{"id":35,"date":"2009-03-11T16:32:24","date_gmt":"2009-03-11T22:32:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.easterbrook.ca\/steve\/?p=35"},"modified":"2009-03-18T19:06:51","modified_gmt":"2009-03-18T23:06:51","slug":"sharing-research-ideas-by-blogging","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.easterbrook.ca\/steve\/2009\/03\/sharing-research-ideas-by-blogging\/","title":{"rendered":"Sharing research ideas by blogging"},"content":{"rendered":"

We had a discussion today with the grad students taking my class on empirical research methods<\/a>, on the role of blogging by researchers. Some students thought that it was a bad idea to post their research ideas on their blogs, because other people might steal them. This is, of course, a\u00a0perennial\u00a0fear amongst grad students – that someone else will do the same research and publish it first. I argued strongly that it doesn’t happen, for two reasons:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. the idea is only a tiny part of the research – it’s what you do with the idea that really matters. Bill Buxton<\/a> has a whole talk on this, the summary<\/a> of which is: \u00a0The worst thing in the world is a precious idea;\u00a0The worst person to have on your team is someone who thinks his idea is precious;\u00a0Good ideas are cheap, they are not precious;\u00a0The key is not to come up with ideas but to cultivate the\u00a0adoption<\/em>\u00a0of ideas.<\/li>\n
  2. even if someone else works on the same idea, they will approach it in different way, and both projects will be a contribution to knowledge (and therefore be worthy of publication).<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    After the class, Simon<\/a> sent me a pointer to Michael Nielsen’s blog post on the importance of scientists sharing their ideas via blogs<\/a>. It’s great reading.<\/p>\n

    Note: I’m particularly chuffed about the relevance of Neilsen’s post to climate science, as the Navier-Stokes equations he mentions in his example lie at the heart of climate simulation models.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    We had a discussion today with the grad students taking my class on empirical research methods, on the role of blogging by researchers. Some students thought that it was a bad idea to post their research ideas on their blogs, because other people might steal them. This is, of course, a\u00a0perennial\u00a0fear amongst grad students – […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":392,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,31],"tags":[6,40,39],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.easterbrook.ca\/steve\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.easterbrook.ca\/steve\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.easterbrook.ca\/steve\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.easterbrook.ca\/steve\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/392"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.easterbrook.ca\/steve\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.easterbrook.ca\/steve\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":96,"href":"http:\/\/www.easterbrook.ca\/steve\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35\/revisions\/96"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.easterbrook.ca\/steve\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.easterbrook.ca\/steve\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.easterbrook.ca\/steve\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}