Opinion

Nature  463, 26-32 (7 January 2010) | doi:10.1038/463026a; Published online 6 January 2010

2020 visions

For the first issue of the new decade, Nature asked a selection of leading researchers and policy-makers where their fields will be ten years from now. We invited them to identify the key questions their disciplines face, the major roadblocks and the pressing next steps.

Contributions include:

• Peter Norvig on search,
  Director of research at Google
  
  Internet search as we know it is just one decade old; by 2020 it will have evolved far beyond its current bounds. Content will be a mix of text, speech, still and video images, histories of interactions with colleagues, friends, information sources and their automated proxies, and tracks of sensor readings from Global Positioning System devices, medical devices and other embedded sensors in our environment.
  
  The majority of search queries will be spoken, not typed, and an experimental minority will be through direct monitoring of brain signals. Users will decide how much of their lives they want to share with search engines, and in what ways.
  
  The results we get back will be a synthesis, not just a list. For example, today if I ask 'compare approaches to nuclear fusion', the major search engines agree that a general encyclopaedia article on fusion power comes first, followed by other similar articles. A decade from now, the result will summarize the major approaches, contrast their differences, automatically translate any foreign documents into my language, and then rank the results by efficacy or place them in a table or chart as appropriate. If I then ask for 'background mathematics for fusion theory', I will get an outline for an impromptu course concentrating on the necessary complex analysis, customized to specific applications in fusion and to my level of mathematical understanding. If I stumble, the course will be readjusted to fit my needs, or perhaps the search engine will connect me to a tutor or another student in a similar plight. Interaction with search engines will be an ongoing conversation; one that is integrated with the other ongoing tasks of our lives.
  
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• David A. Relman on the microbiome,
• David B. Goldstein on personalized medicine,
• Daniel M. Kammen on energy,
• Daniel R. Weinberger on mental health,
• Leslie C. Aiello on hominin palaeontology,
• George Church on synthetic biology,
• John L. Hennessey on universities, 
  President, Stanford University
  
  The world faces increasingly complex challenges, such as maintaining our ecosystem while supporting 9 billion to 10 billion people, reducing poverty, increasing peace and security, and improving human health in both the developed and developing world. Universities must have a role in seeking solutions for these problems and in educating the next generation of leaders to tackle them.
  
  Perhaps the largest threat to our research universities over the next decade is the financial challenge facing governments. In the United States, for example, budget deficits have caused many states to reduce their funding for public universities, and at the federal level, there is likely to be no growth or a cut in funding for research programmes.
  
  To address these financial and intellectual challenges, universities need to be willing to change how they see their research and teaching mission. The scale and complexity of today's global problems demand a more collaborative, multidisciplinary approach.
  
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• Jeffrey Sachs on global governance,
• Adam Burrows on astronomy,
• Gary P. Pisano on drug discovery,
• Joshua R. Goldstein on demographics,
• Paul Anastas on chemistry,
• Richard Klausner and David Baltimore on the National Institutes of Health,
• David R. Montgomery on soil,
• Thomas M. Baer and Nicholas P. Bigelow on lasers,
• Robert D. Holt on ecology,
• Jeremy K. Nicholson on metabolomics.

Getting Older Without Getting Old

By RANDALL STROSS

FACEBOOK now has more than 400 million active users, up from only 50 million as recently as 2007. If social networking still resembled a young, hip downtown nightclub scene — one day a site is hot, the next it’s not — we might expect the crowds to decamp soon. Facebook would become another Friendster, still around but ghostly, forgotten by most.

Facebook, however, isn’t likely to have such a fate. For one thing, it has attracted many “olds,” and they tend to stay put. (Consider AOL.) More than 50 percent of Facebook’s members in the United States are 35 or older, and only 26.8 percent are 24 or under, according to an analysis of December visitors by comScore Media Metrix.

More than demographic stability favors Facebook. The site has shrewdly emulated the “network effects” strategy used by another brand that has long held a dominant position in the computer industry: Microsoft Windows.

Economists use the term network effects to refer to the way the value of a product or service increases in tandem with the number of people who use it. If you’re one of only 10 people in the world with an e-mail account, its usefulness is limited; add a billion more, and the practical value of yours increases apace.

A Facebook member enjoys immediate benefits when each friend joins — these are direct network effects. But the average user already has 130 friends, so unless the user is unusually gregarious, the direct effects won’t increase drastically beyond a certain point.

For an individual member, the most powerful network effects may be indirect ones that come from the huge number of unknown other people in the Facebook world. Their mass attracts, in turn, suppliers of complementary products and services.

