Social Media Playground

THE CREDIBILITY CRISIS IN COMPUTATIONAL SCIENCE: AN INFORMATION ISSUE

                                          

Speaker: Victoria StoddenDean's LectureWednesday, February 1, 2012, 4:10 pm - 5:30 pm210 South Hall

Scientific computation is emerging as absolutely central to the scientific method, but the prevalence of very relaxed practices is leading to a credibility crisis affecting many scientific fields. It is impossible to verify most of the results that computational scientists present at conferences and in papers today. Reproducible computational research, in which all details of computations — code and data — are made conveniently available to others, is necessary for a resolution of this crisis. This requires a multifaceted approach including policy solutions, computational tools for data and code dissemination, curation and archiving, and open licensing frameworks such as the Reproducible Research Standard.

Bio: Victoria Stodden is assistant professor of statistics at Columbia University and serves as a member of the National Science Foundation’s Advisory Committee on Cyberinfrastructure (ACCI), and on Columbia University’s Senate Information Technologies Committee. She is one of the creators ofSparseLab, a collaborative platform for reproducible computational research and has developed an award winning licensing structure to facilitate open and reproducible computational research, called the Reproducible Research Standard. She is currently working on the NSF-funded project “Policy Design for Reproducibility and Data Sharing in Computational Science.”

Victoria co-chaired a working group on Virtual Organizations for the NSF’s Office of Cyberinfrastructure Task Force on Grand Challenge Communities in 2010. She is a Science Commons fellow and a nominated member of the Sigma Xi scientific research society. She also serves on the advisory board for hackNY.org, and on the joint advisory committee for the NSF's EarthCube, the effort to build a geosciences-integrating cyberinfrastructure. She is an editorial board member for Open Research Computation and Open Network Biology. She completed her Ph.D. and law degrees at Stanford University.

Her Erdös Number is 3.

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Today• Announcements (talk, summer, lab)• Glitches?• Servers and Clients and Feeds• One to many, many to one• Synchronous/Asynchronous• Push/Pull• Email• Wikipedia• Blogs• Twitter• Facebook• YouTube• Explore & Questions & Experience

Servers and Clients

• Server = program/machine that accepts and fulfills requests over a network

• Client = program (usually with UI) that translates user request into server request & displays received data

• “conversation” follows a protocol (rules for how you ask for things and how you interpret what you get)

Examples

• Safari, Firefox, Chrome are web clients• Apache is web server software• Mills has a web server machine that runs this

software (or some other)• HTTP is the protocol they use to converse

Feeds -- RSS

• RSS=really simple syndication• “syndicate” ~ distribute• “feed” = server that can be “followed”• User gives URI of feed to “reader” or

“aggregator”• Reader checks regularly for updates

Email as Network

To: amy@here.comFrom: bob@there.comCC: cam@yonder.com, don@wherever.com

amy bob

don

cam

Draw the Email Network# From To CC Subject1 Bob Amy Cam,Don A2 Eve Amy Bob,Cam,Don,Fin,Gil B3 Fin Amy Don A4 Bob Cam Amy,Don A5 Cam Amy B6 Don Amy Eve,Fin,Gil B7 Gil Amy Bob C

amy

bob

don

cam

fin

eve

gil

Draw 2 mode network subject/recipient# From To CC Subject1 Bob Amy Cam,Don A

2 Eve Amy Bob,Cam,Don,Fin,Gil B

3 Fin Amy Don A

4 Bob Cam Amy,Don A

5 Cam Amy B

6 Don Amy Eve,Fin,Gil B

7 Gil Amy Bob C

amy bob doncam fineve gil

A B C

Fill in Matrix for “emails in common”

amy bob doncam fineve gil

A B C

Amy Bob Cam Don Eve Fin GilAmy

Bob

Cam

Don

Eve

Fin

Gil

Amy Bob Cam Don Eve Fin GilAmy 2 2 2 1 1 1

Bob 1 1 1 1 1

Cam 2 1 1 1

Don 1 1 1

Eve 1 1

Fin 1

Gil

Before and After

TwitterTweet

Username

User Avatar

“Real” name

ReTweet

Modified Tweet

Mention

Hashtag

Time/Date

ReTweet

Twitter Networks

• Who follows whom• Who mentions whom• Who retweets whom• Who gets mentioned together• What hashtags mentioned by whom

Twitter

djjr… …

Followed/Followers not necessarily distinct

djjr

A

A

Links among my followed/follwers

djjr

What does network look like if we all follow one another?

Blog Networks

• A follows B• A commented on B