Building a 21st century interface for science

Fully open, easily accessible data, together with open debate and version control, enables much greater scrutiny over results, which should lead to more accurate knowledge.

The responsibility of any interface is to understand and mitigate fallible human behaviours to meaningfully extend our capabilities.

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.

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

Let's take a moment to compare the beginning and the end of our 336 year journey:... It's hard to ignore that they are shockingly similar. (see image in article of publication from 1700s and today)

real scientific understanding arises from synthesising a wide range of literature, because synthesis is the mechanism that provides the context which makes a paper understandable...Given this fact, the interface should be primarily responsible for enabling efficient synthesis

 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.

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 Michael... See more

Much of this knowledge is highly specific, and isn't captured in the literature. We can call this 'tacit' knowledge. To this end, science isn't really the literature - the literature is a partial representation of what we know. The full range of what we know lives inside the minds of researchers.