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How Scientific Paradigms Relate
Journal written by Alien54 (180860) and posted by
kdawson
on Tue Mar 20, 2007 08:29 PM
from the connections dept.
from the connections dept.
Here is a giant chart mapping relationships among scientific paradigms, as published in the journal Nature. This map was constructed by sorting roughly 800,000 published papers into 776 different scientific paradigms (shown as pale circular nodes) based on how often the papers were cited together by authors of other papers. Information Esthetics, an organization founded by map co-creator W. Bradford Paley, is giving away 25" x 24" prints of the Map of Science (you pay postage and handling via PayPal). There are also links to a 3000+ pixel wide jpg of the chart. It would be all one long spectrum except for Computer Science, which makes the connection (via AI) between the hard sciences and the soft sciences.
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Cool (Score:5, Funny)
Uh oh... (Score:5, Funny)
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Not this late at night. They still have a chance to crank up the refrigeration for the server room. Moscow is just waking up, and the US won't come online for another 8- 10 hours. So they have something of a prayer.
The beeper of the webmaster should be going off in Australia just about now, and we can all imagine the panicked cursing as he realizes that he won't be able to make it to the beach because he's going to be busy arranging co-location services for the rest of t
So sad... (Score:3, Interesting)
For instance, an example of applying science to humanities, would be writing about history in a scientific way. May not seem important if you view the people on Earth in as the only society, but if you were trying to compare the history of peoples on many different planets, then it would be very important.
People with a computer science background should know the importance of having a common language to speak, or speaking in the simplest terms. If someone throws acronyms at you, they likely don't know what they are talking about. All field, psychology, history, and cs are related. They should use common terms, or so Wilson would have you believe.
A truly liberal education would show you that all fields relate, and depend on one another.
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What Wilson desc
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I saw Wilson lecture on his new book, The Creation. Very interesting, but I got the feeling that he was repacking the same info for the political climate of today (ie. the culture wars). Brilliant guy tho
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One of the major, I mean MAJOR themes of that book was to show the importance of reductionism. To explain history it would need to be reduced to the individual psychologies of individuals and the social psychologies of the societies they belonged to.
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These complex words are just shortcuts to sets of related knowledge. If you don't know certain key words (not acronyms, but words), I'll have an idea of what you don't know. For
I bought one.. (Score:2, Funny)
Look good on my wall though.
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Not only am I tired, I am blind. A good, good sign to go home before I erase Alaska here, or something.
Re:I bought one.. (Score:4, Informative)
We are using a standard Drupal shopping module and I have received two reports of this. I am sure others have seen the problem and not reported it.
We have a Drupal guru looking at that code, and hundreds of orders have cleard fine, but for now I suggest people do exactly what gammaxy did: if someone else's information show up, wait until tomorrow.
I will remain personally responsible for any mis-charged or undelivered prints. You may find me by Google-ing "Brad Paley": e-mail addresses are available on my various Web sites.
Thank you for the interest! Sorry about the glitch.
Kind Regards, Brad
Parent
Engineering & Computer Science (Score:4, Interesting)
Their "Computer Science" grouping is odd - one of the "paradigms" is "multiple antenna, selective fading, smart antenna,..." which are not computer science topics, they're EE/wireless communications topics.
Some aspects of Computer Science and EE are definitely closely related, but this is kind of weird. Engineering seems under-represented - if there were a lot of engineering disciplines included (EE, Computer, mechanical, aerospace, etc.) but not under any sort of "engineering" heading, why is "applied physics" so small?
Cool chart nonetheless. This was a huge amount of info to sort through and graphically represent.
Re:Engineering & Computer Science (Score:5, Insightful)
You might as well be complaining that they didn't include snowboarding.
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Historically they are Information Theory [wikipedia.org] topics. Only recently, when we figured out how to build them, did they become engineering topics.
Information theorists are typically drawn from the ranks of mathematics, engineering and computer science so the positioning between computer science and mathematics is expected. The close link to control theory is also expected.
As others have pointed out the chart deals with academic papers, so it is telling you how the theory of each area is related. Building MIM
Tufte (Score:4, Insightful)
That poster looks like Edward Tufte got sick after trying to make sense of all that information.
Joke aside, it's gorgeous in the pure organic feel of it, but not particularly informative other than illustrative.
Looks like a nebula (Score:2)
I can just imagine a UFO abductee seeing a similar chart of knowledge or biology or something on the wall of the starship, and think it was a map of the home nebula/star cluster.
Could be useful as some sort of directory if the interface were appropriately interactive.
Where is the icon? (Score:3, Funny)
sounds like a totally new paradigm to me. (Score:2)
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paradigm (Score:2)
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A paradigm is a model or pattern or maybe a framework. It is the general way of looking at or approaching things.
