Re: Geologicpedia

On Dec 13, 6:25 pm, Jo Schaper <jonot34schape...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
Belba Grubb wrote:
That's science today, Jo, or a least a facet of it that many prefer to
overlook. It's a big facet, too, and one that Eisenhower suggested
should be "gravely considered." I don't see too many monastery
equivalents going up nowadays, as the darkness falls, to preserve
Truth. I do see a proliferation of torches, though (computers). And if
the general popular impulse is to create wikis, then I support them
(though I rarely use them and never depend on them) on the basis of
their being an excellent attempt to get back to those days of the
"solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop" -- days which were good for
both science and the public. We need all the tinkerers we can get,
always, as folks like Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard have shown.

Barb

I have nothing against tinkerers, Barb. Heck, I tinker with recipes all
the time. I mixed a box of lime and one of berry Jell-O a couple of days
ago in order to find out what blue-green Jell-O (as opposed to
blue-green algae) tasted like. Yesterday, I tried to take digital
pictures of the ephemeral design inside a kaleidoscope. (I need a
brighter, diffuse light on the far end of the tube to get better
results.) "Tinker" is my middle name. I was one of the kids they had to
make the chemistry sets of the 2000s safe against when I had mine back
in the 1960s. Cobalt chloride in a test tube with an alcohol burner is
COOOL stuff!

When I was in school working on my thesis, I rejected using a mass spec
to do chemical analysis, and went for Hach kits instead, because there
was a reasonable chance I could get my hands on Hach kits once I left
academia, and I didn't need more than 3 significant digits anyway.

I taught myself Apple Basic on an Apple II+ in 1982, and MS-DOS
shortly there after been strictly Windows since Win 3.1 and every
Windows OS up to XP since. A month ago, I walked into a business, sat
down at a Mac OS X machine with a program I'd never seen before in my
life at noon and by the end of the afternoon had 6 jobs done off the
thing. Other than one, one-day database class, and late in this process
(2002) one MS Office class I was required to take for graduation, I've
never had any formal computer instruction in my life, but make about 1/4
of my living at it. and another 1/2 of my living using these beasts.

I'm all for people who do their own websites, or blogs, where they have
control over what is being posted. They can rise or fall on their own
merits. What I distrust about wikis is that you can "have the correct
answer" and your stuff can be erased by the next yahoo who doesn't. In
line with your citation of Ike on the
scientific-technological-government complex -- the reason wikis are so
popular is the hive mentality, which I despise.

Something big happened between when I first got out of college in 1978,
and the second go-round in 2002. (This relates to wikis-- just bear with
me.) As a high schooler, I occasionally worked with a lab partner in
science, or on a group project in some class where the tasks were
assigned, divided within the group, and then all came together to
contribute their part. I worked on several student newspapers, where it
was a group effort: you had writers, editors, photographers, layout
people, proofreaders, ad sales, and a managing editor who coordinated
the various tasks. This is the same as it is today. Through the first go
round of college, people studied together, and helped each other, but
your turned in homework, papers and what you did on tests damn well
better be your own work, or else a citation given to who you interviewed
or consulted.

When I went back to college, I was befuddled to find math problems being
done by teams, with one paper turned in, and one grade given to all,
regardless of how much each person contributed. I saw oral
presentations, on transparency overheads literally cut and pasted from
Web sources, with no attribution given, and those productions praised
over work done with citations from books and peer-reviewed journals on
paper, but few illustrations, and my presentations called 'out of date'
because it wasn't cut and pasted from yesterday's website. I found the
same thing being done on research papers. A group research paper? That's
the way science it done these days-- no one works alone, because the
solitary worker might fudge the data? Huh? Big Science is WATCHING you.

I'm sure all this groupthink is supposed to somehow take advantage of
peer pressure. But I'm pretty immune to peer pressure, and have been
since childhood. Plus those fellow students were twenty years my junior,
and rather like another species, so they weren't my peers. (The usual
complaint of oldsters vs their offspring, actually.)

I never got used to chemistry and physics classes where you could take a
notecard full of forumulae to the exams. (My nephews in high school
now don't memorize the periodic table or the acid/base laws-- they have
open book chemistry tests-- in short, they don't learn chemistry, the
"do" it.) I'm not even going to get started on the whole calculator in
math class thing where the problems test how well you can use the
box,not how much you actually comprehend about the application of the
problem to the real world.

I'm all for individuals learning unique skills, and how to apply them in
a group project where you are the lead writer, or the welder, or the
design guy or the quality control gal or even the quarterback and you
come out with an outstanding bridge or book or sports victory as a
result of team effort. But an engineer usually is lousy at dreaming up
things, and a poet rarely does stress-load matrix calculus worth a damn.
And if I write a wiki entry on the geochemistry of tufa deposition, I
don't want either one of them to 'correct' it.

