The article linked above describes a series of papers on reverse causality.  They postulate that some natural aversion by the Universe to the presence of Higgs bosons has led to the continued failure of the Large Hadron Collider, the bankruptcy of the Superconducting SuperCollider project, and any other projects that might conceivably have produced a Higgs.  They use a quirky choice of mathematics and grammar; but the authors are no cranks.   They are Holger-Bech Nielsen, one of the early creators of string theory, and Masao Ninomiya, one of the editors of International Journal of Modern Physics A — certainly respected in the right context, though given a certain distance today.

Fascinating, and an excellent candidate for Not Even Wrong.   Of course readers of this blog recall that after another couple of setbacks, the LHC will discover Higgs particles on December 21, 2012 .

“I never need porn again, as I can just watch that video over and over and over” – Mattchew, from the comments

The Longest Now crystal ball says Matt will need something else to watch soon, once such designs become bog-standard.  And we won’t be calling them ‘touchscreens’ soon… because why would you use a non-responsive display?

A fun quote:

So, a key question is, “Is each annual 100 million–strong cohort emerging from completion of basic education adequately equipped for its lifelong participation in the relevant society, polity, and economy?” The answer is, “No one has the slightest idea.” Really. Not the slightest idea[...]

I wonder how RAND chooses the areas it tackles for long-term global planning.  How does one go about finding ‘documents like this’ (e.g., long-term plans for educational purpose) in a meaningful way?  Tony Pryor, call your office.

There are some perennial projects that take more than a single barnraising to understand and plan for. One is the issue of supporting different languages equally — the world’s largest and smallest languages are both underrepresented among the projects.  While I would like to see Wikimedia become a model for the rest of the online world in this area, how a global community can provide support, bugfixes, and advice to different/new language groups is an issue for many multilingual projects.  So I offer these questions to all readers – feel free to answer them for the projects you are most familiar with.

• What technical and other support do various language projects need to become awesome?
• What variations are needed for projects whose main goal is language and cultural preservation?
• What sharing of advice or practices would make starting new projects easier?
• How can established projects help new projects with outreach, communication, and planning?

Let me offer one example of how this has been difficult to grasp within Wikimedia: discussions on the early international list were generally in English.  This led to a certain founder effect among participants, and in how the projects are today framed to the world, from elaborations of the vision to interface design.  And this has forked discussions of what language projects need – those in the language of the project, which can happen easily and fluidly among its participants and contributors, and those meta-discussions in one or two shared languages with the potential of setting Wikimedia-wide policy or affecting all projects.

As another example: non-Latin character sets, and cultural differences about editing and participation across different parts of the world, have always been part of discussions about how Wikipedia and its sister projects should advance.  Nevertheless, the early language communities drawn to the project were largely European, and issues that only affect non-Latin readers can still take a while to fix (for instance, replacements for Roman-alphabet captchas, or fixes to javascript and css layouts in corner cases).

What are your examples? What am I leaving out?  How can the global community and the Foundation better support small and underrepresented languages?  Feel free to leave links to current or historical discussions about problems and opportunities.

Here is a series, part of the Educational Technology Debate, on ebooks and affordable access to [preexisting] content, featuring Dick Rowe (Olé!)and Angus Scrimgeour. People still avoid talking about building new materials from scratch – the sort of work that a skillful teacher engages in every week – which is when another leap forward will begin. But they are keen on finding ways to let interactivity and creativity improve and annotate books and class materials.

Do we need a three-legged stool? Will it balance?*  What else is missing?

* I can see a whole new series of YouTube videos based on this hook… including everything from architecture to ontologies.

Thank you also to Philippe and the elections team, and to all candidates who took time to run.  I was particularly glad to see Góngora running, as a new face in meta-affairs, and I hope to see more participation in meta discussion by active es:wp contributors.

I will help the Board be more open.  I have revived the Wikimedia meetings page for suggested agenda items – please leave your ideas and comments there, in any language.  (I know this is a tough thing to request in a monolingual blog.  Suggestions for making this blog more accessible are welcome.)  I will post my own thoughts about agenda items there in advance of future Board meetings.  One of my first efforts will be getting all foundation resolutions and policies translated into Wikimedia’s core languages.

The next one is coming up in a few weeks, during Wikimania – I don’t officially become a Board member until we meet.  I am looking forward to Wikimania, and hope to see some of you there!

I have also updated the old Wikimedia Reports page, as one way to better coordinate organize information – please help add new reports to it, and translate it into other languages.

I have this bug, for databases and for books.  But I haven’t indulged it much — I have contributed sporadically to Wikisource, mainly tiny works in English and Nahuatl, but nothing significant.  The largest work I’ve gotten copyright release for, the Whole Earth Catalog, I haven’t managed to digitize.  So I am still an apprentice, and can not speak definitively about what it means to be a wikisourceror.  But I want to share a story about someone I met who clearly has this spirit, and has gotten his students to work together on wiki-style projects to make their classroom work available to the rest of the world.

