My jetlag is in full swing as I’m writing this from my room at the lovely Walper Terrace Hotel in Kitchener/Waterloo, Ontario. The local time is 10pm, but my inner clock (still set to GMT) tells me it’s 3 in the morning, thus lending incredible appeal to the hotel bed behind me. But I’ve decided to grim up and write about the conferences and workshops I’ve been attending in the past week, because everything whizzes by so fast that the backlog of blogworthy events is just getting bigger and bigger.

So, to start off, I participated in the Science Blogging 2008 Conference that was held on the 30th of August at the Royal Institution in London. More on that later; the conference was preceded by a “London Science Tour” on the 29th of August, led by Matt Brown, Editor at Nature Networks, writer for The Londonist and genuinely nice guy. Matt took us (a group of science bloggers + me) on a day’s walk to a number of scientific points of interest, exhibitions at the Wellcome Collection and behind-the-scenes tours the Linnean Society of London, and the Darwin Centre at the Natural History Museum. I could sit here all night enthusing about the incredible wonders nature on display there, but I’ll just say that - if you get the chance - you should see it for yourself. Here are some of the pictures I took:

Wellcome Collection - Malaria info booth

Wellcome Collection - Creepy crawlies that spread diseases

Linnean Society - Butterfly specimens collected almost 240 years ago

Linnean Society - Coleoptera of 1772, pleased to meet you

Linnean Society - 17th century books on horticulture

Darwin Centre - 8.6m squid “Archie” (Architeuthis dux)

Darwin Centre - A “really big-headed fish in a tube” (excuse my ignorance)

Darwin Centre - A “really poor, cute beaked guy in a glass” (belonging to the Tachyglossidae family? Excuse my ignorance)

Darwin Centre - Snake specimens

During the walk, I got to know some very nice people such as Heather Etchevers, Yaroslav Nikolaev, Martin Fenner (who by now has posted an interview with me on his blog), and Mo Costandi, author of the brilliant Neurophilosophy blog.

The funniest moment came later that night at a pub in Soho. Mo had just introduced me to some guy named Vaughan, and we were standing there with a pint of beer, talking about this and that. Up to that point, I had only exchanged about two sentences with Vaughan, and instead had started telling Mo about how my favourite neuroscience/psychology blog was Mind Hacks and how great Mind Hacks was - and Mo pointed over to Vaughan and said: “That’s Vaughan’s blog!”.

So I got to know the author of Mind Hacks by accident, which was completely awesome. As it turned out the next day, someone else shared my feelings. Ben Goldacre, famous Guardian Science Blogger, told a similar story about meeting Vaughan at the pub that night (”No way, you’re the author of Mind Hacks?! I LOVE Mind Hacks!”) during his opening keynote speech at the conference.

Well, so much for my plan to write about Science Blogging 2008, the Southampton Open Science Workshop, which I attended subsequently, and the Science in the 21st Century Conference, where I am now, in one go. It’s already 4.32am on my inner clock now, and I can’t resist the bed any longer. I guess this will be a multi-part post…

After writing so much about the other fun speeches, sessions, and things to do at the ESOF2008, I didn’t manage to talk about our own session, “Euroscience’s Interactive Workshop: Development of a virtual network custom designed for scientists”, which took place on Monday afternoon.

The sessions was started off by Professors Peter Westh and Roberto Poli, who each presented their vision for an interdisciplinary network for researchers. In their view, ontologies and semantic knowledge will play a key part in establishing a useful network that is not merely a “Facebook for scientists”, but helps to connect researchers through highlighting common areas of interest or - as Prof. Westh emphasized - possible new applications of existing knowledge.

That, of course, was music to our ears. We’ve talked about our “Mendeley = Last.fm for research” vision before on this blog, but the EuroScience workshop was the perfect venue for tossing the idea around a bit further. After all, Last.fm has managed to create the largest ontological classification (and the largest open database) of music in the world, by aggregating the musical tastes of its 20 million users and then data-mining it for similar musical genres, artists, and songs.

