Mapping scientists research behaviour

What do scientists read when they don’t think anyone is looking? Is it possible to anticipate emerging areas of research before they exist? If we could take a real-time snapshot of innovation, what would it look like? For the first time, we may now have some answers.

Picture this: the whole of human knowledge as a figurative mind that can selectively focus on certain areas. It’s a profound notion, and visualizing such a construct is an enormous undertaking. The visualization should be based on users’ downloading and browsing behavior, known as clickstream data. This data was collected, aggregated, and normalized across a wide variety of journal publishers and institutions. The graphic shows a map with the connections among a comprehensive sample space of scholarly research.

Inherent in citation data may be what psychologists call a social desirability bias. Scientists tend to cite the same articles from the same top journals written by the same big-name authors - and rarely cite outside their specific field. “When scientists cite publicly, they act very differently than when they’re just looking at the literature and following their true interests. This tendency causes a “narrowing” artifact within the literature and may inflate the appearance of scientific consensus. The trend seems to be continuing, despite the increasing number of research articles.

The worth and importance of a scientist’s research is often determined by the prestige of the journals in which he or she has published. That prestige is typically based on the publication’s impact factor, which is in turn calculated by citation data. The visualization gives us the possibility of moving beyond simple citation counts and the potential of these new map to serve as the underpinnings of a better scholarly evaluation system.

There are many stories one can tell by tracing the epistemological branches of this new map. For instance, it’s apparent that biology slowly merges with the social sciences and humanities; it gradually becomes biodiversity and ecology, before finally connecting to architecture and design. But perhaps the most interesting story is the one not yet told - the unexpected breakthrough inspired by a scientist reaching out beyond his own field. And it’s certainly possible that eavesdropping on what researchers are reading will act as some sort of innovation bellwether, identifying and facilitating aha moments before they happen.

Scientists

Who are the scientists of today? Where do they work? What motivates them?

Recently academia and industry as scientific work environments have converged in all sorts of ways. At the same time, these ties and convergences have elicited diverse reactions from within the scientific community: Just as there are scientists wholly comfortable doing their work in industry, there are others who take the responsibility of defending scientific integrity and who seek to foreground commercial bias or government interference as public issues.

It was not always this way. In the 19^th and 20^th centuries, science was typically more of an avocation than a job. In the 17th century, the great chemist Robert Boyle not only financed his science but also believed that doing science as a "trade" was demeaning. Newton, as professor of mathematics at Cambridge, was not paid to do research but to teach. Darwin, was never paid to do science. Although many scientific researchers were in academic employment, before the 20th century, the job of a science professor was not to produce new knowledge but to transmit it.

The transformation of science from a calling to a job happened mainly in the past century and with the advent of the Bomb, almost all scientists began to appear as sources of power. Also

the dissolution of boundaries between academia and industry has given enormous strength to modern American science: resources to do what scientists want to do, time to do it, and the reputation that comes from aligning science with the concrete goods.

As we enter the 21st century, new institutional configurations for doing science emerge, together with new scientific agendas and new conceptions of what it is to be a scientist. Some participants and observers of the scene celebrate these changes; others are seriously worried about them. We can be sure of only one thing: The identity of the modern scientist is, in every possible sense, a work in progress.

Intresting facts about NLP

-The Turing test is a proposal for a test of a machine's ability to demonstrate intelligence. Described by Alan Turing in the 1950 paper "Computing Machinery and Intelligence," it proceeds as follows: a human judge engages in a natural language conversation with one human and one machine, each of which tries to appear human. All participants are placed in isolated locations. If the judge cannot reliably tell the machine from the human, the machine is said to have passed the test. In order to test the machine's intelligence rather than its ability to render words into audio, the conversation is limited to a text-only channel such as a computer keyboard and screen. This test was the first mainstream experiment related to NLP.

-Text is the largest repository of human knowledge and is growing quickly, there are emails, news articles, web pages, chat archives, scientific articles, insurance claims, customer complaints letters, transcripts of phone calls, technical documents, government documents, patent portfolios, court decisions, contracts, and so on.

-Nowadays we have access to huge amounts of information, much more than in the past decades, one of the problems with this is that we are not reading any faster than before, therefore we can not take full advantage of this new situation. NlP tries to optimize the human usage of information.

-Dealing with natural language is a difficult task. We need to understanding multiple disciplines including multivariate statistics, learning algorithms, clustering, hidden Markov models and part of speech tagging. We need to have knowledge about language, grammar, ontology and folksonomy.