Greg Crane is a Classicist.  He oversees a major digital classics project at Tufts, and works as scribe and researcher, poring over, transcribing, translating, cross-referencing, annotating and discussing Greek, Latin, and Arabic texts from antiquity.  Two months ago he organized a “Wikipedia portal workshop” with Maura Marx of the Open Knowledge Commons to discuss how to make the digital scans of public domain works, available through the Million Book Project, more useful to Wikipedia.  Mathias was invited to present, and I joined the discussion.

Greg makes some strong points about public collaboration on source materials being a natural extension of academic research — but one that hasn’t been realized through cramped private work areas and a narrow view of who should be able to participate in such work.  Despite this, undergraduate and graduate classics students have been doing detailed work for a long time, many of them wishing they could work on a ‘real’ project that would be reused, not just an assignment.  [The same could be said about most fields, I reckon.]

Combining this broad collection of apprentice scholars with broad tasks that seem difficult for any small group to accomplish is rewarding for everyone involved.  This isn’t “using people’s shirk-y time” for a productive end – it means providing a learning environment in which the work you do to practice your art is available and vaulable to others who might chip in.

I transcribed the day-long workshop.  Some good ideas and quotes came out of it – worth a browse, though it’s long.

Some of the ideas surfaced on the wikisource and openlibrary mailing lists in a recent thread (1, 2).

And Greg and Maura visited the Wikimedia offices earlier this week (I happened to be there later that day); I’ll be interested to see what comes of those conversations as well.

I recommend you start with Apocamon or Dicebox, or even Delta  Thrives when it’s put up, for a quick immersion in color and art.  But my favorites are  the Jain’s Death and the full Spiders series (only the third episode of which is currently online).

Then the day after Globe columnist Yvonne Abraham published an article on the arrest, the Boston force found itself in a truly embarrassing spot.  Police officer, National Guard reservist, and self-proclaimed writer and English teacher Justin Barrett wrote an incredible half-coherent racist and sexist screed to a large cc: list — including his fellow officers and Abraham herself.   She responded with style:

I didn’t make it to the part where he calls me a fool and an infidel (he correctly pegged me as Catholic). And I certainly didn’t make it to the bit where he invites me to serve him hot Panamanian coffee and a warm cruller on a Sunday morning.

I wish I had gotten that far. That would have given me a good laugh.

Barrett was soon suspended from his police and reserve positions; but not before making the whole Boston Police Department hang their collective head in shame.

• Some things don’t date. Scatman John,  Unicorn v. Narwhal, flyguy
• Some are amazing anyway. Superparamagnetic music videos and Things that GROW among them
• And some need resurrection. like Patrick Farley’s amazing comics website of art and animation (and spiders)

Update: thanks to Avi for pointing out that Farley is rebooting his site at electricsheepcomix.com .

I’ve organized my thoughts about being a good Board member in my platform for the Wikimedia Board.

The most common questions I have heard since this year’s elections began are, what does the Foundation do? and what is the Board of Trustees for? I posted answers to these questions and a few more.

People also ask, how do I qualify to vote? To be eligible to vote,

• You must have 600 edits as of June 1, and 50 within the past 6 months.
• You may need to create a Unified Login to count edits on more than one project; or to vote from your main wiki.
• If you are not eligible, you can still encourage fellow Wikimedians to vote, or leave suggestions for future elections

I am more intent on this year’s election than I have been in any year past – in part because the Board’s role has been shifting away from one that actively engages and challenges the community, something valuable Agnela and Anthere brought to the Board that I miss.  I am deeply concerned by the lack of community growth for the past two years, and the complete stagnation of new project development (despite the growth of new independent educational free knowledge projects that requested Wikimedia hosting). And I was just talking to my friend Bibhusan Bista, who said that there is definite interest in the Foundation in Nepal, and in contributing to Wikipedia’s spirit of openness; but of course few editors there feel they can engage in related discussions (and none, for instance, would be eligible to vote).

So I have two goals for my campaign beyond getting elected: to inspire people to vote and remind them why a good foundation matters, and to encourage them to raise community priorities and requests of the foundation, while attention is on governance over the next two weeks (and while you can get an immediate response from at least three future Board members, something often hard to come by).

My request to you, if you appreciate Wikipedia and want to see it thrive, whether or not you have the edit count needed to vote: please leave suggestions about how Wikimedia should grow, blog about the election and your reasons for caring about it, and help support the election in smaller languages and projects.

I am looking for other good descriptions of what it means to identify with similar global collaborative projects; not only in the world of free software and knowledge but also education, health, language, art, science, peace…  and would appreciate links to any gems.

