Modern Methods For Sharing Innovation

The New York Times is running a story about Johnny Chung Lee, a hardware hacker made famous for his projects which modified the Nintendo Wiimote to do things like positional head tracking and multi-touch display control. The article focuses on the suggestion that Lee's use of YouTube to demonstrate his innovations has done a better job of communicating his ideas than more traditional methods could. Quoting: "He might have published a paper that only a few dozen specialists would have read. A talk at a conference would have brought a slightly larger audience. In either case, it would have taken months for his ideas to reach others. Small wonder, then, that he maintains that posting to YouTube has been an essential part of his success as an inventor. 'Sharing an idea the right way is just as important as doing the work itself,' he says. 'If you create something but nobody knows, it's as if it never happened.'"

I just go outside..

And yell, loudly. Eventually, people start running from everywhere, the police show up, etc, just to see what I'm yelling about. Then after that, I know the people who heard me yelling talk about it for weeks.

But Youtube will still be blocked anyway at work

As someone who works in R&D I can absolutely agree.

I stumbled across his valuable work in my own time though, since the Government of Canada blocks Youtube and other blog/social networking sites. Until workplaces and institutions relax/modernise internet policy usage, we won't be seeing the full benefit of these new methods of communication.

Re:But Youtube will still be blocked anyway at wor

When you find something work related at youtube, send a link to your boss. Do this often when you work from home. As management makes a business case for it, it will happen.

A waste of bandwidth

Where I work, YouTube is blocked and rightly so. A true scientist has more effective communication methods than videos. That's why *writing* was invented in the first place. A set of abstract symbols is perfect for sending through ideas and findings.

I think it's a sad side effect of computers and the internet that people are forgetting how to write effectively, using icons and videos instead of clearly structured and written text.

Now get off my lawn.

"deep linking" in youtube videos

Just take 30 seconds of time and bandwidth, by viewing this starting half-way through from 2:30-3:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jd3-eiid-Uw [youtube.com]

Now tell me that those 30 seconds don't convey more via video than could be conveyed through 30 seconds of reading abstract symbols.

Fun fact: YouTube now lets you link to a specific time in a video, by added a time-index anchor at the end of the URL. For example, add #t=2m30 [youtube.com] to the link you just posted.

Re:

Not really, as it would require other people to judge what is relevant to the particular scientific area I'm currently researching, and hopefully place it upon ScienceTube.

An employer who trusted their employees to actually work and not to go all giddy over pictures of puppies wearing hats, would solve the problem more efficiently.

Because of the Internet, everyone's an expert...

The Internet has made innovation much easier. You just have to be willing to do the appropriate reading. There is clearly alot of innovation going on behind the scenes by ordinary people but no one knows about most of it and it makes it seem as if innovation is in decline. If technical journals made it easier for ordinary people to get published it might alleviate the situation somewhat.

Re:Because of the Internet, everyone's an expert..

The innovation going on behind the scenes is trending to make the pay-per-view technical journals less relevant precisely because of their exclusionary nature which relies upon a monopoly on the accepted forms of professional communication.

Re:

The innovation going on behind the scenes is trending to make the pay-per-view technical journals less relevant precisely because of their exclusionary nature which relies upon a monopoly on the accepted forms of professional communication.

Ever consider the concept of signal [nature.com] to noise [timecube.com]? Sure, you can find almost anything on the Internet if you look hard enough. Sometimes, I just want to find what I'm looking for, organized in a coherent fashion and perhaps backed up by some organization with a real telep

Re:

And Wikipedia.. that'll never work.

Re:

Ahem. I said coherent. But anyway, Wikipedia is a wonderful thing, I can find out about all sorts of useless bits of social trivia and TV programs that I've never heard of. But as far as a technical reference, it is pretty spotty. And it tends to be either less detailed than I'm looking for (on technical subjects) or way more detailed than I had hoped it would be (on said TV programs).

