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Mongoliad launch

Tuesday, September 7th, 2010

I made mention of the Mongoliad writing project when it was first announced in late spring (my May 31, 2010 posting). The project features Neal Stepheonson and Greg Bear, both well known science fiction writers (in fact, both have written novels that incorporate nanotechnology), amongst a cast of other writers, artists, techno types, and others. They’re forging into 21st century publishing with a model that is lifted in part from the 19th century, stories produced serially and available by subscription, but made available with contemporary technology, the interrnet. I guess you could call it ‘steam punk publishing’.

Last week, a free preview was made available and registration was opened. Here’s the view from Andrew Leonard at Salon.com,

Behold the power of branding! Chapter I of “The Mongoliad” launched online this week, and I plunked down $9.99 for a year’s subscription, sight unseen, simply because Neal Stephenson’s name was attached. …

But after spending some time with the site and reading the first chapter, it is not exactly clear to me exactly how much Stephenson is baked into this project. He is the co-founder and chairman of Subutai, the start-up that is producing “The Mongoliad.” But the content-creation is a group effort. This serial digital novel is being produced online by a team of writers , artists, hackers and sword-fighting geeks — another big name involved is Greg Bear, also a veteran science fiction author. …

“The Mongoliad” is supposed to be more than “just” a book. Eventually the intention is to incorporate multimedia offerings, along with the hypertext-branching contributions of a user community extending far beyond the core team.

Leonard goes on to express his hope that Mongoliad will be a grand adventure. He really is a Stephenson fan and seems to be genuinely looking forward to reading this experiment in publishing/social media enhancing/serializing a novel. Kit Eaton at Fast Company (Neal Stephenson’s Novel-Redefining Novel, “The Mongoliad,” Launches, Online)  is another fan,

Ghengis Khan shook up the world in the 12th Century, and now in the 21st Century Neal Stephenson’s novel about him may shake up the publishing world: It’s partly interactive, partly social media, and wholly digital.

The Mongoliad promises to be unlike any other book ever written. For starters it’s written, in part, by Neal Stephenson, whose ideas in earlier novels like Snow Crash and The Diamond Age have contributed to many modern marvels like Google Earth and augmented reality. When you learn sci-fi writer Greg Bear is contributing to the team effort too, it makes the whole thing even more promising.

The innovation in The Mongoliad isn’t in its team writing effort, however: It’s in the entire concept of a serialized, dynamic, digital “book” that includes video, imagery, music, and background articles among the text of the storyline and comes with a social media companion, with which fans/readers can comment and interact.

In fact it looks as if they are incorporating fan fiction into their overall plan. If you go to the Mongoliad website, you are encouraged to add your stories and artwork to the site.  This is from their ‘terms of service’,

Contributor Submissions

1. Policy. We welcome the submission of text, stories, vignettes, paragraphs, concepts, characters, ideas, poems, songs, images, animations, or interactive features submitted by registered contributors for potential publication on the Site (“Contributor Submissions”). Subutai grants you a limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable and revocable license to modify, broadcast, and transmit Content solely in order to create and submit Contributor Submissions to Subutai.

You understand that whether or not such Contributor Submissions are published, Subutai cannot guarantee proper attribution with respect to any submissions because of the interactive nature of the Site.

It’ll be interesting to see whether or not this works purely from the perspective of its business model. As for the story itself, I’m not loving it so far.  First, a précis. It’s the thirteenth century in Europe and the Mongolians have a conquered a chunk of it. (Apparently, they did conquer a good chunk by 1241 and were about to conquer the rest when Ögedei Khan, then current Mongol ruler, died and their general,  Subitai, according to custom had to return to Mongolis.  See: Wikipedia essay)

In Mongoliad, there is no withdrawal of the Mongol forces and they are poised to sweep Europe meanwhile a small band of European knights gather to fight (from the Mongoliad Welcome page),

It’s spring of 1241, and the West is shitting its pants (that’s “bewraying its kecks” for you medieval time-travelers).

The Mongol takeover of Europe is almost complete. The hordes commanded by the sons of Genghis Khan have swept out of their immense grassy plains and ravaged Russia, Poland, and Hungary… and now seem poised to sweep west to Paris and south to Rome. King and pope and peasant alike face a bleak future—until a small band of warriors, inheritors of a millennium-old secret tradition, set out to probe the enemy.

Their leader, the greatest knight of their order, will set his small group of specially trained warriors on a perilous eastern journey. They will be guided by an agile, elusive, and sharp-witted adolescent girl, who believes the master’s plan is insane. But this small band is the West’s last, best hope to turn aside the floodtide of the violent genius of the Steppes kingdoms.

In the preview chapter (which is free), we meet Haakon who’s obviously one of the small band of warriors fighting for Europe. At this point,  he’s engaging in some sort of sword fighting duel in a Mongol arena while the crowds roar for blood.  We never learn much more about him or any of the other characters we’re introduced to as the preview is designed to draw us into buying a subscription so we can find out more.  I’m not a big fan of the writing that I see in the preview,

Haakon wanted to roar with anger, but it came out as a strangled laugh. “I am about to do battle with a demon,” he complained, “and you want me to–”

“It’s no demon,” Brother Rutger said, and spat on the loose ocher ground that had been tracked down the tunnel on the boots of surviving combatants. “It’s a man dressed as one.” He rammed the helm down onto Haakon’s head and slapped him on the ass. Even through surcoat, chain mail, gambeson, and drawers, the impact came through solidly. “Oh yes,” he added, “and the Red Veil. We would also like to know what is on the other side.”