Where this comes back to wikis is: If you make a huge original unique
discovery,you can put it on a website, but not in a wiki, because
anyone, regardless of their qualifications can mess with it. Would you
go to the doctor, and get diagnosis and prescription, then take the
piece of paper to the drug dealer on the street (or a florist) to get it
filled? That's exactly what happens in a wiki.

As I said: I'm an iconoclast. The only time I look at a wiki is for some
shallow factoid answer (for example: what WWII fighter craft had tail
gunners?) which I really haven't a clue where exactly to research it...
and the references can take me somewhere to verify what is in the wiki.

Just out of curiosity, I've read the Wikipedia answer on tufa. There is
no reference to tufa being deposited out of calcareous fens (with which
I am intimately acquainted.) But I cannot add what I know about
calcareous fen tufa, or tufa deposition due to water movement down a
slope, because a)what I know is due to original research; and b) I don't
have a website of my paper or abstract on the web. (Paper citations need
not apply.) (Heck, even my spell check doesn't like the word tufa!

I just don't get groupthink, and didn't even when I was a teen.

Wow Jo. Thanks for that. From your remarks I guess we are about the
same age and
have similar education experiences. My first personal "PC" if you will
was the Commodore64.
I had a floppy drive and a printer that ran off of it. I also had a
Simon's basic extension module to go with
it so I had some ability to do graphics. The 64 in Commodore64 stood
for "64K", and oh boy that
was a lot of RAM back then. The undergrads of today can't imagine how
anything could
be accomplished with only 64k. I was using my C64 until 1987. I loved
it. My C64 could do
plate kinematic reconstructions and I used it for such purposes.

Well anyway, back to groupthink.

"groupthink" has become something of a perjorative, and is more or
less defined that way. Groupthink
is a problem when the individuals forming the group think the same
way, and that is quite
different than having a diverse body trying to reach a consensus. I
hope people appreciate the
difference in dynamics between a group of "like-minded" individuals
and a diverse group of individuals with
differing perspectives. If the group is along the lines of the latter,
than I think this is a good thing.

Consider the development of LINUX and the opensource paradigm. While
Linus Torvalds is the original
brains behind LINUX, LINUX has received contributions from many
different programmers with
differing experiences and perspectives. LINUX is one of the fatest
growing operating systems in terms
of use and is slowly but surely pushing MS as LINUX eats up market
share. It is an extremely robust
OS. I beleive its robustness and other features are owed to the
diverse group of people that have
contibuted to it. On the other hand WINDOWS in any of its incarnations
has always had problems
with stability and has been plagued by a plethora of viruses and
hacks. Some people are reinstalling WXP
cuz Vista has not delivered on many of its promises. SO long as MS
remains insular and simply tries
to buyout its competitors or shut them out with shady practices
(according to the EU anyway) rather than
learn from them, OS's developed by MS will not significantly improve
IMHO.


WINDOWS is arguably a product of "group think" in the perjorative,
where LINUX is not.

This is not to say the analogy between LINUX and the Wiki is perfect;
Changes to the LINUX kernel
can be, to a large extent, objectively evaluated on the basis of
performance. Its hard to objectively evaluate
the Wiki in the same way.

I think the Wiki is an impressive resource; however, it should never
be used as the sole resource, although
you could practically say that about any resource.
Creationists have been trying to mess with the Wiki for years and
without too much success. To many
folks are looking after a number of wiki pages to make sure such
harmful mutations don't last long.

Conservapedia is testament I think to the number of interested
observers looking
after the wiki.

Yours,

Stuart
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Geologicpedia
    ... The difference I see between a Linux development group and a wide open wiki is that in order to make any meaningful contribution to Linux one has to have a basic familiarity with computer programming, and Linux syntax to even enter the conversation on Linux. ... Sort of like moderated Usenet. ... I know this opinion flies in the face of good scientific protocol, in that who does an experiment shouldn't matter, but the results do-- the older I get, and the more the world fills up with dreck, the more I want to know what the human credentials are behind info I find on the Net. ...
    (sci.geo.geology)
  • Re: HiJacking Threads Was: hostapd for Fedora 10
    ... Perhaps we need a page on the wiki that explains why ... just like continually telling a child that if he/she does not stop doing ... to mess up a linux box, you need to work at it; ... to mess up an ms windows box, you just need to *look at* it. ...
    (Fedora)
  • New linux wiki up
    ... Just thought I'd let the Ubuntu community know that there's a new Linux wiki ... Linux users in programming, security testing, Linux sysadmin, etc. ... you should also come into our irc channel. ...
    (Ubuntu)
  • New linux wiki up
    ... Just thought I'd let the Ubuntu community know that there's a new Linux wiki ... Linux users in programming, security testing, Linux sysadmin, etc. ... you should also come into our irc channel. ...
    (Ubuntu)
  • Re: Geologicpedia
    ... or else a citation given to who you interviewed ... same thing being done on research papers. ... And if I write a wiki entry on the geochemistry of tufa deposition, ...
    (sci.geo.geology)