Facebook for Scientists?

Researchers need networks too

A report in the Chronicle notes:

A $12.2-million federal stimulus grant from the National Institutes of Health will finance a network some are calling a Facebook for scientists. Several universities, including Cornell University and the University of Florida, will develop the network over the next two years in the hopes of helping scientists find other academics to work with.

If a researcher is looking for someone else in a very specialized field, he or she would usually think of all the people he has met or simply scan recent scientific journals for names, said Michael Conlon, interim director of biomedical informatics at the College of Medicine at the University of Florida and the principal investigator on the grant. Mr. Conlon calls those methods “haphazard.”

People using the network will be able to enter targeted inquiries into a search box. The results will show scholars in very specialized fields. The site will also reveal relationships between academics, such as whether someone has published an article with someone else, or whether someone was an adviser to someone else.

But why create a new network to achieve this? Aren’t existing networks like Facebook or LinkedIn able to do this kind of thing better and more efficiently?

Now it’s “music that makes you dumb”

Follow up to post about books that achieve this end.

This site does the correlation with music and SAT scores.

Looking at Facebook for University of Nottingham today it seems the following represent our top 10:

1 Muse

2 The Killers

3 Oasis

4 Jack Johnson

5 Snow Patrol

6 Coldplay

7 Bloc Party

8 Radiohead

9 The Kooks

10 Razorlight

Which, in US terms, would definitely mean mid-table obscurity.

How disappointing.

Books “that make you dumb”

Interesting piece of work – a website which shows the correlation between favourite books on Facebook and average SAT scores for particular US institutions.

The five highest-scoring books (and Average SAT scores):

1. Lolita (1317)
2. 100 Years of Solitude (1308)
3. Crime and Punishment (1307)
4. Freakonomics (1275)
5. Catch-22 (1233)

Someone, with more time on their hands than is good for them, could do the same in the UK using average tariff scores – we need a new league table.

Even more information for applicants?

According to the Guardian, in a report on a conference they have sponsored:

Universities should offer more detailed information about courses to the Facebook generation, the shadow universities secretary, David Willetts, said today. The Guardian’s Higher Education summit heard that students were sharing information about the offers they receive for university courses on social networking sites, forcing universities to rethink the kind of information they give out.

But there is already an abundance of information about universities, much of it generated by institutions themselves but also a huge amount by government, its agents, newspapers, league table compilers and various websites. Just because some of this now appears, in an even less well-informed state, on Facebook, does not mean universities have suddenly got their marketing campaigns all wrong.

Willetts said students should be able to find out how crowded seminars were likely to be, how much access time they would receive from lecturers and what form this access would take.

Fine and helpful but it is extremely difficult to produce accurate and meaningful data on these items (within a single university, let alone on a comparative basis) and institutions themselves aren’t going to start publishing data describing themselves as overcrowded or offering minimal access to academic staff except on Tuesday afternoons.

But, and this is where he does have a point, if there is no authoritative information about the undergraduate experience then it becomes more likely that gossip and misinformation will dominate. And that is not particularly good news for anyone.

In-house Facebook?

According to Business Week, this is what the big companies are now doing, ie providing an internal social networking alternative.

By luring employees into a network, companies hope to leverage their skills and contacts. But they also hope that all that collaboration will cut out time that’s now spent mailing documents and e-mailing comments.

A bit optimistic perhaps. Seems questionable whether such homegrown facebook alternatives will actually provide a substitute for the real thing or just an additional channel. And how comprehensive is Sharepoint in any case?