Haakon grunted as he adjusted the helmet to suit him. The mysterious Veil. He might have seen it several weeks ago when a group led by the physician Raphael had been sent to retrieve Illarion, the ailing Ruthenian.

Now, their party had divided again, and Feronantus and his team were off on their secret mission–while Haakon and the rest of the Shield-Brethren remained to compete against the champions of the Mongol Empire.

Rutger put his hand on Haakon’s shoulder. They regarded each other silently. Saying goodbye would be worse than useless, since Rutger and the others would see it as a premature admission of defeat, and it might demoralize them. Haakon knew he would be back among them in less time than it took to run out to the gutter and take a shit.

I also have some questions about the politics of it all. Here are a couple pictures from the site, Haakon first,

Art by Jamie Jones (from Mongoliad site)

And here’s one of the two Mongolian thug images currently available,

Concept art from Aleksi Briclot (from Mongoliad site)

This is just the beginning of the series and I’m hoping they head away from seems to be a pretty standard storyline where pretty, blond, white people struggle and eventually turn the tide against a demonic, dark-haired and darker-skinned people.

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Who do you write like? and other writing bits

Friday, July 23rd, 2010

I write like
Cory Doctorow

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

I found this ‘analyse my writing style’ game thanks to The Shebeen Club. (It’s very easy to play, just copy and  paste some of your writing into a submission box and hit submit. A minute or so later you get your answer. (Btw, I’m thrilled with my result.)

As for other ‘writery’ things, Dave at The Black Hole offers advice, links and practical information for people who want to become science writers,

Throughout the course of my own training, I have encountered a number of fellow trainees that have a passion for science writing and they live amongst a sea of those that do not. For those considering a career shift toward this passion, I think the first critical step is to figure out what kind of science writing you are interested in… loosely I’ve broken it up into three categories:

Popular

Feeding the brains of the public

Technical

Accurately explaining scientific protocols and/or information

Editorial

Consolidating or shifting a scientific field, making policy, designing programs, lobbying for change

While Dave is addressing science trainees, his advice is applicable to anyone who’s interested in science writing but without a science background, you will have different challenges.

I’ll make one addition to Dave’s list of organizations you might want to check out, the Society for Technical Communication. I’ve belonged to it for a number of years and they provide a lot of valuable information if you’re interested in the field.

Finally, there’s this interesting article at Fast Company by Rachel Arendt about Tin House and some new rules for submitting manuscripts to them,

A crafty new submissions policy from Tin House Books is reminding writers to be readers—and consumers.

The book press and quarterly literary magazine’s recent call for manuscripts welcomes unsolicited submissions but comes with a caveat: Each submission must include a receipt for a book purchased at a bookstore. As for those who can’t afford to buy books or get to a bookstore, Tin House asks for a haiku or under-100-word sentence explaining why. Writers who prefer their words in e-ink can send similar explanations for their turn away from bookstores and analog reading.

Arendt goes on the describe the publisher and the thinking behind this initiative.

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Nanotech comic books

Thursday, July 22nd, 2010

Originally released in 2008 by Marvel Comics, New-Gen chronicles the adventures of nanotechnology-enhanced super humans. From the article by Patrick Montero at the New York Daily News,

Though similar to other superhero teams, the nanopowered creatures of the futuristic action comic series, New-Gen, are not your average mutant superheroes. What sets them apart is the seamless blending of your classic superhero with real science-based fact.

“Nanotechnology is a real science,” exclaims J.D. Matonti, creator and co-writer of the New-Gen series, “I reached out to NASA scientist, Dr. Brad Edwards, [to learn about] the possibilities of nanotechnology. What if someone was composed of nanobots? What sort of incredible powers could manifest?

We wanted to employ a realistic approach as to where those nanopowers could originate from so when our audience read New-Gen they would think, ‘Hey, this can really happen!’”

I searched Dr.Brad Edwards and found an interview where someone with the same name and an association with NASA (US National Aeronautics and Space Administration) discusses his work on a space elevator. From Sander Olson’s article on Next Big Future,

… Dr. Edwards received his PhD in physics in 1990, and worked at Los Alamos National Lab for 11 years. After leaving Los Alamos, Dr. Edwards has dedicated his career to researching and developing the space elevator concept. All of his research indicates that the space elevator concept is valid and feasible. He currently heads a company called Black Line Ascension, which is actively promoting the space elevator concept. He has published several books on the space elevator, including The Space Elevator: A Revolutionary Earth-to-Space Transport System, and Leaving the Planet by Space Elevator.

I think this is the same person cited in Montero’s article and, while he doesn’t mention nanobots, he does discuss carbon nanotubes and their application in his space elevator project at some length.

Also cited in Montero’s article is a NASA Center for Nanotechnology. The site doesn’t seem to have been updated since April 2007. I mention it because of this comment in Montero’s article,

According to the NASA Center for Nanotechnology (CNT), nanotechnology robots, or nanobots, are microscopic machines that work on an atomic level to systematically organize and manipulate materials 100 millionth of a millimeter or smaller.

I couldn’t find any references to nanobots on that website. Perhaps the creators/writers gave Montero references that were valid in 2007 when they were likely researching and preparing the series prior to its 2008 launch?

I did go to the Marvel Comics website to find free copies of the first three installments of the series as promised in Montero’s article. (Go here.) From the Marvel Comics New-Gen page,

A battle over Nanotechnology rages between two superhuman scientists. Gabriel banishes his former friend, Deadalus, to an underworld, sends his infant twin sons to Earth and takes in the young children and creatures affected by Nanotechnology. The children and creatures grow up possessing unique NanoPowers in the Association for the Protection of New Generation (A.P.N.G.) and will oppose Deadalus as he evolves into the purely evil Sly attempting to transform worlds.

