A role for philosophy remains…

Austin Hughes’ superb long piece in The New Atlantis, here.

Money quote:

Of all the fads and foibles in the long history of human credulity, scientism in all its varied guises — from fanciful cosmology to evolutionary epistemology and ethics — seems among the more dangerous, both because it pretends to be something very different from what it really is and because it has been accorded widespread and uncritical adherence. 

Do read it all. It’s incredibly important.

Some thoughts on E-Science

I’ve spent the last couple of days at an E-Science institute joining some of our university’s research librarians and meeting w. colleagues at places ranging from Harvard to UC Merced. I was excited to learn about how places like George Mason are moving rapidly towards providing comprehensive data-management solutions to PI’s in a way that both supports the requirements of funding agencies, but also allows for the reuse and sharing of data in new and innovative ways (like we do here at Krasnow, check out here).

I also learned about something called the Data Management Plan Tool (or DMP Tool) which can greatly facilitate developing these types of plans for grant applications to a variety of funding agencies (check that out here).

Finally, it was a lot of fun to do something entirely different from what I started off the week doing at NSF (see my earlier post on NBIC2). One of the best things about my job is learning about many different things. I still can’t get over how lucky I am…

NBIC2 at NSF

Dress Rehearsal for NBIC2 final Workshop yesterday

The final workshop is today. Web site is here. I’m giving my talk in about an hour, just before lunch on the advent of the Cognitive Society.

What do I mean by that? Well, the simple present day version is what we’ve collectively done by giving society’s blessing to Big Data: social networking.

But in the future, the Cognitive Society might refer to the emergence of a new collective awareness from large groups of humans. Think of an ant colony with its complex behaviors becoming aware of its collective self.