SciBarCamp II, Toronto

I'm writing this on the train back from SciBarCamp II in Toronto.

To briefly sum up the experience, I've just spent an intense 24 hours in the company of quite a few admirable thinkers.

As the name suggests to people who know about BarCamps, the event was set up as an unconference. Attendance was on invitation and limited to a hundred participants. The chosen theme was "Open Science".

It really felt like the organizers knew what they were doing. No time was wasted. Pretty much all of the participants (two thirds of whom actually weren't at the first SciBarCamp) slipped seamlessly into the unconference mold.

The participant makeup was quite diverse, with maybe half of the participants being scientists and others being businesspeople, technologists and artists with a strong interest in science. I was struck by the all-around open-mindedness and ability to speak in a jargon-free manner.

---

The event went as follows: At the Friday evening reception, we spent 30 minutes on personal introductions, then had a mix & mingle session where people basically talked to whoever they liked, and filled in session proposal sheets. Around 30 such sheets were filled in. Then, participants were invited to go around the sheets and were able to comment on them and indicate interest by filling in circles below the session descriptions.

The interest indicators enabled the organizers to build Saturday's schedule on the fly. Rooms were allocated to sessions, with the more popular sessions obviously being put into larger rooms. A few proposals were merged together. The final schedule had five one-hour time slots, with 5 parallel sessions underway at any one time.

You can have a look at the schedule here. Two sessions especially stood out for me. The first was Joel Sachs and Jesse Greener's session on citizen science. The second was Michael Nielsen's talk on open mass collaboration in mathematics. I will cover them in upcoming posts.

I especially appreciated the opportunity to meet again with WorldChangers Hassan Masum, Mark Tovey and Karl Schroeder, and I was stoked to shake hands with quantum-information-authority-turned-science-futurist Michael Nielsen for the first time. It was also a great pleasure to meet new people like physicist Rob Spekkens and Kaitlin "I am not a lawyer" Thaney from Science Commons.

Huge kudos to Eva Amsen, Christine Buske, Jen Dodd, Jamie McQuay, Mark Tovey and Sunny Tsang, who pulled this event off, well, flawlessly on a shoestring budget.

I think a Montreal SciBarCamp will obviously need to happen at some point. However, it feels like the requisite network has yet to gel together. (Either that, or I haven't connected to it for some reason.)

Update: Here is Glendon Mellow's report on SciBarCamp.

Quick Guide: Four Easy Ways to Protect your Gmail Account

If you are using Gmail as your main email account, you'll readily admit that you'd be in a tough spot if you were to lose access to it. But these things do happen, be it because you forgot your password (most likely right after changing it!) or because your archenemy (or some random joker) has been able to hijack your account. Hey, if it happened to Kanye, it could happen to anyone :)

If you have registered for various services on the web using your Gmail account, things could get really messy. "I forgot my password" links would no longer be of any use, as they send help to an account you can no longer enter. Moreover, a hijacker could use your Gmail as a gateway to gain access to your accounts on those services.

The long and short of it, really, is that it would be best if you didn't lose your Gmail account.

I did a quick search today to see what precautions I could take to protect against this and found out que you and I can reduce risks in four easy ways. (The links below work for me today; your mileage may vary.)

1. Always use the secure https protocol (look at the bottom of the page) to communicate with Gmail.
   
2. Make sure you have chosen a secret question to get your password back.
3. Make sure you have entered a secondary address in your Gmail settings.
   
4. Pick a password that is not easy to guess.
   

In this guide you can find additional info, including a discussion of what your options are if you find yourself in the unfortunate position of having lost access to your account.

What Physics and Computer Science Taught Me About Thinking

Back in the day, as a student, I had the opportunity to study two scientific disciplines. Beyond giving me a solid grounding in each field, these studies actually taught me a thing or two about thinking. These are actually the most valuable pieces of wisdom I got from nearly a decade of higher education.

First, physics taught me that, very often, the way you look at a problem determines how easy or hard it will be to think about it and solve it. When doing physics assignments, I would often spend about 3/4 of the time manipulating the problem statement to find a formulation that made its subsequent resolution straightforward. Very often the calculation ended up being trivial compared to what it would have been using a different representation. I challenged myself to make my weekly writeup fit comfortably on a single sheet of paper without cutting out detail, and I often succeeded.

I learned from physics that it is often best not to rush in to solve a problem. The time you invest in really understanding a problem is typically given to you back several-fold:

• It simplifies the problem at hand;
• It creates new learning in your mind, which will make subsequent similar problems easier to tackle.
  

Second, computer science taught me that there are many ways to skin a cat. Programming is essentially a communication challenge. It is about clarifying initially fuzzy concepts and relations and representing them in code. The way you do this determines how much or how little trouble you're setting yourself up for.