There’s also a New-Gen website where you can read up on the latest about the series, find biographies for each character, and more.

The series, from what I’ve seen of it, looks like it might be good, goofy fun although I understand from Montero’s article that the creative team has reworked the original stories to make them edgier for their new (2010) release as mobile comics. As for the science aspect, I think they had good intentions when they started the research.

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ASME’s introductory nanotechnology podcast doesn’t mention the word billionth

Thursday, July 15th, 2010

It’s a landmark moment, I have never before come across an introductory nanotechnology presentation where they make no reference to ‘billionth’ as in, nanometre means one billionth of a metre.

The American Society of Mechanical Engineers now known as ASME offers a series of podcasts about nanotechnology on its website. This page is where you can sign up to get free access. (You might want to take a look at that agreement before submitting it. More about that later.) I saw the first installation on Andrew Maynard’s 2020 Science blog here. Andrew is prominently featured in this first podcast.

I enjoyed the podcast and found this new approach to introducing nanotechnology quite intriguing and I suspect they’re going in the right direction. 1 billionth of a metre or of a second doesn’t really convey that much information for most of us. Personally, I visualize the existence of alternate realities, tiny worlds of atoms and molecules which I believe to be present but are not perceptible to me through my senses.

It’s been decades since I first saw a representation of an atom or a molecule but the resemblance to planets has often played in my imagination since. They will always be planets for me, regardless of the fact that more accurate representations exist than the ones I saw so many years ago.

I think it’s the poetic aspect of it all, as if we carry worlds within us while our own planet may be simply an atom in someone else’s universe. One of these days when I have a better handle on what I’m trying to say here,  I will write a poem about it.

Actually, I’ve been meaning to do a series of poems based on the periodic table of elements ever since I saw a revisioning of the periodic table, The Chemical Galaxy by Philip Stewart. The desire was reawakened recently on finding Sam Kean’s series Blogging the Periodic Table, for Slate Magazine. From Kean’s first entry,

I’m blogging about the periodic table this month in conjunction with my new book, The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World From the Periodic Table of the Elements. Now, I know not everyone has fond memories of the periodic table, but it got to me early—thanks to one element, mercury. I used to break those old-fashioned mercury thermometers all the time as a kid (accidentally, I swear), and I was always fascinated to see the little balls of liquid metal rolling around on the floor. My mother used to sweep them up with a toothpick, and we kept a jar with a pecan-size glob of all the mercury from all the broken thermometers on a knickknack shelf in our house.

But what really reinforced my love of mercury—and got me interested in the periodic table as a whole—was learning about all the places that mercury popped up in history. Lewis and Clark hauled 600 mercury-laced laxative tablets with them when they explored the interior of America—historians have tracked down some places where they stayed based on deposits in the soil. The so-called mad hatters (like the one in Alice in Wonderland) went crazy because of the mercury in the vats in which they cleaned fur pelts.

Mercury made me see how many different areas of life the periodic table intersects with, and I wrote The Disappearing Spoon because I realized that you can say the same about every single element on the table. There are hidden tales about familiar elements like gold, carbon, and lead and even obscure elements like tellurium and molybdenum have wonderful, often wild back stories.

There are eight more entries as of 11:25 am PST, July 15, 2010. I wish Kean good luck as he sells his book. By the way, he’ll be blogging until early August 2010.

Getting back to ASME and their nanotechnology podcasts. I haven’t signed up and am not sure I will. They are insisting on copyright in their  user agreement (link to page),

Copyrights. All rights, including copyright and database right, in this Site and its contents (including, but not limited to, all text, images, software, video clips, audio clips) (collectively, “Content”), are owned by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), or otherwise used by ASME as permitted by applicable law or agreement.

…

Content Displayed on the Website. User shall not remove, obscure or alter the Content. User shall not distribute, rent, lease, transfer or otherwise make the Content available to any third party, or use the Content for systematic downloading, and/or the making of print or electronic copies for transmission to non-subscribers. User may download only the video clips designated on the Website as downloadable and may not share video URLs with non-subscribers. [emphases mine]

If I read those passages correctly, I’m prevented from copying any portion of the materials from their website and reproducing them on this blog to nonsubscribers. (I trust reproducing portions of their ‘user agreement’ won’t land me into trouble.) Since I copy and excerpt with a very high rate of frequency (being careful to give attribution and links while excerpting portions only), I don’t want to be placed in the position of having to ask for permission each and every time I’d like to copy something from the ASME site.  A lot of my entries are timely so I don’t want to wait and, frankly, I don’t understand what their problems with activities such as mine might be.  I suspect that this agreement will prove overly prohibitive and I hope the ASME folks will reconsider their approach to copyright. I really would like to view a few of their podcasts.