When people ask me about myself, I often say I am a Wikipedian and a physicist.   A physicist in that I want to know how things work at different scales, and to estimate specifics from first principles, limiting factors, conserved properties.  And a Wikipedian in that I want to understand what large groups of people can do to fix what needs fixing while learning and enjoying themselves.

I regularly have to explain what I mean by this last bit – not a desire to add to Wikipedia itself, or to contribute tidbits of knowledge to something, but the quick check for the edit button when you find a mistake in any environment, the urge to improve things on the spot – the sense of turning to someone next to you and saying, “let’s fix this”.

Let me give you an example from recent memory.  Last week I was visiting my local clinic in Cambridge.  It is a quiet building, competently staffed, with more security and information desk staff than is absolutely necessary.  Noone would say they were struggling to make ends meet.  They have a few vending machines throughout the clinic – offering drinks and snacks that are decidedly unhealthy.  I couldn’t find a single healthy product in them, aside from bottled water (and there are water fountains on every floor).

Clearly a fine idea gone wrong.  This didn’t sit well with me, so I started asking the staff about it.  Noone could say for sure how they were chosen; and all agreed that while the convenience was nice, they should at least be limited to healthy foods.  I asked if there was anyone I could talk to about it (not really), and left a request card suggesting a replacement.

This was deeply unsatisfying.  I wanted to fix this right away… it seemed clear this would make everyone better off,  and I had an idea of what to do.   I could imagine a process of replacement running like this:

1. Define a proposal to replace the machines with healthier options
2. Find the person in the clinic heirarchy responsible for such things and make the recommendation
3. Research alternatives and present a few options with their costs, including the general cost of replacement and of cancelling any existing contracts with the current vending vendor.
4. Talk casually to staff and patients to get their input, since as long as such a change is being made, it should be enjoyed afterwards.
5. Pursue this through the gears of hospital bureaucracy.

All of this would take a fair bit of time and persistent followup.  (Despite a personal fondness for things that vend, I don’t know the first thing about the world of vending machine vendors and their alternatives, and I doubted people reading that card would either.)  Certainly more than my personal benefit would merit if I had to do it all myself.

But if there were a natural way to pursue this as a community, I would gladly get it started.  And if there were a way to make such a proposal, and then extend it to all clinics in the country that might be in the same situation, I could recruit health advocates who would delightedly devote a hundred hours to the project — doing so would be the highlight of their year.  The benefits are so obvious, and the implications for our culture as well as individual patients would be tangible.  I’m inclined to find my local community-health group and see if they are up to the challenge.  But they tend to think in terms of political advocacy.   And my idea isn’t to stand outside with placards and digital petitions shouting for legislators to mandate clincial change — it is to research, plan, design, suggest, and help implement a change directly and quickly.

So among other things, being a Wikipedian means : the recognition that things can be directly changed; the sense that collaboration of neighbors, and the promise of scale, can make any challenge worth the effort.  (As for what being a Wikimedian means… there’s less consensus on that point!  I tried to answer that in a recent Q&A.)

Now Pascal Martin of Linterweb and Wikiwix fame has released a new product : Okawix, the engine behind a new DVD snapshot of wikipedia; it is now linked from download.wikimedia.org.  You can reads more about it on their Wikiwix blog.  This could be the foundation for a fully functional Wikipedia on a Stick project, with editing and commentary, as the WikiStick hackers from Taiwan envisioned a couple of years ago.  See for yourself!

Book 1,  Book 2

On the English Wikipedia, the Arbitration Committee tried to organize a community think tank to provide research and advice on community development and long-range plans, something which is generally wanted and needed by the community, but which people didn’t like having associated with the AC. (personally I think the idea will work fine once people get rid of application processes and acceptance metrics, and simply encourage everyone to take part in a focused sort of brainstorming, in a well-ordered way.)

At the New York Wikiconference this coming weekend, a number of the talks are about planning for outreach and future chapter and project growth — something it would be good to see more of at local events and on-wiki.  And I am running for the Wikimedia Board in part to help vitalize and expand Wikipedia’s sister projects, which have never emerged from its shadow (while still promising the same sort of universal single-source for free knowledge that we would all love to see and use).

So… what would you like to see in Wikipedia’s future?  What have you been waiting to happen for years that hasn’t yet come to pass?  What would you like to see from Wikibooks, Wikiversity, Wiktionary, Wikinews, or Wikisource?  Are you still secretly hoping that Wikispecies will merge with the Encyclopedia of Life?  Do you want Wikiquote to be as popular as LyricWiki, only legal? Are you happier with Enciclopedia Libre and WikiZnanie?  Let me know.  The best ideas will be thrown up on the whiteboard at the wikiconference.