Knowledge grows like species evolve. Ideas are combined to form new knowledge in a process we can call  bisociation , such that new knowledge is really just a combination of existing ideas.

Pen and paper took us as far as the moon. It's about time we went to the stars.

A major development in this trajectory, not limited to scientific journals alone, was the invention of graphical displays of information...Graphical displays of information are the foundation of every discipline concerned with quantitative information, because they make information human readable.

In many cases, the reader might be able to provide valuable insight that was inaccessible to the author, simply because they have had a different set of experiences. They may be able to unlock something important by applying their own knowledge in the context of the paper. Despite being highly valuable, this kind of insight isn't recorded anywhere,... See more

 Since the scientific interface is not capable of serving the general population, people have to blind trust the institutions who communicate science publicly. When that trust evaporates, people begin to reject the information itself.

In this future, mainstream media no longer interprets scientific information. Instead, they draw directly from the source. In fact, all scientific communication and learning, including every textbook, lecture and online course draws from the same, original, primary artifacts accessible through the same interface. Expert scientists, lay readers and... See more

So, representing systems dynamically is important for learning about and understanding systems deeply. This is important for both novices and experts. However, dynamic representations of systems are not just useful for learning. Dynamic simulations are models of some interacting phenomena, which makes them able to predict things.

By analogy, it should act like a Google search, in that users can ask questions of any part of the scientific record. However, it should be unlike a Google search in that it synthesises information across all search results to produce a systems-level understanding of the search query, accessible to the user through many kinds of rich, dynamic... See more

There may be good reason to be optimistic about non-'scientists' taking part in science....Innocentive creates prizes to incentivise a distributed global network to solve specific problems for organisations who can't solve those problems in-house. Problems can be highly technical (see image below), and span across many domains. I will reuse... See more