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Graphic novel by nanogirl

Tuesday, July 13th, 2010

Came across an item about a 3-D graphic novel that features nanotechnology. The author, Gina Miller aka nanogirl, was interviewed by Gavin Sheehan for City Weekly (Salt Lake City, Utah, that is). From the  article, here’s a description of how she came to incorporate nanotechnology in her graphic novel,

Before my animation work I was very focused on nanotechnology, I developed a web portal and nanotechnology news service. This is why you will sometimes see this topic in my artwork and animations. Nanotechnology is an emerging science that is on a scale so small you can not see it with the human eye. It is one billionth of a meter. If fully developed nanotechnology could provide some amazing benefits to humanity. For example: cures for diseases, one could have nanobots roaming the body and repairing any nasty viruses or cancer cells. Nanobots could be sent out into the atmosphere to repair pollution. Nanotechnology could also help fight starvation via molecular food synthesis. Before I began the graphic novel I had watched a lot of movies and read books where humans build a great technology, then this technology turns against humanity and endangers it. I knew that I would like to see a story where it wasn’t so black and white. As I progressed with my own art I began thinking why can’t I make that story. The plot itself developed quite unexpectedly. A few years ago I began seeing pieces of the Lazarus story in my mind. Over time the details began to fill in and I wrote the story out. This must have awoken something in my mind because after that I wrote out more stories that perhaps will take a life of their own one day.

If you’re interested in more about the artist/author, 3-D animation, and her thoughts about the Salt Lake City art scene, do check out the article. Here’s a sample of one of the graphic images that accompany the article,

3D Illustration from Lazarus (graphic novel) by Gina Miller

Gina Miller has a website at nanogirl.com and there’s a trailer for her graphic novel, Lazarus, here on Youtube.

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California boycott of Nature journals?

Tuesday, June 15th, 2010

It seems the California Digital Library (CDL) which manages subscriptions for the University of  California has been getting a deal on its Nature journal subscriptions and now the publisher, Nature Publishing Group (NPG), has raised their subscription price by approximately 400 percent. Predictably the librarians are protesting the rate hike. Less predictably, they are calling for a boycott.

The Pasco Phronesis blog notes,

The negotiations continue via press releases. Independent of the claims both sides are making, this fight brings out the point that journal subscription rates have continually increased at rates that challenge many universities to keep up. NPG is not the only company charging high rates, it’s just that the long-standing agreement with the CDL has become no longer sustainable for NPG. Given the continuing budget problems California faces, it seems quite likely that the CDL may no longer find NPG subscriptions sustainable.

The article by Jennifer Howard for the Chronicle of Higher Education offers some details about the proposed boycott. In addition to canceling subscriptions,

The voluntary boycott would “strongly encourage” researchers not to contribute papers to those journals or review manuscripts for them. It would urge them to resign from Nature’s editorial boards and to encourage similar “sympathy actions” among colleagues outside the University of California system.

The boycott’s impact on faculty is not something that immediately occurred to me but Dr. Free-Ride at Adventures in Ethics and Science notes,

One bullet point that I think ought to be included above — something that I hope UC faculty and administrators will consider seriously — is that hiring, retention, tenure, and promotion decisions within the UC system should not unfairly penalize those who have opted to publish their scholarly work elsewhere, including in peer-reviewed journals that may not currently have the impact factor (or whatever other metric that evaluators lean on so as not to have to evaluate the quality of scholarly output themselves) that the NPG journals do. Otherwise, there’s a serious career incentive for faculty to knuckle under to NPG rather than honoring the boycott.

There is both support and precedent for such a boycott according to Howard’s article,

Keith Yamamoto is a professor of molecular biology and executive vice dean of the School of Medicine at UC-San Francisco. He stands ready to help organize a boycott, if necessary, a tactic he and other researchers used successfully in 2003 when another big commercial publisher, Elsevier, bought Cell Press and tried to raise its journal prices.

After the letter went out on Tuesday, Mr. Yamamoto received an “overwhelmingly positive” response from other university researchers. He said he’s confident that there will be broad support for a boycott among the faculty if the Nature Group doesn’t negotiate, even if it means some hardships for individual researchers.

“There’s a strong feeling that this is an irresponsible action on the part of NPG,” he told The Chronicle. That feeling is fueled by what he called “a broad awareness in the scientific community that the world is changing rather rapidly with respect to scholarly publication.”

Although researchers still have “a very strong tie to traditional journals” like Nature, he said, scientific publishing has evolved in the seven years since the Elsevier boycott. “In many ways it doesn’t matter where the work’s published, because scientists will be able to find it,” Mr. Yamamoto said.

I feel sympathy for both sides as neither side is doing well economically these days. I do have to wonder at the decision to quadruple the subscription rates overnight as it smacks of a negotiating tactic in a situation where the CDL had come to expect a significantly lowered subscription rate. With this tactic there’s the potential for a perceived win-win situation. The CDL will triumphantly negotiate a lower subscription rate and the publisher will get the increase they wanted in the first place. That’s my theory.

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Interacting with stories and/or with data

Monday, June 14th, 2010

A researcher, Ivo Swarties, at the University of Twente in The Netherlands is developing a means of allowing viewers to enter into a story (via avatar) and affect the plotline in what seems like a combination of what you’d see in 2nd Life and gaming. The project also brings to mind The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson and its intelligent nanotechnology-enabled book along with Stephenson’s latest publishing project, Mongoliad (which I blogged about here).

The article about Swarties’ project on physorg.com by Rianne Wanders goes on to note,

The ‘Virtual Storyteller’, developed by Ivo Swartjes of the University of Twente, is a computer-controlled system that generates stories automatically. Soon it will be possible for you as a player to take on the role of a character and ‘step inside’ the story, which then unfolds on the basis of what you as a player do. In the gaming world there are already ‘branching storylines’ in which the gamer can influence the development of a story, but Swartjes’ new system goes a step further. [emphasis mine]The world of the story is populated with various virtual figures, each with their own emotions, plans and goals. ‘Rules’ drawn up in advance determine the characters’ behaviour, and the story comes about as the different characters interact.

There’s a video with the article if you want to see this project for yourself.