We can see examples of different paradigms in software - procedural programming, functional programming, object oriented can all be considered paradigms. OO is a general way of doing things and breaks all the rules of functional programming - but it isn't wrong it is just a way of doing things. Within that paradigm we can come up with rules about what is good or allowed or bad, and it only ap
Great example of CS / hard science crossover (Score:2)
linky [uiuc.edu]
Google cache [209.85.165.104] because the link is to a power point...
Basically, a multiobjective GA was used to find parameter sets for chemical simulation equations that increased the speed of those simulations by a factor of 10x-103x. (And were more accurate, to boot.) That enables the reaction models to be more complex and, as the presentation stated, "lead potentially to
If... (Score:2)
Paradigm != field of study (Score:5, Insightful)
To closely quote Wikipedia, a paradigm is the set of practices that define a scientific discipline during a particular period of time. A paradigm is defined by science historian Thomas Kuhn to comprise the following:
It looks to me as if this chart does not show connectedness among "paradigms". It simply shows connectedness among various areas of study (as measured in terms of clusterings of bibliography citations).
A paradigm change is something that happens within a single area of study, such as geology or linguistics. To look at connectedness among "paradigms", you'd have to look at the history of single fields, not the current interconnectedness among different fields.
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True - it does not resemble ten cents in any way whatsoever.
ordering problems (Score:2)
It took 3 tries to make the quantity and price function correctly.
Then two more tries later, I had different people's names and addresses instead of my own.
Then, I finally got to PayPal with my information, did the PayPal bit successfully, and then it told me "access denied" on returning to the merchant.
*confused*
Torrent (Score:2, Informative)
In a sliiiightly shameless plug... (Score:2, Interesting)
I've been investigating a similar mapping technique to the one these people used, nearly identical in fact, as applied to social networks. I've modelled people as antigravitationally interacting points, with friendships represented as springs.
You can see an early render [deviantart.com] (deviantart.org), or one using the same data but with a slightly more sophisticated physics simulation [deviantart.com] (deviantart.org).
It's terribly biased (Score:2)
Their site actually lets you highlight the portions that they consider Engineering, and the result is pretty weird: you get computer science, math, a lot of astrophysics, fluid mechanics, materials, applied ph
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Yes, but published where? They didn't say.
Their bad categorization of Engineering reinforces my belief that there really is a bias.
Re:It's terribly biased (Score:5, Insightful)
Engineering is not science, so yes it is biased against engineering in the same way as it is biased against architecture, sport, art, politics, and everything else that it is not trying to map.
Parent
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I always laugh at people who try to re-define other people's pro
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What are your expectations based on? The chart is based on scientific publications, and IME it is representative. Federal research budget [usatoday.com] in 2004:
Life Sciences: 54%
Engineering: 17%
Physical Sciences: 10%
Kevin Bacon (Score:4, Funny)
776 is a few too many for me! (Score:2)
So I'd love to see a similar chart with 100 categories - then one could conceivably try to read a book about each of them!
Danny.
If you squint just right... (Score:4, Funny)
Rather useful... (Score:3, Insightful)
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That's the link via the Artificial Intelligence papers. Otherwise the loop is pretty much broken.
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Computer science is closer to social sciences than it is to cell biology in terms of what paradigm actually means. Other than mathematics, I can see nothing on that page that better matches computer science in terms of what kind of questions are asked, how they are posed, and how research is interpretted.
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Map is itself an example of CS & social scienc (Score:5, Informative)
So an algorithm generates this map from journal articles, then lays it out as a network - and I see people on here arguing about whether the categories are biased. What more proof do you need?
Or, take a close look at social science - there's economics in there. I see asset allocation; I'm sure game theory is there too (Prisoner's Dilemma, Tragedy of the Commons, public goods theory).
What's really surprising here is not the strength of the connection between computer science and the social sciences; it's the scarcity of connections elsewhere. Where are the connections between ecology and social science, ecology and computer science? I see infectious diseases - where are the links to network theory? What about the social and communication basis for physics and the other hard sciences?
Habermas has a fascinating analysis of this. He argues that science depends on a prior consensus about how the validity of evidence is evaluated. That consensus cannot itself be scientific. In other words, scientists can't agree about the value of each other's work until they first achieve a certain level of agreement on a social and communicative level.
If that sounds suspect to you, remember that the use of the word "paradigm" debated elswhere in this discussion originates from Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scienticific Revolutions, which is about the (significantly nonrational) process by which science is conducted, and is grounded in philosophy, history, and social science.
Perhaps the biggest missing links here are philosophy (including mathematics) and history. But then, they aren't sciences. At least not now: there have been scientific theories of history; science itself was once a branch of philosophy. Hurrah for computer science closing the circle, but the circle shouldn't be in need of closing.
Parent
Re:Where's Creationism? (Score:5, Funny)
The entire map itself implies Creationism and Intelligent Design. Did anyone notice how much the graph with the flowing lines for labels looks suprisingly like the Flying Spaghetti Monster? Even as we search to explain the world with science his very form appears every from within the heart of cold scientific diagrams to a nice Italian dinner.
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Oh, that's easy. (Score:4, Funny)
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