Again, the representation you choose matters, but not quite in the same way that it matters in weekly physics assignments. You're not trying to knock a particular ball out of the park. In a software project you're typically trying to design pieces that will interact together and that you will be using to build larger pieces still.

Of courses the pieces have to "work", but great design means that they have a special quality beyond just being correct: they're easy to understand and use. And they will still be easy to understand in use six months from now, when you return to that code after having been busy with something else. Or when someone else dives into your code.

An operating principle here is to make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler. It usually takes work to get there, but it is amply rewarded in the long run.

To summarize: doing physics and computer science, I learned about the value of making the effort to make things simple. (as Mark Pilgrim said: "A lot of effort went into making this effortless")

Now, the great thing about it is that lessons learned about thinking are applicable wherever there is thinking involved, which is a pretty wide domain of applicability when you think about it. In a future post I want to explore how these principles influence the impact and diffusion of ideas, whether they be theories, methodologies, memes, or musical themes.

Canada's Top 10 Digital Thinkers?

Hugh McGuire is wondering who might be "Canada's top 10 digital thinkers - the people who are writing, or doing, the most innovative digital stuff in the country?". Chime in with your suggestions over there.

9 Ways to Face the Perils of Cloud Computing

The cloud *might* go up in smoke.
Are you sitting on it? Be smart.

I like to think I'm pretty cautious when it comes to safeguarding my stuff, but I admit I was taken by surprise when the spiffy, cluefully designed social bookmarking system ma.gnolia underwent a pretty catastrophic FAIL event a little more than a week ago.

Meaning: The service went down. And: the data (about half a terabyte of it) was lost. And: there was a backup, but it went down the drain, too.

What happen? Did somebody set us up the bomb? Actually, no. The file system got corrupted, which in turn corrupted the database backup. Ma.gnolia founder Larry Halff has admitted his backup system wasn't robust enough.

Larry must have had a hell of a week. This event is of course bad enough for him and for ma.gnolia, but it is also a nightmare scenario for the heavy users who had thousands of links, annotations and ratings in there.

On a personal level, I had been collecting bookmarks there for a social software course that I'm developing. While I hadn't stored a zillion links in ma.gnolia, it's still a disappointment. But really, I should have known better than to assume that the services I rely on were properly backed up and just couldn't melt down or disappear. As Christopher Null writes, "you can't trust an online service any more than you can trust your hard drive not to crash. Sure, the vast majority of the time everything will be fine, but eventually all technology products fail, and even the best safeguards are often imperfect."

From a user standpoint, there are two things to think about regarding incidents like these. The first obvious one is how to recover from such a loss, and the second one is how to guard against eventual occurrences. Let's look at each one in turn.

A. The service died on me! What now!?

It turns out that there might be a couple ways to at least partially recover when your content vanishes.

1. Google and other search engines keep cached copies of publicly accessible web pages. If you're lucky, the googlebot will have crawled and saved a copy of pages with your content. Identify keywords that appeared on your pages or in URLs. Then do a search within the site and click the "Cached" links in the search results. (I found a few of my lost bookmarks that way.)
   
2. The Internet Archive crawls the Web and makes what it found available a few months later through its Wayback machine. You may find some of your older stuff there, though in my experience the archive is quite incomplete (for good cause, if you consider the size of the Web!).
3. Some of the aggregators out there might have picked up your content if it was available as a feed. Here's an example: The excellent Microcontent News weblog had a short life, but the site has been all but dead for several few years. However, Bloglines still has a copy of the feed, as it was left in 2003. (Unfortunately this one was a teaser feed, with only the first sentence of each post; had it been a full feed, the content would be there.) Over at HubLog, Alf Eaton has explained how to get at a feed's historical items using the Google Reader API.
   
4. Some sites republish feeds for fun and/or profit. Even if your original feed is no longer accessible, you may find traces of your content elsewhere. To find it, take a clue from Obi-Wan: Use the Search, Luke.
   

B. How do I protect against an eventual meltdown?

Here are five ways to minimize the impact of a service going down on the ground:

1. Use several services redundantly. For instance, social bookmarking service Diigo has a feature baked in that lets you post to multiple services. If one goes down you still have your links in other places.
   
2. Save local copies to your hard drive. For pictures and videos, you usually start from a drive, so this is a non-issue. But for blogs and social bookmarks, very often the "original" copy is stored with the service you're using. If it offers integral exports, use them. If not, local backup is less practical -- but have a look at #3.
   
3. Produce full feeds of your content and subscribe to them in local or Web aggregators. I'd have to do more research to see which ones keep items for the longest time, but I'm pretty sure that some local aggregators can be set to never throw anything away (If you know of some, please comment!)
4. Use an on-demand archiving service like (the amazing) Webcitation.org, which will keep a copy of any page on demand.
   