On another related front, Cliff Kuang profiles in an article (The Genius Behind Minority Report’s Interfaces Resurfaces, With Mind-blowing New Tech) on the Fast Company site describes a new human-computer interface. This story provides a contrast to the one about the ‘Virtual Storyteller’ because this time you don’t have to become an avatar to interact with the content. From the article,

It’s a cliche to say that Minority Report-style interfaces are just around the corner. But not when John Underkoffler [founder of Oblong Industries] is involved. As tech advistor on the film, he was the guy whose work actually inspired the interfaces that Tom Cruise used. The real-life system he’s been developing, called g-speak, is unbelievable.

…

Oblong hasn’t previously revealed most of the features you see in the later half of the video [available in the article's web page or on YouTube], including the ability zoom in and fly through a virtual, 3-D image environment (6:30); the ability to navigate an SQL database in 3-D (8:40); the gestural wand that lets you manipulate and disassemble 3-D models (10:00); and the stunning movie-editing system, called Tamper (11:00).

Do go see the video. At one point, Underkoffler (who was speaking at the February 2010 TED) drags data from the big screen in front of him onto a table set up on the stage where he’s speaking.

Perhaps most shockingly (at least for me) was the information that this interface is already in use commercially (probably in a limited way).

These developments and many others suggest that the printed word’s primacy is seriously on the wane, something I first heard 20 years ago. Oftentimes when ideas about how technology will affect us are discussed, there’s a kind of hysterical reaction which is remarkably similar across at least two centuries. Dave Bruggeman at his Pasco Phronesis blog has a posting about the similarities between Twitter and 19th century diaries,

Lee Humphreys, a Cornell University communications professor, has reviewed several 18th and 19th century diaries as background to her ongoing work in classifying Twitter output (H/T Futurity). These were relatively small journals, necessitating short messages. And those messages bear a resemblance to the kinds of Twitter messages that focus on what people are doing (as opposed to the messages where people are reacting to things).

Dave goes on to recommend The Shock of the Old; Technology and Global History since 1900 by David Edgerton as an antidote to our general ignorance (from the book’s web page),

Edgerton offers a startling new and fresh way of thinking about the history of technology, radically revising our ideas about the interaction of technology and society in the past and in the present.

I’d also recommend Carolyn Marvin’s book, When old technologies were new, where she discusses the introduction of telecommunications technology and includes the electric light with these then new technologies (telegraph and telephone). She includes cautionary commentary from the newspapers, magazines, and books of the day which is remarkably similar to what’s available in our contemporary media environment.

Adding a little more fuel is Stephen Hume in a June 12, 2010 article about Shakespeare for the Vancouver Sun who asks,

But is the Bard relevant in an age of atom bombs; a world of instant communication gratified by movies based on comic books, sex-saturated graphic novels, gory video games, the television soaps and the hip tsunami of fan fiction that swashes around the Internet?

[and answers]

So, the Bard may be stereotyped as the bane of high school students, symbol of snooty, barely comprehensible language, disparaged as sexist, racist, anti-Semitic, representative of an age in which men wore tights and silly codpieces to inflate their egos, but Shakespeare trumps his critics by remaining unassailably popular.

His plays have been performed on every continent in every major language. He’s been produced as classic opera in China; as traditional kabuki in Japan. He’s been enthusiastically embraced and sparked an artistic renaissance in South Asia. In St. Petersburg, Russia, there can be a dozen Shakespeare plays running simultaneously. Shakespeare festivals occur in Austria, Belgium, Finland, Portugal, Sweden and Turkey, to list but a few.

Yes to Pasco Phronesis, David Edgerton, Carolyn Marvin, and Stephen Hume, I agree that we have much  in common with our ancestors but there are also some profound and subtle differences not easily articulated.  I suspect that if time travel were possible and we could visit Shakespeare’s time we would find that the basic human experience doesn’t change that much but that we would be hardpressed to fit into that society as our ideas wouldn’t just be outlandish they would be unthinkable. I mean literally unthinkable.

As Walter Ong noted in his book, Orality and Literacy, the concept of a certain type of list is a product of literacy. Have you ever done that test where you pick out the item that doesn’t belong on the list? Try: hammer, saw, nails, tree. The correct answer anybody knows is tree since it’s not a tool. However, someone from oral culture would view the exclusion of the tree as crazy since you need both tools and  wood to build something and clearly the tree provides wood. (I’ll see if I can find the citation in Ong’s book as he provides research to prove his point.) A list is a particular way of organizing information and thinking about it.

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Ideas becoming knowledge: interview with Dr. Rainer Becker (part 2 of 2)

Wednesday, June 2nd, 2010

Before getting to part 2 of Dr. Becker’s interview, I’m including this abbreviated introduction for anyone who hasn’t had a chance to read part 1 yet. From the April 22, 2010 news item on Nanowerk,

How do sensational ideas become commonly accepted knowledge? How does a hypothesis turn into certainty? What are the ways and words that bring results of scientific experiments into textbooks and people’s minds, how are they “transferred” into these domains? Science philosopher Dr. Rainer Becker has recently started dealing with such questions. Over the next three years, Becker will accompany the work of Professor Dr. Frank Rösl’s department at the German Cancer Research Center (Deutsches Krebsforschungszentrum, DKFZ), which studies cancer-causing viruses. He is one of three scientists in an interdisciplinary joint project which is funded by the German Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) with a total sum of approximately € 790,000.

…

In his future project, the philosopher [Becker] will study in real time, so to speak, how natural science data are being obtained, processed and communicated. As a “researcher of science”, he will observe the laboratory work from the perspective of the humanities and cultural science, he will do research in archives and will interview scientists.

