[Fis] Scientific Communication and Publishing

Mon Oct 3 10:29:22 CEST 2016

Dear Pedro,

Your comments led me to reflect on the development musical notation,
one of the principle effects of which was to present new possibilities
for the coordination of singing, which in turn resulted in more
complex counterpoint. So monks could crowd around a choirbook and sing
the new polyphony (see attached picture). I'm given to thinking such
innovations amount to an increase in the maximum entropy of a
collective situation, which produces an increase in redundancy, which
in turn produces new possibilities of self-organisation (if we take
Shannon's R = 1 - H/Hmax as a starting point - which is a big IF).
This is Von Foerster's thinking in the paper I mentioned earlier.

Such increases in maximum entropy can be threatening for those whose
self-organisation was well-adjusted to the pre-existing and
well-codified possibilities of the world; some are excited by it. We
do not know that among those distracted teenagers switching from
screen to screen there isn't some new Bacon who will harness the new
possibilities into a new language of science. All we can be certain of
is that they are the future. And I can imagine a bored teenage Bacon
gazing into his mobile phone as he's being berated by the Schoolmen
whose clearly-codified and absolute science he rejected.

Our technologies for communication increase the possibilities for
communicating. I think our information science, which has vastly grown
with the development of computers as you say, now demands richer media
of communication if it is to be effectively coordinated to the good of
society: if our scientific 'counterpoint' is to really work. Today we
have a kind of chaos whose negative consequences are all too obvious -
our universities have been turned into businesses, our science has
turned into an empty and selfish pursuit of academic celebrity (I like
the 'aristocracy of science'!), and the whole thing has become not
just unaffordable, but an economic vehicle for extracting money from
the poor that they haven't even earned yet. I would like to argue for
the view that this chaos is precisely the result of the failure to
embrace our new possibilities of communication constructively: it is
the conservative academy holding-out against the rising maximum
entropy of communication in the world. I strongly sense this is
transitional. I also feel that any fundamental change in the academy
is not led by initiatives in 'teaching and learning', but in the
practices of scientists.

Best wishes,

Mark

On 30 September 2016 at 12:49, Pedro C. Marijuan
<pcmarijuan.iacs at aragon.es> wrote:
> Dear Mark and Colleagues,
>
> Thanks for the well crafted work. Actually you have presented us a tightly
> linked work along perspectives of philosophical, historical, and present day
> criticisms stances. For my taste, Sections 1 and 2 are a matter of opinion,
> of philosophical orientation, closer in this case to critical stances.
> Speech social-construction, status function, scarcity declaration,
> communication definition, information-uncertainty sciences, etc. Some of
> these topics are or have been subject to hot debate in this list, so I
> decline entering--anyhow, my personal impression is that such kind of
> oriented approach although formally consistent, leave aside important
> aspects of the phenomenon. But it is good that you have made the consistent
> scheme.
>
> Historically, the parallel between publication in that transitional period
> of the "scientific revolution" and our times of "information revolution" is
> well developed. Just to enlarge the panorama, I recommend Information Ages.
> Literacy, Numeracy, and the Computer Revolution. Michael E. Hobart and
> Zachary S. Schiffman. (2000). The publication practices around the "papiri
> era", culminating in the Alexandrian Library, and the "codices era", around
> the monastic system first and later around the university system are the two
> big precedents. The underlying phenomenon in all eras revolves around the
> "sharing of knowledge", a genuine cognitive instinct that is channeled in
> different ways by existing social orders and available technical resources.
> Not much different from the artistic pulsion--and often closely interlinked
> (paradigmatic Leonardo da Vinci).
>
> In our times, there is a famous sentence by premier Zhou Enlai "It is too
> early to say"... However personally I share most of the concerns raised by
> Mark, adding a pessimistic note on the impact that the new techs are having
> in the "creative engine" of science. Although multiple new fields have been
> open thanks to the computer upheaval (precision medicine, omic revolution,
> nanosciences, social physics, social neurosceince, social networks, big data
> everywhere, etc etc), the amazing bounty has been accompanied by new
> problems. On the one side a new aristocracy related to big sceince projects
> and techno-utopian goals, more and more distanced of the common researcher,
> plus an enormous increase of computer-mediated bureaucratization. Besides,
> the really easy communication tools and the multiplicity of channels have
> derived in an unselected overflow that impacts negatively on the slow
> reflection needed in science: rushing from screen to screen, no time to
> think. Something similar is happening in technically mediated social
> relationships--terrible for instance in adolescents. If we are going toward
> a symbiosis man-machine, the prospects are not fascinating.
>
> Well, these are comments from a late baby boomer, hardly adapted to the new
> order...
> Best greetings to all
> --Pedro
>
>
>
>
> I El 26/09/2016 a las 9:55, Mark Johnson escribió:
>
> Dear FIS Colleagues,
>
> To kick-start the discussion on scientific publishing, I have prepared
> a short (hopefully provocative) video. It can be found at:
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Bh3vqM98-U
>
> (if anyone's interested, the software I used for producing it is
> called 'Videoscribe')
>
> I have also produced a paper which is attached.
>
> I hope you find these interesting and stimulating!
>
> Best wishes,
>
> Mark
>
>
>
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>
>
> --
> -------------------------------------------------
> Pedro C. Marijuán
> Grupo de Bioinformación / Bioinformation Group
> Instituto Aragonés de Ciencias de la Salud
> Centro de Investigación Biomédica de Aragón (CIBA)
> Avda. San Juan Bosco, 13, planta X
> 50009 Zaragoza, Spain
> Tfno. +34 976 71 3526 (& 6818)
> pcmarijuan.iacs at aragon.es
> http://sites.google.com/site/pedrocmarijuan/
> -------------------------------------------------
>
>
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-- 
Dr. Mark William Johnson
Institute of Learning and Teaching
Faculty of Health and Life Sciences
University of Liverpool

Phone: 07786 064505
Email: johnsonmwj1 at gmail.com
Blog: http://dailyimprovisation.blogspot.com
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