5. Make things public as much as you can. Public information naturally tends to get crawled and replicated. The public bookmarks on ma.gnolia have seen a better rate of recovery than the private ones.
6. (extra tip! thanks to Dave in the comments) With some services, you can email your updates to yourself. Just store those emails and you've got a safety copy.
   

Now, to be honest, this is the kind of advice that I read but rarely apply. Getting hit close to home will hopefully make me take one good look at all the services I'm using and to make sure I'm following at least some of my own advice, lest I burn myself again!

The Greatness and Perils of Following Suit

Do quality and popularity always go together?

Very often, the first thing we do when we aren't quite sure what to do is to look at people around us to see what they are doing. Then, if we can't see anything obviously wrong with what others are doing, we'll typically follow suit.

One advantage of this way of doing things is that it saves us a lot of thinking. Let's face it, we don't have time to think through every single action we take. Another advantage of following suit is that it at least partially shields us from embarrassment: should our actions be found to be faulty or just plain dumb, we can always fall back on the excuse that everybody was doing it. (This is the basis for the classic maxim "Nobody ever got fired for buying from [insert well-established company name here].)"

Now, in a world with an abundance of choice, just taking the time to examine all of the options available to us is inconceivable. Take the case of music. Tens of thousands of music albums are released each year, which roughly amounts to a hundred a day. Say you wanted to choose this year's best song. Well, this is a needle-in-a-haystack problem. Even if you spend 24 hours a day listening to music for the next year you won't be able to give each album a complete listen. So you'll have to take a cue from what others have chosen to listen to and talk about, and actually completely ignore the majority of what is out there.

Does this mean that you have to give up any hope of picking the greatest song of the year? Perhaps not. Whether it be through the media or through your social network, you will almost certainly be exposed much more to certain songs or albums than to others. Some songs are more talked about and played: they are more popular. One line of reasoning goes like this: since better songs become more popular, if a song is any good, chances are that you'll learn about it. Conversely, if you never hear at all about a song it probably wasn't worth hearing in the first place. Therefore, the thinking goes, the best song is certainly among those you will hear this year, and chances are you'll hear it several times. Heck, everyone will hear it several times.

The same line of thinking could be applied to all kinds of things: books, scientific articles, shoes, even ideas (memes for those who like that term).

This approach, then, roughly consists of equating quality with popularity. One of its flaws is to assume that quality is absolute or objective, that is, that the quality of a thing is the same without taking into consideration the user (or reader, listener, etc.) of that thing. There are many contexts where this is not true. To pick an obvious example, the "best shoe ever" might be a woman's shoe, in which case it's not the best choice for me.

But even where we may assume that quality is absolute, there are pitfalls. In the next few posts I want to discuss some of them. Stay tuned.

(Heh, looks like I found a nice way to pressure myself to write at least another post :)

What I Did During My Vacation

So I've been a little derelict in blogging lately.

Well... okay. To be accurate, it would appear that I didn't blog at all throughout 2007 and 2008!

Just to bring you, dear reader (purposely using the singular here - is anyone still tracking this feed, or did I manage to shake everybody off?), up to date, here are a few of the things I did during my vacation from blogging... in totally shuffled order:

• Visited a few beautiful places in Quebec
• Learned to play, reasonably well by my admittedly low standards, the 3rd movement (Presto Agitato) of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata
• Finished a basement, and built a set of stairs to get there
• Got a job as professor of computer science here in Montreal
  
• Learned a bit about caring for the well-being of a family
• Got befriended in Twitter and Facebook by about a zillion strangers.
• Left my position at Socialtext
• Started putting together a French-language online course on social software.
• Did an experiment in homeschooling (something very rare in these parts).
• Read a big pile of - wait for it - books! Yes, books!
  
• Collaborated with Stephen Downes and Daniel Lemire in an investigation of diversity in social networks (more on that later)
• Learned to play, reasonably well by my admittedly low standards, Jerry Lee Lewis' Great Balls of Fire and Ray Charles' What'd I Say
• Learned more than I would have wished about petty academic infighting (thankfully from a relatively uninvolved standpoint)
  
• Worked on building wikis that support multilingual communities
  
• Almost got to meet my geek idol, Jon Udell
• Started playing rock'n'roll with my bro again
• Discovered the inspirational FAIL blog
  
• Decided to start blogging again
• Waited some more
• Started blogging again!
  

Whew. The first post is the hardest, or so say about 2,000 other bloggers. Wish me success and speed in writing the next few hundred.

Addendum: This post would never have happened if it hadn't been for the persistent encouragements of my esteemed colleague Daniel Lemire.