"A common use of Flickr is to find photos. But what about finding a new species of insect? Insect biosystematist Dr. Shaun Winterton discovered a photo on Flickr of a green lacewing taken by Hock Ping Guek (known as Kurt on Flickr). The insect was not identifiable as a known species to Winterton, and after collaborating with the photographer, a specimen was collected in the Malaysian rainforest. Further examination showed that this indeed was a new species. The discoverers named it Semachrysa jade. The discovery was published in ZooKeys and the abstract reads: A charismatic new species of green lacewing discovered in Malaysia (Neuroptera, Chrysopidae): the confluence of citizen scientist, online image database and cybertaxonomy."
"Two recent articles call for an openness revolution in science: one on GigaOM and the other in the Wall Street Journal. But they’ve got it all wrong. These folks are missing that the process of scientific discovery is not, at its core, an open process. It only becomes an open process at the point of publication."
"If you are a scientist or engineer, programming can enable you to work 10 to 100 times faster, and to come up with more creative solutions than colleagues who do not know how to program."
I want to reproduce this but do the tasting blind.
Thomas Midgley, Jr. (May 18, 1889 – November 2, 1944), was an American mechanical engineer turned chemist. He developed both the tetra-ethyl lead (TEL) additive to gasoline and chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), and held over a hundred patents. While lauded at the time for his discoveries, today his legacy is seen as far more mixed considering the serious negative environmental impacts of these innovations. One historian remarked that Midgley "had more impact on the atmosphere than any other single organism in Earth's history."
"Science and reason are discomforting precisely because they have been carefully devised to allow nature to speak to us and to divulge its secrets, quite independently of what we would prefer to hear. Once we realize this, and we thus become willing to accept unpleasant but validated truths in place of comforting myths, we are far better prepared to recognize, address, and perchance solve, the myriad of problems presented to us by a complex civilization and a threatened natural estate. It is true that technology, applied without reasonable foresight or moral constraint, has brought us to our current environmental peril. But organized, cumulative and institutional reason - which is to say, science - is our best way out."
Very long, and very convincing, argument about why Brix are a crap measure of food quality.
Myria is a distributed, shared-nothing Big Data management system and Cloud service from the University of Washington. We derive requirements from real users and complex workflows, especially in science.
