Via Jean-Claude Bradley on UsefulChem, an article in Wired on making more of the ‘Dark Data’ out there available. As Jean-Claude notes this is focussed mainly on the notion of ‘failed experiments’ and ‘positive bias’ but there is much more background data out there. Experiments that don’t quite make the grade for inclusion in the paper or are just one of many that may be useful from a statistical perspective.

I’ve been fiddling with this post for a while and I’m not sure where its going but I think other people’s views might make the whole thing clearer. This is after all why we believe in being open. So here it is in its unfinished and certainly unclarified form. All comments gratefully received.

Research in most places today is done under more or less rigorous safety regimes. A general approach which I believe is fairly universal is that any action should in principle be ‘Risk Assessed’. For many everyday procedures such an assessment may not need to be written down but it is general practise in the UK that there needs to be a paper trail that demonstrates that such risk assessments are carried out.

I went along to a session on enabling uptake, which has evolved out of groups based in education and training. This mainly involved people focussed on education and training and support people. It was mainly focussed on Grid based systems. Two interesting things came out of this I thought.

Some responses to John Wood’s talk on e-science infrastructure at AHM2007. The talk focussed on large scale infrastructure and the need for co-ordination. There are serious political and logistical problems for making proper coordination happen. A couple of interesting comments came out; Need for the involvement of historians and sociologists to follow what is happening.

Some themes seem to emerge to me from the talks I have been to. One is that the many people are talking about the need to expand the reach of e-science tools out to the ‘general scientific community’.  As I noted in other posts part of this is a problem with language.

Brief notes on this parallel session from E-science all hands meeting on Tuesday morning. First talk in this session discussed the CARMEN project which aims to provide repositories and tools for neuroscience electrophyisology data. There was a short discussion on the challenges of persuading scientists to put the data in. The speaker’s (Paul Watson) view was that this would probably need to be driven by funders and journals.

Well when it’s not open obviously. There are many ways to provide all the information imagineable while still keeping things hidden. Or at least difficult to figure out or to find. The slogan ‘No insider information’ is useful because it provides a good benchmark to work towards. It is perhaps an ideal to attain rather than a practical target but thinking about what we know but is not clear from the blog notebook has a number of useful results.

I attended the session held on Nature Island as part of the Scifoo Lives On series being organised by Jean-Claude Bradley and Bertalan Mesko and wanted to record some of my impressions. The mechanics of the meeting itself were interesting. My initial reaction to the idea of meetings in Second Life was pretty sceptical. My natural inclination would have been to setup some sort of video cast or conference call.

I don’t really want to add anything more to what has been said in many places (and has been rounded up well by Bora Zivkovic on Blog Around the Clock, see also Peter Suber for the definitive critique, also updates here and here). However there is a public relations issue here for the open science movement in general that I think hasn’t come up yet.