Rainer Becker

In part 1, Dr. Becker discussed the interdisciplinary nature of the whole project and some of the theorists who’ve influenced his own work. Now on with part 2 of the interview about Dr. Becker’s project about how ideas become knowledge,

5. I see mention of archives and scientists in the news release about your project and am wondering if you will be considering groups who are not scientists, e.g. clinical medical personal and/or patients as well. And if you do, how will you go about this?

A: Though the study will be more on knowledge (and according practices) and not so much ‘sociological’ in a broad sense, I already attended several formal and informal interviews with scientists (ranging from traditional to the point of focus group approaches in my own talks/seminars) – and, of course, non-scientists in the field, for example, as you mentioned, personal (so called ‚TA’s, also‚ simple workers’) and their special perspectives on the field.

Contact with patients though is a bit hard not least due to several concerns – at least of the institution I observe (and that at the same time formally is my employer) in my field, the DKFZ, do exist something called the ‘Krebsinformationsdienst’ – a phone-service for interested on the wide topics surrounding cancer. As I learned it is not a potential link to patients – because of privacy concerns. Though it would be a necessity – not at least a theoretical and practical one (you might recall Foucault’s topic of the ‘doublette’) – to talk with patients, it could become a little bit hard. I plan on talking to organized groups of concerned persons but have not done it yet. Also it could be interesting if scientists and patients could meet in a new way (not so much the ‘from bench to bedside’ way is done).

Another interesting field: All the concepts of ‘patient action groups’ etc. – they constituted a while back. All this groups and their relation to professionals surely changed the last 30 years: this could also be a field of inquiry. I’ll have to take a look. And: Surely I am highly interested to talk to patients, but its not so simple to get contacts…

6. How will the results be disseminated? I expect you will publish the study and present at conferences but are you planning other means of disseminating the information as well? e.g. a blog

A: Beside the publication of a study and presentation of the results first of all we are planning to do a book series – 8 to 14 books, a round 100 pages each (German-speakers might know the ‘Merve’-format: this is something we are thinking about); we have some titles yet, the first and second one is in the making. I progress writing on my first text for the first book in the series (on ‘strangeness’).

Blogs could be an option, but not yet – and if so, it would rather be a secondary option. Maybe – or relatively sure – we’ll open a internet-page with newest infos (with rss-feed).

7. Is there anything you’d like to add?

A: The last answer could also be my first Question: what do you do? what is your interest in a study like mine? What is your ‘mission’ (statement) – esp. of your blog? And what do you think: what significance do blogs have today in the field of science and its ‘communication’ (or ‘critique’ and each digital ‘companions’)?

Thank y0u,  it’s an unexpected treat to be asked questions and very disconcerting as I’m not used to it. Plus, it’s hard work coming up with answers.

(a) What do you do?

I’m a writer who specializes in science and technology topics and for the last few years I’ve focused on nanotechnology. I suppose you could also call me an independent scholar as I’m not associated with an academic institution and I occasionally give presentations at academic conferences about nanotechnology, new media, writing, and storytelling.

(b) What is your interest in a study like mine?

It is a long and winding story, which I will cut down as best I can:

In the 1990s, I was working on contract for a large telecommunications company and had the privilege of working for them a few times over a number of years. The time between the contracts was broken up so there were periods of 6 months or more where I was working on contracts for other companies. I noticed when I’d return to the telecommunications company that people would tell me I was using the terminology incorrectly. At first, I thought I’d misremembered but it kept happening and eventually I realized that I had (more or less) preserved the terminology’s meaning while the people working for the company had continued to develop it.

This notion was borrowed from something I came across about 20 years ago. I was working towards my undergraduate communications degree and while working on a paper about linguistics and  cultural issues I came across this notion about preserving/changing language and meaning over time in the context of immigrant communities. One of the more dramatic examples is in Quebec (where my mother is from) which hosts a population that has managed to preserve language and culture over a couple of centuries while the parent culture and language in France kept changing.

Also like most Francophones I’ve met, I’m always been interested in language and in my case that includes how words accrue meaning. My interest in your study is that the process of ideas becoming knowledge would seem to have a natural affinity with linguistics and communication, i. e., how words accrue meaning and how we communicate that meaning.

(c) What is your ‘mission’ (statement) – esp. of your blog?

My own mission statement or ‘raison d’être’, in its most general sense, is to assist communication between groups that don’t communicate well. Specifically, I am interested in taking science concepts and facilitating communication about them with and between various communities or cultural groups. Although sometimes I find that the communication is already taking place but it’s unrecognized as it’s occurring by means that are not privileged as ‘science communication’.

To this day, I’m not sure how I became so interested in nanotechnology which has been my focus for the last 3.5 years. I suspect it has to do both with the sound of the prefix ‘nano’ and its scale as scientists work directly with atoms and molecules. In high school, I used to fantasize that atoms were planets and that there were multiple universes existing at different scales and that the planet earth might really be an atom. As for those fantasies, I may have been influenced by Jonathan Swift’s ‘Gulliver’s Travels’ as well as science fiction television programmes that had people popping in and out of various time periods.

This blog is a way of expressing some of my ideas about science and technology, in this case nanotechnology, while noting and linking to the range of discussion that currently exists. I like to include pop culture (and, occasionally, high culture), business, science, philosophy and more because I view the process where words accrue meaning and/or meanings as one that requires communal engagement from a wide range of sectors. This blog has also allowed me to explore new ideas and connect with people of similar and new interests. Unexpectedly, I sometimes find myself engaged in a discovery of and discussion about Canadian science policy and another one on copyright, patents, and trademarks.