-Processing of a huge amount of data in a limited amount of time is required so special algorithms are needed. We generally apply algorithms that have low computational cost or algorithms that allow reducing the amount of computational processing needed by pre-processing the data we have. To do this there are techniques for reducing the size of the text by extracting stop words, removing words that appear too often and also words that appear very few times.

-The applications of NLP include answering queries, identifying spam, recognizing what is the main theme of a document, grouping similar texts, obtaining the main keywords of a document, detecting syntactic errors and identifying the secondary themes of a document.

Social Networks

Could it be that social networks are a feeble attempt to fight against loneliness? I have the feeling that in modern times people are getting more and more isolated so they attempt to overcome loneliness by engaging in online social interaction. But internet users tend to relate only to their circle of friend, in a more impersonal way and they rarely create strong bonds through this virtual networks.

Communities themselves are built by common, shared myths, which are just symbolic and meaningful stories. And good stories require tactile human experience, things we can all relate to physically--hard falls, soggy shoes, dry mouths and tired arms. We'll receive no Moby Dicks from Second Life, and in the six years since the popular advent of blogs, how many good books have been made from collections of blog posts?

No Relations
One of the problems with some social networks like Twitter is that the messages are to brief; they give no opportunity for creating relationships. It's like trying to know someone through what they scrawl in a restroom stall.

Another issue you can find while using social networks is that members do not spend as much time at networking or exchanging information, as they do in “broadcasting their lives to an outer tier of acquaintances.

Once again, “social networks” does not mean “friends networks” or “party networks” it means “society networks”. We connect to people who are interested in observing, reading about, being linked to, finding out stuff but not necessarily relating to others. If social networks really are the next generation of news, it implies that we are more interested in reading Facebook posts than we are in reading newspapers.

Time

It is the invisible presence that governs your world. Trailing you like an unshakable shadow, it ticks and tocks incessantly - you can sense it in your heartbeat, in the rising and setting of the sun, and in your daily rush. It brings order to our lives through the categories of past, present and future.

There is nothing with which we are so familiar with and yet when you try to pin it down you find only a relentless torrent of questions. Why does time appear to flow? What makes it different from space? What is it?

Physicists have also struggled to understand what time really is. In fact, they are not even sure it exists at all. Some researchers increasingly suspect that time is not a fundamental feature of nature, but rather an artifact of our perception. One group has recently found a way to do quantum physics without invoking time, If this approach is correct it reinforces the theory that time is an illusion, and that we may need to rethink how the universe works.

According to general relativity, time is stitched together with space to form four-dimensional space-time. The passage of time is not absolute; instead, time differs from one frame of reference to the next, and what one observer experiences as time, another might experience as a mixture of time and space.

Originality

This post intends the describe what happens when people try to create, in this a text, and they come across with the issue or originality.

Nothing. There’s nothing original. So I might as well give up now.
That’s what I often end up mumbling to myself, usually an hour or so after I’ve finished writing something new, once the initial elated feeling that it was the most powerful piece of prose ever committed to pixels has dissipated, to be replaced by the awful realization that someone, somewhere, probably did it all before. And did it far better, too.

When I came up with sing your own lullaby, that joyful sensation lasted for perhaps the shortest time I have ever experienced, possibly no more than three seconds. I knew with absolute certainty that the domain would already have been snapped up not just once, but a number of times. I was right.

Great amounts of blogs just replicate existing articles, like the ones from newspaper or the ones with product reviews. I do not get it, why take the time to copy the information if it is already there and they are not even adding any interesting comment.

Storing memories

Our memory system is built so that we are likey to remember what is most important to us. In our everyday lives, memory is a natural in by product of the manner in which we think about an episode. Different people retain or recollect very different aspects of their everyday environment.

Sometimes we want to remember facts that are dificult to learn for us. Luckyly there are several techniques that can help us improve the chance of remember what we desire to;a popular one consits in relate and integrate the new information with knowledge we already have.

Fragments of our experiences are constructed by an "encoding process"; a procedure for transforming something a persons sees, hears, thinks and feel into a memory. This process resides in the area of the brain that is in charge of constructing the fragments of out past experiences.

One of the problems with this mechanism is that encoding and remembering are virtually inseparable. The close relationship between them can cause dificulties in our everyday life. The problem is that we remember only what we have encoded and what we enconde depends on our experiences knowledge and needs.

When perforimg the retrieval and encoding of a certain memory the conditions are not always similar. Nevetheless when we recall this particular memory the subjective perception, such as: present thoughts, emotional state and corporal posture present at the moment of encoding are usually reinstantiated at recall time. This mechanim make ourselvs more consistent given that subjetivity does not affect the interpretation of the stored facts.

Memory is part of the brains's attempt to impose ordern in our environment.