/sci/ - Science & Math

eventually some new "elite" form of knowledge will have to be found. at the moment you are exposed to such a massive amount of data you cant process it. want to know about ethanol to do a project? here is 100 books focusing on ethanol and 50000 with a chapter on it. how do you proces it? you will have to determine which is the best book and just go with that. but you cant read everyone. so the only solution is to see which book is recommended by MIT or some shit. this is already the start of this elite knowledge system. a system to gather knowledge that is of higher quality than normal and doesn't repeat anything is needed.

In math and physics, almost all new papers are posted on the publicly available arxiv.org prior to publication. This is a great thing and makes everyone able to read new articles without having to pay for any journal subscriptions. I hope this is the way of the future and that it spreads to other areas of science as well (or maybe it has already? Is there something similar for biology, chemistry or medicine?).

Interesting concern. Here some thoughts on your points

- If you think that the wikipedia interface is not nice, then you don't know and other libraries.

- It really has to be taken into account, that people draw a lot of motivation from becoming known and famous. Not just pleasure for science.
From this it follows that there have to be some high level journals. Terry Tao was recently blogging about a newer variant of journal, look it up if you're interested.

- I'm not 100% pro these free MIT courses with >9000 participants. What I would hate to see is thousands of people with the same opinion and same point of view, who in the end, decide the rules of the game because they are such a mass and not necessarily bad but hiveminded. Clearly, people are happy to get grades from Stanford or MIT, but having many universities all over the world and many schools of thought are vital to science - to me it seems that people don't realize that.
End maybe even ending up with pragmatic engeneers teaching physics? No, just no.

Motivated by the last point, just collecting all the information and finding out the "best" seems like a danger to me.

>>4999079
(nano-, mirco, genetic- blubb) biologists are paranoid.

Basically, there will be no arXiv for a field which is so new that there is money to get.

>>4999079
What you're describing looks great! I'm working in biology (well entomology, I'm a taxonomist) and I don't think we have this. But indeed, that's what we need.
And open access is pretty cool too

>>4999086
-Interfaces for the vast majority of scientific/knowledge content on the web is terrible.
-I'm ok with high level journals, but I think they can remain high level while being more open and allowing papers to be published faster (There was a blog post on Techcrunch called The Future of Science a few months ago, very interesting piece)
-iTunes U, Khan Academy are incredible opportunities to learn, but yeah, it doesn't replace the actual curriculums. And of course, these are just "samples" of knowledge. I mean, on iTunes U for example you can't interact with the lecturer. And for me, interacting with the speaker is one of the best way to learn and find new possibilities for future research (like when you lecturer is saying "and this is an interesting work that has to be done")
-What do you mean by "Motivated by the last point". Which last point are you talking about?

>>4999106
I mean the point where a lot of people from all over the place study one video lecture course. If one "finds out what the best knowledge is", in the flood of information, and everybody learns from that, then people will find global consensus based on the fact that they all learned from one source. People are not clever of willing enought to challenge their own pov.

>>4999124
Oh sure!

Any other opinions?

>>4999619

Yes. Create an AI that can collect information form digital media (sites, ebooks, etc), and "re-catalog" in a best way.

You can teach the AI in a ortographic-grammar way, but you need to use parameters like "dictionary interpretation", compare sources, etc.

>>4999062 Let's build a new Alexandria library.
I believe that in ten years we might be carrying the entire Library of Congress in our pockets. Certainly looking forward to it.

We really need to get a better way to put things down than books and things to read.

If you scan all the books, and give them equal importance... aren't you avoiding progress?

>>>5000000

>>5001335
And Internet Archive is doing an awesome job digitizing libraries around the world.

>>5001292
It would be excellent. Do you think this is doable "soon"?