Did you know that 80-90% of all scientific discovery has been accomplished in the last 100 years? Apparently if we calculate the percentage of scientists who are still alive from the total number of scientists that have ever lived, we will get just about the same number: 80-90% (Sismondo, 2004).

Of course asking a question like “do you believe in science?” might seem absurd. Ever since my days back in Alexander’s lab at the University of Utah I have considered myself one of those scientists, but now having read too much philosophy I find myself questioning what I was doing. Much like Bruno Latour’s anxious friend who only dares to admit he isn’t so certain about “reality”, I find myself trying to justify this scientist identity.

Looking towards the past, and in anticipation of my future, gnovis is running an essay of mine that briefly considers two theoretical heavyweights: Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn.

If Popper is right, then we are accomplishing some of the most remarkable work in human history. However, if Kuhn is correct, then we might need to come to terms with the reality that all of that work might be thrown out the window some day.

This time around I don’t have any answers. If you do, I would love to hear them.

Read more here:
Falsifying my Paradigms @ gnovis Journal

TheMachineIsMe twittered me after my post on Treadmill desks to make sure I had heard of the Hawaii Chair.

Oh, yes. I have. Here, TMIS, is a rocking endorsement:

It kind of makes me appreciate my non-walking, non-moving desk. Just don’t take away my second monitor. Then we would have a problem.

Welcome to the week!

Today’s video entertainment is brought to you by Microsoft. After teasing the world with two either brilliant or horrendous ads featuring the unlikely duo of Bill Gates and Seinfeld, the two co-stars have (literally) walked into the sunset. Speculation remains on whether these two ads were faux or not, but either way they have been replaced with this:

Always a sucker for ads, I was excited to see this new campaign. It is certainly smart. We will just have to wait to see if it is effective. Engaging in brand wars while employing the competition’s terminology (“I’m a Mac/PC”) is always dangerous.

Enjoy the movie, and check out the comments on YouTube if you get a chance. blackghost10sg’s quip was especially entertaining:

I’m a PC and i have virus now. oops! I’m dead now. lol!

I recently shook up my gym routine. I decided I needed more cardio. You know, all that time behind a desk at work, behind a book at school (well, hundreds of books). Of course, the problem might have nothing to do with the gym. When trying to shove three lives into the space of one, why not blame my faux-obesity on my “outdated” work desk?

Imagine my delight when running across the Treadmill Desk! Jason Kotke brings us today’s innovation, explaining that “some people now work at walking desks, standing-height desks outfitted with treadmills.”

Although this isn’t an entirely new idea, the timing is particularly rich: I am preparing to start a thesis exploring the ways in which technologies and users essentially create each other. While I won’t be studying ergonomics, I can’t help but wonder: If my desk has created my hunched back, will these new desks create (as Kotke reports) thin World of Warcraft addicts?

Here is some video to drive the point home:

(Thanks John for the link!)

As a new member of gnovis’ New Media Team, I will be spending a good chunk of time this year engaged in “academic blogging.” I am not quite sure what that is yet, but I am thrilled to invite you to help me find out by participating in the conversations on gnovis’ blog. In case you haven’t bookmarked it, here is the address: http://www.gnovisjournal.org/blog

Bravely charting its first year, the New Media Team is comprised of Patricia Fancher, Margarita Rayzberg, and myself. This means there is a lot of passion on gnovis’ blog, and so we thought it was appropriate to each take a moment and talk about what blogging means to us.

“Why We Blog” is a four part series that considers the relationship between the academy, journals, blogs, and their authors. Can you relate to Margarita’s telenovela-blogger-lifestyle? Or is blogging more like Trish’s caffeinated conversations? You might, as Brad Weikel does, consider blogging a type of exploration, or agree with my belief that blogging can fulfill an obligation to the community:

I blog with the hope that the open dissemination of knowledge will add pliability to the nature of academia and education, much in the same way blogs are currently restructuring traditional news media. I strongly believe that the Ivory Tower has an obligation to the global community that makes its very existence possible. Blogging is just one way in which to assist the collaboration and dissemination of knowledge. In this information age, there is no reason that information should be scare or that every voice should not be heard.

Or perhaps you have a different viewpoint all together! That is what gnovis is about. Come share your thoughts, tell us what you think. With your participation we can, as Brad Weikel hopes, “propel the discourse, instead of merely chronicling it.”

Welcome to the conversation!

It looks like it is a Pixie CMS weekend. The following error was giving me some trouble, so hopefully throwing this out into the blogosphere will save someone some time.

Problem: When updating a static page’s content you get one of several validation errors.

• Privs is a required field
• Publish is a required field
• and so on…

Solution:

1. Delete all effected pages.
2. Create them again, and make sure your Page Description doesn’t include symbols (the one that caused me problems was a pipe: | ).
3. Avoid complex Page Descriptions until this bug is fixed.

It is that simple, but if you would like more of a description, read on.
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I have been playing around with Pixie CMS from toggle a bit recently. It is a promising options for small sites with only one layer of navigation.

Small as these sites might be, customers still want Google Analytics, so I have written a “block” to help them out. Let’s call this Version 1.

Pixie CMS is certainly worth checking out. If you like it or are already using it, hopefully you can get some use out of this add-on!

>>More information about Google Analytics Block v1 here

You are on a desert island. You have the option of an email account or Google, which do you choose? Well, that’s a no brainer. You choose email and send someone a letter so you can get off the stupid island. But what if that island was Manhattan?

Earlier this month, the Pew Internet & American Life Project released the latest statistics frequency on search engine use. In case you are curious, here is how it stacks up (click for a full-size version):

Despite where you live, apparently we all feel like we are on our own island of sorts. And believe it or not, search engine use has only recently been gaining on email. The Pew offers two explanations for the increased populatity of search engines (and let’s just ignore the absurdity of considering Google as unpopular).

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I was having dinner with a colleague earlier this week who in a hushed and slightly embarrassed voice admitted that she just didn’t understand Twitter. Normally I would have assured her that Twittering is not a social requirement, but in her case, it was part of her job. Twitter, Blogs, Facebook – these are the bread and butter of an emerging professional class of “social media consultants.” Maybe it is a D.C. thing. After admitting to her that I am more confused about these jobs than the technologies they rely on, I happily agreed to help get her up to speed.

Internet culture, however, is incredibly memetic. I suppose this makes Dawkins the philosopher of choice for contemporary geekdom, but it also means that the distinction between popular and unpopular, in and out, can be dizzying.

Point and case: This video from CrunchGear. Somehow they managed to capture the simultaneous love, disdain, and absurdity of Twitter. And it only took Hitler to pull it off.

“I have to admit something. Sometimes I like to read the missed connections section in the paper, just for fun. And I really like them. Is that so bad?”

Without fail, every time I tell someone new that I am doing a research project on Missed Connections, they quickly interrupt me to exclaim how much they love reading these little messages. It is funny, I certainly can relate to how they feel, but I frequently am so “down in the trenches”, if you will, that I miss the beautiful potential embedded in each post.

While stumbling around the net this weekend I ran across a video that seemed to tug on this very point. An episode of Val’s Art Diary, this video gets right to the heart of the matter, and gives one artist’s interpretation of this suspended form of romance. In her words:

Every couple you talk to has a story of them meeting, and it is usually is a pretty random thing… what if your moment already happened and none of you did anything about it? It seems to me that as much as we like to shape our lives, somethings are simply beyond our control.

I hope you enjoy the video as much as I did.