Category Archives: Open knowledge

by Judith Curry

Here’s a little real talk about the book publishing industry — it adds almost no value, it is going to be wiped off the face of the earth soon, and writers and readers will be better off for it. – Matthew Yglesias

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by Judith Curry

There is a war under way for control of the Internet, and every day brings word of new clashes on a shifting and widening battlefront. Governments, corporations, criminals, anarchists—they all have their own war aims.

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by Judith Curry

The rise of digital media has revolutionized the management of information and created opportunities for broader involvement in science’s production. 

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by Judith Curry

“The fuss over climategate showed that the world is increasingly unwilling to accept the message that “we are scientists; trust us”. Other people want to join the scientific conversation. Good scientists, interested in finding truth, should want to encourage them, not put up the shutters. The wider world instinctively knows to distrust those in all walks of life who reject openness.”

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by Judith Curry

There are two problems with the current criteria for tenure: they don’t reflect modern, interdisciplinary scholarship, and they don’t include metrics to evaluate influence and perspective beyond peer-reviewed publications.

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by Judith Curry

There has been considerable interesting discussion on the previous thread.  I plan to follow up with thread on verification and validation of climate models, and am pondering how to deal with explaining the greenhouse effect.  On this thread, I would like to see discussion on this thread focus on the following:

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by Judith Curry

Documenting, understanding and predicting climate variability and change is an issue of substantial scientific and socioeconomic importance.  The IPCC put forth a strategy for assessing the science that is based upon reducing uncertainty and building a consensus.  This consensus was used to convince the public and policy makers of the IPCC’s scientific findings, which were linked with the UNFCCC treaties and policies to urge action on carbon stabilization.  The partial success of this strategy was reflected by the award of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize to the IPCC.

Failures of this strategy in terms of the actual science are to overly focus the science on one aspect of the climate problem, marginalize dissenting voices, polarize the scientific community, and alienate a large segment of the educated public who have the desire, interest, logic, and often the mathematical and physical science skills to understand and even contribute to the science.

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by Judith Curry

Michael Lowe posted this comment on the Disagreement  thread:

Wouldn’t it be great if more science was like this – hundreds of interested bloggers, laypeople and scientist interracting, arguing, disagreeing, learning. Maybe this is the real postnormal science!

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