(d) And what do you think: what significance do blogs have today in the field of science and its ‘communication’ (or ‘critique’ and each digital ‘companions’)?

I have long been interested in the impact that new technology has on writing and thinking. (During that communications degree, I was forced to read Walter Ong’s book, Orality and Literacy, loathed it and dismissed it. In subsequent years, I have become haunted by it and the thesis that writing itself is a technology which affects thinking [the kinds of thoughts we have and the way in which we think them]. This also links to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis but going into that will  make this a much longer posting.) It seems to me that this too has an affinity with your study of ideas passing on into knowledge.

In any event, I ended up taking a master’s degree in Creative Writing and New Media (at De Montfort University in UK) where we discussed some of these ideas and more while exploring various media.As I learned, there are a number of discussions taking place about this technology and writing issues from a number of perspectives (I am getting to the science but it’s part of this larger movement).

What impact does using icons instead of words have on reading and writing? Are we using more visual data to communicate where words would have been used previously? (Note: I recently saw a visual data abstract for an article I was reading in a peer-reviewed science journal.) Are we gong to call this mashing together of words, visual, and auditory data transliteracy or multimodal discourse or something else? (The naming of things is important because while words can accrue and change meaning they also impose it.) Are the media which allow and encourage us to mash words, visual, and auditory data exerting influence on the science discussion and on the research itself? Those are some of questions that influence me and by extension this blog.

Given that I’m not particularly inclined to the technical, my own projects default to simpler technologies such as blogs and wikis while I keep an eye on more elaborate projects such as the math group that meets in 2nd Life (virtual reality) to play around with data in 12 dimensions, at least that’s their aim. There was also a nanotechnology project on 2nd Life’s Science Island. (I haven’t heard much about that one recently.)

Elsewhere on this blog, I have noted a science songs website (somewhere there’s one for medical songs) and that the AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science) ran a ‘Dancing with scientists’ contest in 2009 while the American Chemical Society (ACS) ran a couple of video contests that same year. One of the winning ACS videos was called, The Nano Song where you could learn about nanotechnology concepts from singing puppets. (It’s meant for adults and it does a pretty good job of explaining things.) YouTube hosts any number of science videos from business and academic institutions as well as from individuals.

As for where blogs (software) and ‘digital companions’ (hardware) belong in the science discourse, I’m going to make reference to two recent studies that have focused on the science discourse and the internet. The first suggests that people who learn about science concepts  on the internet (e.g. reading blogs) tend to be better informed than people who learn about those concepts via traditional media such as newspapers and television. The second study suggests that Google may be affecting the online science discourse by nudging search strategies in particular directions. While the specific focus is nanotechnology, something about the larger science discourse can be inferred from the data.

If you’re interested in these studies, here are the references (I’ve copied these from my previous posts on these studies):

(1) Citation: Anderson, Ashley A.; Brossard, Dominique; Scheufele, Dietram A. The changing information environment for nanotechnology: online audiences and content. Journal of Nanoparticle Research (DOI 10.1007/s11051-010-9860-2) forthcoming May 2010 issue.

(2)  Dietram Scheufele, member of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s research team, posted more about this newest paper on his nanopublic blog (May 7, 2010—I’ve tried to provide the link to the individual posting but if this doesn’t work, you have the date). For anyone interested in reading the team’s paper (Narrowing the nano discourse?), Scheufele provides a link for seamless guest access (click on the post’s title) to the paper on the Science Direct website.

As for information about ‘digital companions’, I haven’t come across anything yet although I am curious about the impact these much smaller screens have and it seems to me that Twitter (a true child of mobile phones and digital companions) which forces concision  is a likely area of future study for its impact on science discourse.

In any event, this blog allows me to gather and link information together in ways that stimulate my thinking and, hopefully, my readers’ thinking. The comments are hugely helpful in this process. The blog also acts as a repository and allows me to revisit my ideas months or even years later with fresh eyes.

Thank you for your time. [to Rainer]

Thank you for your interest! [from Rainer]

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Mongoliad, nanotech novelists: Neal Stephenson and Greg Bear, and e-lit futures

Monday, May 31st, 2010

Kit Eaton at Fast Company recently featured  some information about a ‘new’ novel (both in form, it’s an app and in content, it’s being written by Neal Stephenson, Greg Bear, and others). From Eaton’s May 26, 2010 article,

Late yesterday in San Francisco, at the SF App Showcase, a sneaky little startup company called Subutai demonstrated some of the tech that’ll be going into the Mongoliad app. This oddly-named creature is actually what we’re interested in–a reinvention of the novel as a serialized publication through a dedicated app. Stephenson isn’t the only one taking part, as both Greg Bear and Nicole Galland will be writing too, but Stephenson is really the core of the project.

This is exciting, as anyone who’s familiar with his [Stephenson] Diamond Age novel will attest: This book imagines a future where a super-smart, partially artificial intelligent book is created, and acts as a young girl’s life guide. The hope is, obviously, that Stephenson uses his imagination to leverage novel and unexpected aspects of smartphone or tablet PC tech to transform the resulting publication into something surprisingly new … possibly even more of a transformation than paper-based magazine publishers are attempting as they rejig their content models towards the iPad. Words like “para-narrative,” “nontextual,” and “extra-narrative” certainly suggest this.

