to relevant articles from EurekAlert!, an online, global news service operated by AAAS, the science society. EurekAlert! is like a PR news wire for scientific research, providing a central place through which universities, medical centers, journals, government agencies, corporations and other organizations can bring their news to the media.

WorldWideScience Search Results

The WorldWideScience portal is a great resource for anyone looking for the most current findings from fields such as technology, energy, medicine, agriculture, environment, and more. You don't have to be a student, professor, or researcher to enjoy the richness of the data provided, either, as WWS has been designed to be easy enough for anyone to use. You can try it out for yourself here: worldwidescience.org

Can yet another organization really make a difference? Some observers seem to be suffering from Organization Fatigue, but we're interested to see what Berners Lee can do. A group dedicated to deep study of the web and the obstacles to its growth sounds like a great idea to us. Not everyone agrees.

The Foundation launched with a three part plan, including:

• Web Science and Research

Studying the web "as an interconnected complex system (that combines disciplines of science, biomedical science, social science, and computer science, for example)" and creating curriculum for other Web Scientists to be trained with around the world.
• Web Technology and Practice

Advancing standards.
• Web for Society

"To learn from people in socially or economically deprived communities how the Web can better serve them." (Nice that it's phrased this way.) Creating programs to extend access around the world.

Concerns

We are a little concerned about a conversation Berners Lee had with the BBC prior to unveiling the Foundation where he argued that there needs to be some way to brand trustworthy websites as trustworthy. That strikes us as either silly or frightening, possibly both.

Web standards guru and blogger Molly Holzschlag sums up what is probably a common feeling of ambivalence about the new Foundation.

I would love to feel optimistic about this, but at this point I've really decided that creating more groups is just adding layers of problems on top of what we're already doing.

On the other hand, if this empowers greater outreach, education and fosters real influence in returning to the core ideals of an interoperable Web for all, then I'm all for it.

Eran Hammer-Lahav, Open Web Evangelist at Yahoo! and party to the founding of another group, the Open Web Foundation, has sharper words for Berners Lee's group.

Seems odd to ask for money, and a lot of
it, with so little detail as to what this organization is about?...We've been asked many times why a new org, and I think it is fair to ask it back. Seems to me that most of this should/could be done within the W3C. If the W3C is no longer able to promote its own mission, it raises the question: should the same leadership be trusted to run a new effort that seems to try and fix what their first effort failed to accomplish?

We are sympathetic to both opinions here. The problems being engaged with are thorny enough that we applaud anyone for trying tackle them - and the inventor of the web certainly brings credentials to the effort. Also, it's not our $5 million so we're not going to lose too much sleep even if the effort goes no where.

What do you think? Does the World Wide Web Foundation website give you hope that the organization will be effective? If these topics are of interest to you, see also the Digital Divide Network.

Think the scientific genius behind Q, the fictional gadgetmeister that keeps James Bond ahead of the bad guys, combined with the technological expertise our own recently named CTO Aneesh Chopra has, and you might just see the perfect applicant.

"It will involve a sort of future-gazing to see where technology will be taking us in a year or so," Prof Beddington said.

Beddington adds that the successful applicant will not need to develop a weapons system for the latest Aston Martin.

Candidates will need to have "world-class scientific expertise and credibility in relevant scientific and technology disciplines." If you want to apply, you've got until April 24.

It's not only in scientific realms. We're seeing this on the Consumer Web too, as Marshall Kirkpatrick explained this morning in an article about social media monitoring tools. He wrote that data mining tools are being democratized and used more nowadays, similar to how online publishing tools were democratized in Web 2.0. The cloud computing servers that the University of Washington will utilize are relatively cheap and easy to use Web platforms that will enable data mining on a scale not seen before. These projects will access a cloud datacenter established for educational use in 2007, through a partnership between Google, IBM and six academic institutions (including the University of Washington).

Oceans and Galaxies of Data

Bill Howe, a researcher at the UW's eScience Institute, explained the impact of cloud computing on his ocean climate simulation project. Instead of running a simulation to test a single hypothesis, he said, climate scientists are now running long-term simulations and then sifting through tens of thousands of gigabytes of resulting data to discover trends.

Andrew Connolly, a UW associate professor of astronomy, explained that for his project analyzing astronomical images, cloud computing makes it easier to store and process information in the cloud and make the information available over the Web. He said that whereas scientists once competed for time on telescopes, recorded data and then studied the individual images in detail, now "telescopes continuously record high-resolution images that are available to all, providing millions of times more information." So the shift is that the data gathering has been automated and is available on a much larger scale than before for scientists to analyze it.

