What Open Source Shares With Science 115
An anonymous reader sends in a philosophical piece at ZDNet about the similarities between open source development and the scientific method. Here's an excerpt:
"The speed of progress is greatly enhanced by virtue of the fact the practitioners of Science publish not only results, but methodology, and techniques. In programmatic terms, this is equivalent to both the binary and the source code. This not only helps 'bootstrap' others into the field, to learn from the examples set, but makes it possible for others to verify or refute the results (or techniques) under investigation. In an almost guided-Darwinian evolutionary fashion, this makes the scientific process a powerful tool for the highlighting, analysis and possible culling of ideas and concepts; less useful ideas and hypothesEs die, and likely contenders come sharply into focus. Newton made his famous comment about 'standing on the shoulders of giants,' in part, to indicate that his contributions to human knowledge could not have been achieved solely. He needed the 'firmament' beneath him hypothesized, tested and confirmed by generations of scientists, philosophers and thinkers before him, over centuries."
Re:Science is not open (Score:3, Informative)
That was an interesting insight, to question how open science really is in practice, based on the practical difficulty of accessing information, even now.
By the way, on the Bastille day part, just a reminder from:
"Social Movements and Strategic Nonviolence"
http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/change/science_nonviolence.html [ucsc.edu]
"Studies of social movements in the United States also show that the necessary social disruption has to be created through the principled use of strategic nonviolence. Any form of violence, whether property damage or physical battles with opponents and police, will turn off the great majority of Americans and bring down overwhelming police and military repression."
Re:Science is not open (Score:3, Informative)
It depends on the field, really. In bioinformatics, we're lucky enough to have (a) a growing number of open access journals, as another poster mentioned, and (b) a number of enormous public access databases with raw data available to anyone who wants to use it. In biology and medicine in general, the NIH public access policy is designed to ensure that the finished product (i.e. journal articles) doesn't stay locked up forever. But I understand that bioinformatics is kind of at the leading edge of this trend -- if your area of interest is, say, inorganic chemistry, it may be a lot harder to get past the barriers.
Re:Science is not open (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Science is not open (Score:3, Informative)
Not to mention university and community-college libraries, which are usually happy to grant access to interested members of the community. Other than inconvenience (a nominal fee, traveling to/from libraries, etc.), access to traditional journals aren't really an impediment to the motivated amateur scientist.
That said, online access to any research results paid for by public funds is what today's society should expect and demand nowadays.
Re:I disagree that Open Source is like Science (Score:3, Informative)
Depends on what science you do. For my own work, I can use a desktop PC with decent specifications, if I'm willing to wait a while for the results to come out.
Re:I disagree that Open Source is like Science (Score:2, Informative)
Re:open source = non-privatized science (Score:3, Informative)
Please note: this is not a cure for Hepatitis C that these people are sitting on. It's only a lead, that with ten years work, *might* lead to a cure, or might not. You can stop infections in a test tube if you silence this gene. Okay. What if silencing that gene turns out to be fatal when you do it in living human body? What if silencing that gene doesn't help prevent that infection at all in the human body (a lot of things that work in vitro don't work in vivo)? And how are you going to silence the gene in vivo, anyways? No gene therapy done so far has worked on silencing a gene, only introducing a new one, and even *that's* been highly experimental and has had some nasty setbacks. And so on. Honestly, I'd think that you'd have an excellent chance of challenging that patent on the basis of utility: it doesn't *do* anything useful, at least not in and of itself.
Re:Sadly, education is lagging behind once again. (Score:3, Informative)
When they do that to us in (Chemical) Engineering they want us to produce a badly-managed and half-finished mess, the first time around anyway.
They consider it a Learning Experience. And that it is!
Your professor didn't go too far per se, it's just that he assumed that group work just happens. It's something you really have to learn. It doesn't surprise me to hear of academics behaving that way though.