Both Stephenson (Diamond Age, 1995) and Bear (Blood Music, 1988) wrote, at a fairly early stage,  stories/novels that featured nanotechnology. For example, Diamond Age’s  ‘partially artificial intelligent book’ is made possible with nanotechnology. Unfortunately, no details about the novel’s content were revealed either in Eaton’s article or on the company’s, Subutai, website. Eaton’s article does offer this,

Speaking at the SF event yesterday Subutai’s CE Jeremy Bornstein revealed that there would be gaming and social media events wrapped around and inside the novel, and even demoed a user profile page that included a measure of a user’s “standing” in the Mongoliad community. There was also scope for users to “rate” portions of the story as it progresses. And while it seems that user interaction won’t play a role in the actual text of the publication, it’s going to be such a blended-media thing that this means user’s inputs still affect the overall performance.

This doesn’t sound like anything outside of the ordinary community-building exercise that many authors and media publishers are engaged in these days but, as you can see in the first excerpt from Eaton’s article, they’re hoping Stephenson will come up with an unexpected way to exploit the capabilities of mobile technology.

As for the show where Mongoliad was announced, here’s a little more information about it (from an article by Daniel Terdiman on CNET’s geek gestalt blog,)

On Tuesday night, Socolow and Dale Larson, his partner in a consulting firm called SF App Studio, hosted the sixth iteration of their app showcase, the SF AppShow. And before a packed house of more than 200 people–their biggest crowd so far–at the famous 111 Minna Gallery here, the two gave a series of app developers the chance to get up on stage and take six minutes to explain their projects.

Part DiggNation, part Demo, and part real-world App Store front end, the SF AppShow seems to have a growing influence in the world of app development–be it for Apple’s iPad or iPhone, Google’s Android, or the BlackBerry–and the people who create the mobile products and evangelize them.

This all brought to mind Kate Pullinger, a writer who works both in the traditional media (she won the 2009 Governor General’s [in Canada] award for literature, The Mistress of Nothing) and is well-known for digital novels such as Inanimate Alice. This is from her April 29, 2010, posting titled, A Writer’s View of the Future of Publishing,

Over the past ten years I’ve been deeply enmeshed in discussions about the future of writing, and the myriad ways in which the new technologies have the potential to change literature. My interest is in text, and what happens to text when you put it on a screen alongside the full range of media computing offers. I write ‘digital fiction’, works that are not digital conversions but are ‘born digital’, using text and multimedia to tell a story that is meant to be viewed on a screen.

However, as well as digital fiction, I also write books – novels and short stories – and have been functioning as a writer within the traditional publishing industry for more than twenty years. I’ve watched as the publishing and bookselling industries have struggled to come to terms with the new technologies and what they have to offer to both readers and writers. I’ve had many discussions with agents and publishers about what the future will hold. I’ve stumbled down my share of blind alleys, waking up to discover that last night’s certainty (fiction for UK mobile phones!) is this morning’s well-that-was-a-dumb-idea (fiction for UK mobile phones!).

Kate first wrote this piece for The Literary Platform (from their About page),

The Literary Platform is dedicated to showcasing projects experimenting with literature and technology. It brings together comment from industry figures and key thinkers, and encourages debate.

…

The key word circulating in book publishing at the moment is ‘experiment’. The showcase will demonstrate how traditional publishers and developers are experimenting with multimedia formats, how established authors are going it alone, how first-time novelists are bypassing publishers and how niche literary magazines are finding wider audiences.

Getting back to Mongoliad, I look forward to following the project’s progress especially in light of Kate’s comments about fiction for mobile phones, “last night’s certainty (fiction for UK mobile phones!) is this morning’s well-that-was-a-dumb-idea (fiction for UK mobile phones!).”

Two final comments. First, I was a student of Kate Pullinger’s at De Montfort University’s Masters of Creative Writing and New Media programme, which is now defunct. Second, I got curious about Subutai and it turns out it’s the name for a Mongolian general (from the essay on New World Encyclopedia which, in turn, has been modified from an essay originally found on Wikipedia)

Subutai (Subetei, Subetai, Sübeedei; Classic Mongolian: Sübügätäi or Sübü’ätäi) (1176–1248), also known as Subetai the Valiant, was the primary strategist and general of Genghis Khan (Temüjin) and Ögedei Khan. The son of a blacksmith, he rose through the ranks and directed more than 20 campaigns during which he conquered (or overran) more territory than any other commander in history. He gained victory by means of imaginative and sophisticated strategies and routinely coordinated movements of armies that were more than 300 miles away from each other. He is most remembered for devising the battle plan that destroyed the armies of Hungary and Poland within two days of each other, by forces almost a thousand miles apart.

I am amazed that someone who didn’t have telephones, telegraphs, or any other form of communication (pony express?) that could have traversed 1000 miles within two days to give updates and deal with changing conditions managed to destroy two armies at that distance from each other.

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Bio: fiction, etc. festival in Europe

Monday, May 24th, 2010

I believe that it truly was a coincidence when this information hit my mailbox in the same week that Craig Venter made his big synthetic biology announcement (noted on this blog here),

The 1st Bio:Fiction Science, Art & Filmfestival aims at attracting public awareness to synthetic biology and its ramifications for our daily life in the future. Synthetic biology is the design and construction of new biological systems not found in nature. Synthetic biology aims at creating new forms of life for practical purposes. By applying engineering principles to biology scientists will be able to design life forms much different from breeding or traditional genetic engineering. Filmmakers are encouraged to share their cinematic visions of a present or future society shaped by synthetic biology. Prizes will be awarded in the following categories: Short Fiction;Documentary Film; Animation; Online-Audience Award, Special Award of the Jury.

The festival will be held in Vienna, Austria in May 2011 and the deadline for entries is July 15, 2010. The festival website is here.

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