Showing posts with label pedro Beltrão. Show all posts
Showing posts with label pedro Beltrão. Show all posts

24 July 2006

Open Science and Modularity

As the open meme sweeps through field after field, there is a tendency to assume that openness on its own is enough. But as this wise post by Pedro Beltrão about open science explains, there's something else you need if you are to get the full benefits of opening up: modularity.

Open source thrives because major tasks are split up into smaller ones, joined by clean interfaces. This enables tasks to be distributed, and sometimes performed in parallel. Competition operates at the level of the small tasks - the best solutions are chosen - rather than at the top level, which is how proprietary software typically works.

But as Beltrão points out, science is still encouraging competition at the topmost level - at the point when results are published - which leads to teams being scooped and work wasted. Far more sensible if the whole were split up into smaller tasks where competition can operate more fruitfully, and he has some practical suggestions about how that might be achieved.

02 July 2006

Carnival of the Bioinformaticians

A little while back I wrote about the blog-form of carnivals. At the time, Pedro Beltrão said he was about to start a new one, devoted to bioinformatics, and here it is, Bio::Blogs, with its very own Web sit. I really must write something for the next one.