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    21st Century Ideas: Mass centralization of science and innovation

    How can we get all the greatest minds to work together to focus on saving mankind?

    Started by: Neouser Raves:13 Badge Winner! Cooperation Radar

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    Should we organize the world's scientists and put them in one place, so that they can work closely together and come up with solutions to save mankind? If so, how can we organize a centralization of science, and make it so that wherever this science central doesn't put all the power into a the hands of a single country?

    Is centralization such a good idea? Isn\\\'t decentralization and variety normally more productive in the long run? If scientists are all coralled together put under the control of some bureaucratic hierarchy, isn\\\'t it just more likely they\\\'ll think the same thing, and spend their time fighting for political status? Yes, you want clustering so that great minds have the chance to bounce ideas off each other, but we need pluralism too.

    Perhaps then, centralization through a medium. Like a website, or something similar

    I think Phil Jones has the right track here. We don\\\'t want to force people to work under some kind of general scientific directorate-- as a scientist, I can safely say that that never yields results. What we need is some kind of central datalink system in which studies can be found and categorized. This would allow better collaboration between scientists, better evaluation of results by analysts, and increased transparency. Perhaps this central datalink could also incorporate some sort of peer review element-- one major problem in science today is the wildly varied standards of different journals.

    I agree with Neouser. The are plenty of mediums for mass-communication centralization of science and innovation specialists. With the developments in Web 2.0 infrastructures there will be new protocols beyond RSS feeds and XML that will allow for more integration of websites, content, and media. The science and innovation fields will prosper as long as secure networks are established. The new, bright ideas will be shared easily, with priority on the ideas that mean most to the greater human population. Clustering is not a good idea as phil jones said, at least not physically. The push for a more centralized specialists\\\' community through technology is what will occur, provided that Outlaw Planet can be contained through building secure networks, such as the WORM Superstruct initiative.

    Maybe the word \\\"centralization\\\" should be properly defined. Does it mean making possible active communication of the minds through an efficient medium, making possible collaboration among many minds working on related projects to save mankind? Or, does it mean streamlining scientists to focus on specific centralized topics that may lead to decreasing diversity in solutions?

    This ties in with the 21st century idea of \\\"translocalism,\\\" I think: people working at local nodes that network to create larger superstructures that can be implemented in a plentitude of localities.

    There is also a difference between \\\'centralising\\\' and collaborating and actively encouraging diversity in perspectives. It might be useful to get open access to databases, results and interpretation, but encourage different groups of people to work on these ideas separately and from different angles - to encourage different perspectives.

    Open-source collaboration is the way of the future. The newest and best ways to gain a variety of insight while allowing the community to self-regulate has allowed people who only want a small piece to be involved while letting the community experts integrate all the ideas. There is no reason this can\\\'t be done the same way, with the use of a wiki or another form of open-sourced collaboration tool.

    Instant online cooperation true cloud networks and holografic proyections that can be manipulated in real time by many users.

    I\\\'m of the mindset that \\\"too many cooks spoil the broth\\\". You can\\\'t have several high level scientists trying to work on the same thing, at the same time, in the same place... I\\\'ve seen programmers try to do this and it\\\'s a disaster; else they\\\'ll be tripping up over each other and it will actually hinder productivity. But there *should* be some sort of \\\"power that be\\\" that coordinates the efforts, making sure time isn\\\'t spent doing the same thing in multiple places, maximizing the efficiency of the scientific work force.

    I\\\'ve got a name for this: The \\\"Open Source Seed\\\" http://superstructgame.org/DiscussionView/95

    I would agree that Open Source seems to be the way to go in deciding between how to manage so many problems with many people behind each problem, contributing together to solve and so on... The Open Source approach is really THE way to go when it comes to the many problems that we have, since we do not have time to solve the problems sequentially, but we have to solve all the problems at the same time.

    The influential Tsunamipants institute which started as a society for part-time survival-hackers and eco-engineers is now a worldwide knowledge base of personal safety and portable survival technologies and strategies. At Tsunamipants we believe in DIY knowledge and extra-academic research. We offer personal portable solutions to surviving extreme weather, disease and guerilla warfare. Only our database is centralized.

    Continued from above: And offer portable solutions to surviving extreme weather, disease and guerilla warfare. Only our database is centralized.

    Continued from above: We offer portable solutions to surviving extreme weather, disease and guerilla warfare. Only our database is centralized.

    Who is picking these great minds? And are they only scientists, but novelists, artists, economists, etc as well? Beyond the \\\"thing,\\\" be it the web forum or seed or \\\"holographic proyection\\\" or node, we need people to connect researchers to the nodes. Go betweens.

    It would be great if the great minds did work together but once the idea\\\'s are in place - how do we get the theories put into practice in a way that is of most benefit to the most people?

    The problem isn't so much centralizing them, as getting the scientists aware of what's already out there. There are places like arxiv.org that have been providing open access to science reports for decades. But - just because a mostly-complete solution to problem X has been posted there, doesn't mean that scientist Y who's working on the problem knows of these bits of the solution (so as to refine and complete it), or that resource source Z (a government, corporation, or whatever) which is facing problem X knows to fund this area of research. It's a combination of advertising and understanding, on a scale that demands automation. Sadly, we don't have artificial intelligences smarter than a dog...yet. But there are efforts, in the cores of companies like Google, to build search engines that can browse these places and suggest partial solutions, which people trained in the technology could use to gather parts of those patterns that human beings are so very good at recognizing. (In the mean time, people can always look up the science of things themselves. Bemoaning our lack of scientists while being unwilling to put forth the effort to study these problems oneself is slightly hypocritical. One does not absolutely require a degree in order to start learning about DNA, for example, and there are certainly ample, freely available educational videos on the topic from various universities.)

    I think the 'great minds' should self select.

    I do think distributed information and communication technologies can help. Government departments, universities, and research institutes do maintain many public online databases and tools to house and access scientific data. One of the most promising ways for scientists to share papers without journals is the Public Library of Scienc http://www.plos.org/. And genetic information is freely available through the NCBI at: http://blast.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Blast.cgi Submission, curation, and peer review do present problems to an open model, as it is important to trust the data and methods of the submitted contents. I have degrees in Biology and Computer Science and have watched good minds struggle with politics and inefficiency surrounding government and university administration and funding. Many of them have chosen to work for private industry or throw in the towel to pursue careers as lawyers or doctors where they are better compensated and feel more able to get things done.




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