[p2p-research] The evolution of P2P science

[Ryan Lanham]

Great article...and more evidence for the inevitability of open.  I am a
multi-year BOINC user on the Cure Diabetes team of the protein modelling
experiment.  One of the best commons I know of.

Ryan


On 2/5/10, Tomas Rawlings <tom at fluffylogic.net> wrote:
>
>
>
> Michel Bauwens wrote:
>
>> Tom,
>> I don't know if you have time, but this would be a really good blog topic!
>>
>> So here it is...I've scheduled it on the blog for about a week, so
> feedback welcome! Thanks.
>
> The Democratising of Science: Research in the p2p age & Why the climate
> email hack may turn out to be a good thing
>
> The hacking of emails written by scientists at the Climate Research Unit
> has produced lots of comment and copy about the efficacy of climate science
> and seems to have done damage to the reputations of the scientists and
> sciences involved. However the response to this incident – an opening up and
> peering of science that should be the response to this incident, will
> benefit us all.
>
> I’ve always felt that science is in essence, quite a democratic idea – this
> may seem the opposite of how some perceive scientists to be; cold, logical
> and aloof people getting their perspective from laboratories far from the
> real world. When I did science at school (and to be fair I was not that
> great at it) the concept that you could do the experiments to find things
> out for yourself rather than simply accepting what was written in the text
> books was, well…punk. The scientific method has at its core some very
> democratic principles: First is that when something is correct – it is so
> because that’s what the evidence says and this is regardless of the status
> of the person advocating and/or the view of society to the point being made.
> When Copernicus suggested that the earth rotated around the sun, it made
> those in power very unhappy – but the democracy of the evidence pushes the
> point regardless of the discomfort of the Catholic Church. Second is that
> you have to back your claims with both evidence and method – this in turn
> drives transparency and peer-involvement. It is the essence of peer-review;
> that others need to be able to see behind the curtain of your claims. This
> is also a democratic principle because when making claims in science you
> can’t rely on your position in society, your wealth or your power; you have
> to lay bare the foundations of your ideas for inspection and in doing to
> open them to challenge.
>
> Now these are all lofty claims – the reality is often very different. The
> scientific method has noble ideas and claims, yet where it meets human
> nature, it often gets a little lost. Scientists are very human; they can,
> and do, get things wrong. They can, and do, make mistakes – and then
> sometimes try to cover-up those mistakes. Politics and not data can corrupt
> findings either by influencing the process or burying unfavourable outcomes.
> This is both a limitation and the main point of these democratic ideals. A
> limitation because it imposes by human flaws into how the system operates.
> The main point, because the requirement to share method and data – to open
> it up to your peers – is one of the ways we seek to iron out these flaws.
>
> There is another process within science that is also important to
> understand; it’s interpretation. When I was taught science in school we were
> told that the idea behind the layout of an experimental write-up (abstract,
> introduction, method, results, conclusion etc) was structured as such so
> that anyone with a good grasp of language and maths could read it and
> understand it. Again, this is another noble and democratic ideal that often
> flounders in reality. Most areas of science are so complex that you need a
> better grounding in the specific area than the paper’s introduction may
> offer in order to set the correct context. The maths used in research has
> developed significantly since Copernicus and are the methods available
> require much more than basic maths to understand. As such most people
> outside the field rely on an interpretor to locate important findings,
> translate them into normal speech and summarise them in an accessible way –
> this function is most often done by the media. But just as scientists are
> very human; they can, and do, get things wrong – so are journalists. They
> can, and do, make mistakes – and then sometimes try to cover-up those
> mistakes. The politics of a media outlet can and does corrupt findings
> either by influencing the selection of reports and interviewees or by
> twisting outcomes to that media outlet’s narrative into favourable shapes.
>
> This is where the changes in communication technology come into the story.
> First, science now has the opportunity to add many more peers into the
> process; it is much easier than ever before to collaborate, exchange data
> and ideas and discuss methods. We can all become peers; reviewing papers,
> performing experiments. We can control for the problems in the complexity of
> the process by aggregating resources and allowing people to focus on the
> aspects that they are most equipped to do. An example of this is the
> SETI at home project – where people can aggregate their efforts in the search
> for extraterrestrial intelligence. There are various levels of involvement
> to the project from the most basic entry level of installing the software
> (that uses downtime of people’s computers to analyse data) to assisting with
> the development of the software itself (called BOINC). This is not a perfect
> example of a fully democratic project for a number of reasons, for example
> the code for BOINC is not open source and getting direct involvement with
> the small handful of people coordinating the project working for Berkeley is
> hard; but it is a start.
>
> Second is that changes in communication technology allow much more scope
> for scientists to communicate without the middleman of the media. We’ve seen
> a proliferation of science blogging – some amazing while others are poor –
> but all allow direct communication on a level not possible a couple of
> decades ago. This is key, because from my experience of chatting to
> scientists they are not cold, logic, aloof people getting their world-view
> from laboratories – but human beings who are totally engaged in the real
> world – and know how messy it is. It is often the media interpretation of
> their work that likes to cull the complexities to make the research fit an
> ongoing narrative rather than report it, warts and all. Climate science is a
> classic example of how this is happening in practice; while those unhappy
> with the consensus on climate change have plenty of outlets and blogs – so
> we see more and more and more of the scientists themselves weighing in to
> speak directly with the public. Realclimate is a great example of this,
> where not only do the climate scientists post articles about the latests
> research and news items, but they also answer people’s questions in the
> comments sections.
>
> However there is a downside to this; it does mean that people will try to
> use the data to arrive at pre-determined positions that are unscientific.
> They will do this anyway and so this is a danger, yes. It means people will
> abuse the data and process in all sorts of horrendous ways to suit thier
> political agendas. This is also a danger. Yet the same peer-principles that
> allow this abuse are also the key to de-bunking it. Let me give an example –
> the Global Historical Climatology Network (GHCN). This is a datset of
> temperature records from 1880 to the present day. It is simple to download
> the data and then do as you will with it. One user published a paper that
> purported to show that global warming was not happening as was claimed and
> that the adjustments made were distorting the picture - while another
> responded to this claim with another use of the same dataset displaying the
> changes applied by the scientists to the raw data in a simple graph to show
> how little change was going on. This graph is a simple and powerful refute
> to the obfuscation of the facts and is all the more powerful because it was
> developed independently of those who generate the data. Without this data
> being available and without the peer analysis of the data, the claims and
> counter claims lack any objective – and verifiable objectivity to them.
>
> What has become apparent to me in the aftermath of the hacking incident is
> that is that the broad response (but sadly not all) to the hacking has been
> to both open-up the data and source-code being used to drive climate
> science, but also to also force more scientists involved to spend more time
> engaging with people in regard their work. It is going to be harder and
> harder for scientists to keep data private by default – which is good – and
> I would hope we move to a position where this is both best practice and the
> norm.
>
>
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-- 
Ryan Lanham
rlanham1963 at gmail.com
Facebook: Ryan_Lanham
P.O. Box 633
Grand Cayman, KY1-1303
Cayman Islands
(345) 916-1712
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