5 ms·

The science of science

34 points by pama 16y ago

Anon84 16y ago
"If It Has "Science" in the Name, It's Not"
- possibilistic 16y ago
  Unfortunately true. This seems to be a pop-sci cover of some data mining and semantic clustering algorithm for scientific publications. The author claims the groupings may be better than citations (less political, for instance) in showing how ideas impact a given research community.
  - dereg 16y ago
    People with last names in the "lower" part of the alphabet are also cited more than their higher-alphabetized counterparts.
    - crocowhile 16y ago
      [citation needed]
- pjscott 16y ago
  Trivial counterexample: science has "science" in the name, and is science.
- calpaterson 16y ago
  You have problems with climate science? "It has proven difficult to provide a definitive account of scientific method that can decisively serve to distinguish science from non-science. Thus there are legitimate arguments about exactly where the borders are, which is known as the problem of demarcation." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science#Philosophy_of_science http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science#Philosophy_of_science Science is not currently a iron-cast term, irrespective of pithy aphorism.
- anamax 16y ago
  materials science isn't science? There are others.
btilly 16y ago
Classifying science sounds like a boring application of this algorithm. I'd be more interested to see it used for spontaneously identifying groups of related publications any kind, such as blogs.
- jacques_chester 16y ago
  Blogs are a simple case because the default is to refer to each other through inline hyperlinks. I've also seen linguistic data mining studies done that suggest that blogs which commonly agree with each other, commonly agree with each other. For purposes of politeness, I acted astonished at this revelation.
adi92 16y ago
They are talking about Latent Dirichlet Allocation which was made by Blei in 2002 ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latent_Dirichlet_allocation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latent_Dirichlet_allocation ) Here is video by him where he explains the basic model as well timeline-related hacks the article talks about - http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3077213787166426672# http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3077213787166426672# You can very easily play with LDA yourself with this toolkit - http://mallet.cs.umass.edu/ http://mallet.cs.umass.edu/
- jacques_chester 16y ago
  Was I just looking at formulae or some pages taken from the Odyssey? I guess we could get the computer to categorise it ...
- jkan 16y ago
  I think they're talking about this one: http://projecteuclid.org/euclid.aoas/1183143727 http://projecteuclid.org/euclid.aoas/1183143727 This work uses the correlated topic model, which extends LDA to model correlations among the extracted topics. Edit: and this one [pdf]: http://www.icml2010.org/papers/384.pdf http://www.icml2010.org/papers/384.pdf

34 points by pama 16y ago

Anon84 16y ago

"If It Has "Science" in the Name, It's Not"

possibilistic 16y ago
Unfortunately true. This seems to be a pop-sci cover of some data mining and semantic clustering algorithm for scientific publications. The author claims the groupings may be better than citations (less political, for instance) in showing how ideas impact a given research community.
- dereg 16y ago
  People with last names in the "lower" part of the alphabet are also cited more than their higher-alphabetized counterparts.
  - crocowhile 16y ago
    [citation needed]
pjscott 16y ago
Trivial counterexample: science has "science" in the name, and is science.
calpaterson 16y ago
You have problems with climate science? "It has proven difficult to provide a definitive account of scientific method that can decisively serve to distinguish science from non-science. Thus there are legitimate arguments about exactly where the borders are, which is known as the problem of demarcation." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science#Philosophy_of_science http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science#Philosophy_of_science Science is not currently a iron-cast term, irrespective of pithy aphorism.
anamax 16y ago
materials science isn't science? There are others.

btilly 16y ago

Classifying science sounds like a boring application of this algorithm. I'd be more interested to see it used for spontaneously identifying groups of related publications any kind, such as blogs.

jacques_chester 16y ago
Blogs are a simple case because the default is to refer to each other through inline hyperlinks. I've also seen linguistic data mining studies done that suggest that blogs which commonly agree with each other, commonly agree with each other. For purposes of politeness, I acted astonished at this revelation.

adi92 16y ago

They are talking about Latent Dirichlet Allocation which was made by Blei in 2002 ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latent_Dirichlet_allocation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latent_Dirichlet_allocation ) Here is video by him where he explains the basic model as well timeline-related hacks the article talks about - http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3077213787166426672# http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3077213787166426672# You can very easily play with LDA yourself with this toolkit - http://mallet.cs.umass.edu/ http://mallet.cs.umass.edu/

jacques_chester 16y ago
Was I just looking at formulae or some pages taken from the Odyssey? I guess we could get the computer to categorise it ...
jkan 16y ago
I think they're talking about this one: http://projecteuclid.org/euclid.aoas/1183143727 http://projecteuclid.org/euclid.aoas/1183143727 This work uses the correlated topic model, which extends LDA to model correlations among the extracted topics. Edit: and this one [pdf]: http://www.icml2010.org/papers/384.pdf http://www.icml2010.org/papers/384.pdf