Data Rich - And Useful

This current era of the Web, which some are calling 'Web 3.0' (but we frankly don't know what it's called yet) is increasingly data rich. The same thing could have been said about the Web 2.0 era, when oceans of 'User Generated Content' were created. However the world of sensors is rapidly pouring even more data onto the Web. Ed Lazowska, a UW professor of computer science and engineering, noted that "the rapid evolution of sensors is transforming all sciences from data-poor to data-rich." He said that "the challenge is to use modern cloud computing resources, such as Amazon Web Services, and modern computer science advances, such as data mining and machine learning, to explore these massive volumes of data." He claimed that this new computational science will be pervasive and will have enormous impact.

We're always pleased when the Web has a meaningful impact on the 'real world' - and particularly on science projects such as this, where the findings could be profound.

Members can participate in forums about homework, get quick answers to questions 24 hours a day and access explanations of problems from more than 200 of the most popular text books in 7 subject areas. There are free and paid membership levels at $10 per month and users deemed helpful by others can receive financial rewards like gift certificates.

Limitations

We did have a hard time viewing the videos. The topics are also limited to math and science, but we can see how that makes sense. The highest rated user on the site is one who has never asked a question, only answered thousands of other peoples' questions, and claims to be a monkey.

Joseph Weisenthal at PaidContent, who found the funding announcement first, thinks that study groups are best appreciated for being distracted from studying with social activity. That might be the case for many people, but there is clearly also a lot of interest in getting help to hard math and science problems on Cramster already.

All in all, the service looks great. With $3 million more in the bank, we expect to start seeing Cramster around a lot more. We wrote last month about 10 great apps for college students - we can certainly foresee this one making that list next year.

Mememoir is a completely new development and as of now, its only deployment is in the form of the WikiGenes wiki. Both Mememoir and Wikigenes, a database of literature about genetic information, were created by Robert Hoffmann, a fellow at Society in Science in Switzerland and a visiting scientist at MIT.

For scientists in academia, publications are the lifeblood of their careers. Having published in a wiki is not going to persuade a tenure track committee anytime soon, but the systems that Mememoir puts in place might just make those contributions stand out a bit more. Besides attribution, Mememoir also gives its users the ability to rates authors and their contributions.

The developers are still looking at their options for possibly open-sourcing the code behind Mememoir. As Robert Hoffmann pointed out to us, the project will look at its options at a later time and is mostly focused on running the Wikigenes project for now.

WikiGenes

The information in WikiGenes itself was based on iHop, another project by Hoffman (and not the infamous chain of pancake houses). The idea behind iHop is that information about a single gene can often be dispersed over hundreds of different academic papers, which makes finding and synthesizing all this data extremely hard. IHop used algorithms to parse all this information and bring it together in one database, which was then used to seed WikiGenes.

According to Hoffmann, the idea behind WikiGenes is that it will combat this dispersal of information in the first place, as scientists can enter their research results into the database directly.

Trust and Authorship

WikiTrust, which rates authors on Wikipedia according to an algorithm is trying to do something similar for all of the Wikipedia, but Mememoir takes this to a more personal level. Both systems are, of course, potentially fraught with problems, but it will be interesting to see if scientists will warm up to the wiki model.

We would really like to see Hoffmann and his team open up the code to Mememoir, as the wiki itself is a highly capable piece of code that looks flexible enough to power any kind of wiki - academic or not. In testing it, it turned out one of the easiest to use wikis we have seen so far and it could surely benefit a lot of different projects in the long run. If you would like to see it in action, the project has create a short screen-cast that you can see here.

Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, director of the Information + Innovation Policy Research Center at the National University of Singapore, argues that "the over-abundance of connections through which information travels reduces diversity and keeps radical ideas from taking hold."

Other factors to consider though, we would contend, include the positive impact of collaboration, serendipitous social discovery, rapid news dispersal, interdisciplinary cross-pollination and the increased scalability of support for ideas that living large on social networks enables.

A "good or bad" analysis may be too crude for evaluating the effect of extensive social connections online on innovation: it seems true that both extended periods of uninterrupted work time are essential to innovation and that online noise is good for you. Is participation in large social networks a net positive or a net negative? That probably depends on the person, but smaller networks are probably an important option to consider as well.

We would post a poll asking for your opinion on the matter, but in writing about group-think online that would seem too ironic.

Science magazine subscribers can read Mayer-Schönberger's article here. MSNBC's science blog and New Scientist have additional coverage.

One of the great discoveries of modern science was the realization of how interconnected the world is. The deterministic, Newtonian view of a clockwork Universe was replaced by the much more dynamic, uncertain and entangled world of Quantum Mechanics. The new world is the one where Godel forever cut hopes for completeness in mathematics and Turing showed that computation, like the future, is fundamentally unpredictable. Despite these unexpected setbacks, modern science is wonderful, powerful and thought provoking - and relevant to technologists.