The Wikipedia is an enormously interesting experiment in human knowledge, but I think the death of paid subscription d

Re:

If I thought that Wikipedia were near the end of the scale of what we can achieve through collaborative information gathering and/or decision making, then I'd readily agree.

As Clay Shirky points out with regards our cognitive surplus, Wikipedia is just a drop in the ocean with regards our potential.

If you never see it, it never happened

And if they make me remember my registration, I'll never read their article.

a picture is worth a thousand words...

and a video is worth a million.

Papers and seminars are useless

Every paper I've read and every talk I've been to has been nearly useless for reproducing the results. The author/speaker always glosses over some crucial component as though it were common knowledge. "Here we used a 4th Order Adaptive Runge-Kutta solver to integrate the following equations for fluid dynamics." "Um, excuse me, but do you have any source code for that solver?" "That's left as an exercise to the reader." Last time I checked, professors would give you a much lower grade if you didn't show your work.

here, have mine

One RK4 solver, with easy explanations of the steps.
http://code.google.com/p/nmod/wiki/int3 [google.com]
Its not adaptive (I fail to see why adding adaptivity helps, and I have yet to see satisfactory proof that it does).

Re:

well, to be fair, if they had to hold your hand through the entire process it'd take a lot more time--since these are usually more complicated inventions than those in Dr. Lee's videos--and so fewer speakers would be able to share their research. i mean, they're seminars not workshops. scientific seminars usually aren't aimed at laymen audiences, so you're expected to have a certain level of knowledge and scientific background. that way speakers can just gloss over the nonessential steps that other research

Re:

Indeed. One 20 minute talk is not enough time to give details about how to do even the most basic of lab procedures needed to replicate results in biology. In many studies, one year of lab experience is not enough.

Re:

The reasons for this are less that they don't want to share the information, and more that you can't include such things in most papers because of page restrictions/time restrictions on the publication/presentation. It is usually assumed anyone _that_ interested would know how to plug these things into an RK4 (etc), so he can get on with what his work really means.

That said, my solution to this has been to include a url with all my relevant source code in the references section of all the papers I've publi

Cold fusion

I recall that cold fusion got so much notice by the scientists holding a press conference ... before publishing their paper.

Presumably the next pseudoscience snake oil innovation will be publicised in a YouTube video incorporating phone footage of a hilarious injury and the word "FAIL" in Impact Condensed, to the tune of "Still Alive".

Who Needs Traditional Peer Review?

Who needs peer review when you got YouTube and the Internet? The entire world should be our peers, not just a small elitist group. Traditional peer review is mostly a censorship mechanism that is used to suppress minority opinions. It creates an incestuous situation whereby science becomes stuck in a rut of its own making from which only a Kuhnian revolution can extricate it. This is no good. The cross pollenization of ideas is essential to progress and should be welcome by all scientists. The writing is on the wall. The Internet will kill the old-style peer review system and I, for one, will not shed any tears. Just cast your idea upon the waters and see how it fares. If it's any good, it will grow. If not, it will die. That is the new trend. What could be better?

As a case in point, the Slashdot moderation mechanism is a prime example of an old-style peer review mechanism that is due for a serious revision. It allows a small group of regulars (with time on their hands) to change what others should perceive according to their perspective. Where is the freedom in that? We don't need chaperones, thank you very much. A private kill-file/rating system would be better, in my opinion.

OK. Now mod me down if you disagree and make my point for me.

Re:Who Needs Traditional Peer Review?

A little elitism is a good thing. You don't want just people making judgments in fields that they know little to nothing about. That's where you get pseudo-science and superstition.

Re:

That's where you get pseudo-science and superstition.

Well, I want to be the judge of that. I refuse to let others make that decision for me. Freedom is the name of the game.

Re:

I thought scientific progress was the name of the game?

Re:

The internet concept was initially developed as a way for scientists to share their research and data freely and easily. The general populous has also been able to make use of the network through the various social tools now developed to work on it. The original purpose is still served very well such as the data sharing for the LHC. I's hardly surprising that scientists are now leveraging the social tools to further their research in the way non-scientists initially furthered their entertainment using the