So our presentation was aimed at exploring how these principles could be applied to research. You can find an abridged version below! I tried my best at voiceover narration, but doing it in front of my computer at midnight just doesn’t turn out as lively as standing in front of an audience:

After the talk, we got great feedback from the audience. The panel moderator, Jens Degett, even wondered whether we just might have solved the major problem of Open Access - the researchers’ lack of participation: With Mendeley, researchers have an increased incentive to post their articles online, because it enables them track the evolution of their readership in real-time!

One of the audience members who came up to us after the presentation was Anders Norgaard, a Ph.D. student from Denmark who had some cool suggestions for future features. We also talked about open sourcing Mendeley Desktop, and I mentioned to him that we had three KDE developers on our team. This is the dialog that ensued:

Anders: Oh, really? What are their names?

Me: Well, there’s Mike Arthur…

Anders: Mike Arthur? I know him, he’s quite famous in the KDE scene!

Me: …and Fred Emmott…

Anders: Fred Emmott? The guy who’s doing Slamd64?!

Me: …yes, and Robert Knight will be starting next Monday…

Anders: Robert Knight?! He’s famous, too! How did you manage to get those guys?

Well, the credit goes to Mike. I knew that we had brilliant engineers on our team, but I was clueless that they were actually famous… Mike, Fred, Robert - I tip my hat to you guys!

Well, my voice is slowly returning at last. It’s a race against time, because I’m invited to give a presentation at the EuroScience Open Forum 2008 in Barcelona next Monday afternoon! If my voice doesn’t hold up, I’m determined to croak and gesticulate wildly instead. The session is titled “Euroscience’s Interactive Workshop: Development of a virtual network custom designed for scientists”:

The purpose of the workshop is to discuss and give input as to how to develop a trans-, multi-, and inter-disciplinary (semantic) network for scientists on the internet. Very often it is the combination of knowledge from different fields or the borderline between different scientific paradigms from diverse research cultures which creates new ideas and knowledge. It is relatively easy for a researcher to know what is going on in their field and to have contact and exchange of knowledge with his peers. It is much more difficult to find trans-disciplinary fora for discussion.

I’m really, really, really looking forward to this! Not only will it be my first time in Barcelona, but also my first ESOF conference, and the programme looks fantastic. The talks and presentations are grouped into the following topics:

The human mind and behaviour
The Very Big and the Very Small
Open society, open science
Engineering the body
What should we eat and how should we look?
Enhancing energy security, fighting global warming
Science and Innovation Policy
Science and Art
Screening: burdens and benefits
Communicating Science

The science nerd in me will have a hard time deciding what to attend… I’ll arrive in Barcelona on Friday night and I’ll stay until Wednesday morning - so if you’d like to meet and hang out at the conference, just

A few days ago, there was an interesting story in the NY Times about new curriculum at Binghamton University which will try to bridge the divide between the sciences and the humanities. I meant to write about it on this blog, but didn’t find the time. Now I’ve read a reply which perfectly and concisely expresses my thoughts. Sheril Kirshenbaum, a marine biologist at Duke University and co-author of The Intersection on ScienceBlogs:

Experience has taught me neither field can be addressed comprehensively through a single lens, and we make the greatest strides and forge new directions through the convergence of people and philosophies.

I couldn’t agree more, although getting there took me some time. When I began writing my Ph.D. thesis, I shared the office with Daniela Wentz, a doctoral student in Media Philosophy. I think she’d admit that, being relative novices in our fields, both of us were rather cocky about the perceived superiority of “our” epistemological position. I had just read Popper (and some Lakatos) and thought that only quantitative empirical research deserved to be called “science”, whereas she felt that deconstruction in the vein of Derrida was the be-all and end-all theory of knowledge.

We quickly became very good friends. As we spent countless hours debating the pros and cons and whys and whynots of our respective philosophical approaches, both in the office and over glasses of red wine in the cafés of Weimar (Humanities scholars know how to debate in style, you have to give them that), the respect for the other’s methods of scientific inquiry grew. I believe that my understanding and appreciation of science benefited immensely from these discussions. So if you’re an empirical researcher who doubts the epistemological value of the Humanities, that’s really something I can recommend: Find a friend in the Humanities to fight with!

One final thought about linguistic implications: In my native language German, the word “Wissenschaft” - as the literal translation of “sciences” - does encompass both the sciences and the humanities in its meaning.