1. Godel, Escher, Bach, by Douglas Hofstadter

This Pulitzer Prize winning book is a mind-opening journey that spans science, computation, zen, art, music and much much more. The book is most unusual in the way it tells its story. Some chapters are dialogs between Achilles and Tortoise. Other chapters are focused on Bach's fugues and the theorems of great German mathematician Kurt Gordel.

Throughout the book, Hofstadter discusses the work of M.C. Escher, a painter famous for his paradoxical paintings that question how the mind perceives space. In addition, the book features chapters about modern genetics, zen buddhism and neuroscience. All of these seemingly diverse topics come together to discuss recursive structures, the mind, artificial intelligence and computation.

2. Complexity by Mitchell Waldrop

Stephen Hawking once said: "I think the next century will be the century of complexity." Complexity science is one of the most important breakthroughs in recent history. Unlike the traditional specialized approach to science, complexity focuses on patterns and properties that exist across different branches.

Mitchell Waldrop's book introduces readers to complexity by telling a story about the people who brought it into the spotlight. Among the characters we meet are economists, physicists, biologists and computer scientists responsible for establishing the Institute of Complex Systems in Santa Fe New Mexico. Through their stories, Walldrop introduces the reader to the wonderful and profound world of complex systems.

3. At Home in the Universe, by Stuart Kauffman

Dr. Stuart Kauffman is one of the characters in the Walldrop's book. He is one of the most passionate, dedicated and original thinkers about Complex Systems. A few decades ago, while in medical school, he wanted to understand gene networks and came up with a model known as K-N nets. Fascinated with the ideas, he choose science instead of medicine and went on to work on complexity.

In this book he explores a range of fascinating topics - like gene networks, auto-catalytic sets, rugged landscapes. It ultimately leads to the question of the origin of life. In this challenging book, Kauffman postulates that life is not an accident, but an expected and even inevitable consequence of the laws of self-organization.

4. The User Illusion, by Tor Norretranders

During the twentieth century scientists made amazing discoveries about the brain. They also discovered just how little we know about the function of what is likely to be the most interesting and powerful object in the universe. Among the large number of books written on the subject, this book written by Danish journalist Tor Norretranders is a standout.

The books builds on physics, particularly thermodynamics, to explain the fascinating aspects of human consciousness. While the first few chapters are somewhat challenging, the crux of the book will give you a unique, eye-opening perspective on the interplay between the human brain and mind. Among the shocking things in the book is a notion that it takes a half a second for our consciousness to process an event. Knowing that, it is difficult to think about the world in the same way.

5. Programming the Universe, by Seth Lloyd

Quantum Information Theory is one of the hottest topics in science and Seth Lloyd is one of the hottest figures in the field. Famous for his bold predictions about the computational capacity of the universe, Dr. Lloyd belongs to the club that thinks that we live inside of a gigantic quantum computer. Sounds interesting? It is!

The book works the readers through the ideas of quantum information theory, explaining qbits, quantum superpositions and computation based on atoms. He argues that random fluctuations in the quantum foam produced higher-density areas, then matter, stars, galaxies and life. His conclusion is the same as Kauffman's - life is not an accident nor its divine. Rather, life is a consequence of the laws of computation and self-organization.

Conclusion

There are so many great science books on topics ranging from physics and biology to economics and social science. These books discuss patterns in the world around us. And many of the themes are very familiar to us, technologists. This is why it is important for us to keep up and know what is going on in the world of science. Besides being fascinating, it is increasingly applicable and useful.

And now, please share with us your favorite science books - the ones that made a big impact on you and helped expand your mind.

"The World Wide Web changed the ways people work, play, communicate, collaborate, and educate. But without new research aimed at understanding the current, evolving and potential Web, we may miss or delay opportunities for new and revolutionary capabilities.

To model the Web, to understand the architectural principles that have provided for its growth, and to ensure it supports the basic social values of trustworthiness, personal control over information, and respect for social boundaries, then we must pursue a research agenda that targets the Web and its use as a primary focus of attention."

Rensselaer's Tetherless World Constellation addresses this emerging area of "Web Science," focusing on the World Wide Web and its future use.

Faculty in the constellation explore the research and engineering principles that underlie the Web, enhance the Web's reach beyond the desktop and laptop computer, and develop new technologies and languages to expand the capabilities of the Web.

We use powerful scientific and mathematical techniques to explore the modeling of the Web from network- and information-centric views. We aim to make the next generation Web natural to use while responsive to a growing variety of policy and social needs."

The point is that we study Computer Science but the Web is a lot more than the application of Computer Science. It is the social dimension that makes it interesting and nobody has been systematically studying that. For scientists this is marvelous unexplored territory. Sir Tim Berners-Lee, being a scientist, looks at all the wild, apparently chaotic Web 2.0 innovation in the same way a scientist looks at experiments. In that context, entrepreneurs run experiments by launching something onto the Web. If it "catches fire", the investors clamor to get on board and people make a lot of money. If it fails in the market, people lose money. But to a scientist, both results are equally useful, providing additional data points from which theories can be deduced.

It is personally exciting for me to have Rensellaer take such a leadership position in this emerging science as they are close to where I live in what has historically been the "sleepy government town of Albany". All the tech action was either south to New York City or east to Boston. There have been attempts for some time to create a Tech Valley high tech zone in the area. But this new drive by Rensellaer will make a difference.

Rensellaer have brought in some real academic leaders to drive this initiative, including Jim Hendler and Deborah McGuiness:

Jim Hendler is the Tetherless World Senior Constellation Professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in the Departments of Computer Science and Cognitive Science. He is a Fellow of both the American Association for Artificial Intelligence and the British Computer Society.

He is also the former Chief Scientist of the Information Systems Office at the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and was awarded the US Air Force Exceptional Civilian Service Medal in 2002.

He is the Editor in Chief of IEEE Intelligent Systems and is the first computer scientist to serve on the Board of Reviewing Editors for Science.

Deborah McGuinness is of the creators of the Web language that is ushering in the next generation of the World Wide Web -- the OWL Web Ontology Language -- Deborah McGuinness is widely known in her field.

McGuinness comes to Rensselaer from Stanford University where she last led the Knowledge Systems Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

McGuinness has published more than 100 papers on knowledge-based systems, ontology environments, configuration, search technology and intelligent applications and holds five patents. Prior to joining Stanford, McGuiness worked for Bell Laboratories (later AT&T) were she co-developed a predecessor language to today's ontology Web language.

She is CEO and president of her own consulting firm and is on the board of the Semantic Web Science Foundation as well as a number of startup companies. She is a member of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence and the Association for Computing Machinery.

Rensellaer is clearly staking a position in the elite technology world usually reserved for Stanford and MIT. This will create some new technology. I caught an early glimpse of some of the web technology coming out of the Rensellaer labs and it looked very exciting. I intend to go back to there and report on that in a future post.

Combine this with a good quality of life and lower cost of living (compared to say New York City or Silicon Valley) and you get a fertile environment for start-ups.

While such reminiscences undoubtedly wrench a wistful sigh from the breast of those who lived and worked in those heady days (like, before 2002), educating young would-be journalists about how early adopters and the tech-minded are consuming and helping distribute news is a necessary step to ensure the evolution rather than the extinction of American news services. Northwestern University has taken productive steps in that direction this spring and is set to present five interesting, student-created news apps this week.

The students have focused on easing creation and consumption of news while reducing costs of news production and enabling journalistic standards of research and factuality.

The body of work from this experiment includes sports story generator (Machine Generated Sports Stories, or MGSS) that writes sports coverage all by itself from box scores and play-by-play; a Microsoft Word plug-in (Easy Writer) that allows journos to research and fact-check stories as they write them without having to use a separate search engine; an iPhone app (News Feed) that provides the daily news in five- 10- and 20-minute chunks for news-hungry readers with limited time to read; and two Twitter apps.

Twitter News Service sends pertinent news links to users based on their posts. Either the tool will run in the background of Twitter or from a designated Twitter account that users choose to follow (or un-follow) as they desire.

Tweedia will combine news stories with relevant personal opinion and information on a given topic. By integrating Tweedia into a news site, readers get instant access to relevant Twitter posts. News outlets can place a Tweedia link at the end of stories that will either open a widget on the page or redirect readers to the Tweedia site.

Last year, Medill students built News Mixer, a site that mashed up local news with Facebook, allowing users to comment as they read even though many old-school news organizations still don't allow for comments.

Now all Northwestern needs to do is throw in the business school kids and a couple hundred thousand dollars; Startup Semester, anyone?

ReadWriteWeb has already written about data visualization capabilities in sites like Second Life. Due to a fledgling economy, many suggested that these institutionally-branded education initiatives may also become popular. Nevertheless, apart from this recent endorsement by the University of Texas, mainstream educators still don't have the green light to teach in virtual worlds. Many argue that video teleconferencing and instant messaging have replaced the need for virtual world interaction. However, neither of these offer the same immersive experience.

While we know that face-to-face learning is currently the most successful teaching method, if you had to choose an online learning environment, would you consider a virtual world? Let us know in the comments below.