For Windows, the enormous installed base attracted third-party software developers, which in turn drew more users. Apple’s iPhone has had a similar virtuous cycle. So, too, on Facebook, developers of applications like FamilyLink, Marketplace and iLike’s Music create a software universe with seemingly infinite choices. And that attracts more users — and still more developers.

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Exclusive: How Google’s Algorithm Rules the Web

By Steven Levy  February 22, 2010  |  12:00 pm  |  Wired March 2010

Want to know how Google is about to change your life? Stop by the Ouagadougou conference room on a Thursday morning. It is here, at the Mountain View, California, headquarters of the world’s most powerful Internet company, that a room filled with three dozen engineers, product managers, and executives figure out how to make their search engine even smarter. This year, Google will introduce 550 or so improvements to its fabled algorithm, and each will be determined at a gathering just like this one. The decisions made at the weekly Search Quality Launch Meeting will wind up affecting the results you get when you use Google’s search engine to look for anything — “Samsung SF-755p printer,” “Ed Hardy MySpace layouts,” or maybe even “capital Burkina Faso,” which just happens to share its name with this conference room. Udi Manber, Google’s head of search since 2006, leads the proceedings. One by one, potential modifications are introduced, along with the results of months of testing in various countries and multiple languages. A screen displays side-by-side results of sample queries before and after the change. Following one example — a search for “guitar center wah-wah” — Manber cries out, “I did that search!”

You might think that after a solid decade of search-market dominance, Google could relax. After all, it holds a commanding 65 percent market share and is still the only company whose name is synonymous with the verb search. But just as Google isn’t ready to rest on its laurels, its competitors aren’t ready to concede defeat. For years, the Silicon Valley monolith has used its mysterious, seemingly omniscient algorithm to, as its mission statement puts it, “organize the world’s information.” But over the past five years, a slew of companies have challenged Google’s central premise: that a single search engine, through technological wizardry and constant refinement, can satisfy any possible query. Facebook launched an early attack with its implication that some people would rather get information from their friends than from an anonymous formula. Twitter’s ability to parse its constant stream of updates introduced the concept of real-time search, a way of tapping into the latest chatter and conversation as it unfolds. Yelp helps people find restaurants, dry cleaners, and babysitters by crowdsourcing the ratings. None of these upstarts individually presents much of a threat, but together they hint at a wide-open, messier future of search — one that isn’t dominated by a single engine but rather incorporates a grab bag of services.

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How Twitter and Facebook Make Us More Productive

By Brendan I. Koerner  February 22, 2010  |  12:00 pm  |  Wired  March 2010

Your random tweets about Android apps and last night’s Glee  are stifling the economic recovery. At least, that’s the buzz among efficiency mavens, who seem to spend all their time adding up microblogging’s fiscal toll. Last year, Nucleus Research warned that Facebook shaves 1.5 percent off total office productivity; a Morse survey estimated that on-the-job social networking costs British companies $2.2 billion a year.

But for knowledge workers charged with transforming ideas into products — whether gadgets, code, or even Wired articles — goofing off isn’t the enemy. In fact, regularly stepping back from the project at hand can be essential to success. And social networks are particularly well suited to stoking the creative mind.

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March 3, 2010

Getting the Most Out of Twitter

By CLAIRE CAIN MILLER

A COMMON reason given by those who have yet to try Twitter: “I have nothing to say.”

The truth is, you don’t have to post a message to get the most out of Twitter.

At its best, the social medium is a perpetual, personalized news service about topics of your choosing — whether health care reform, tech news or the latest episode of “Gossip Girl” — filtered and served to you by people who care a lot about what you care a lot about.

Even the most prolific users say Twitter has become more useful as a way to tap in to the discussions of the day than to broadcast their own thoughts. And once you get pulled in, you might just find you have something to say after all.

Mary F. Calvert for The New York Times. Janessa Goldbeck, who works in Washington for an anti-genocide group, checks a few Twitter Lists of people who work in human rights. "It's the quickest, most personalized news filter you could imagine," she said.

Biz Stone, Twitter’s co-founder, suggests that naysayers simply log on to Twitter’s home page and search for a topic they are interested in, whether it’s their favorite sports team, the name of their company or a topic in the news.

Within a minute, they understand the appeal, he said.

Twitter users write 50 million messages a day. For the holdouts, here are a few ways to make Twitter work for you.

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The emergence of the networked information economy is unleashing two powerful forces. On one hand, easy access to high-speed networks is empowering individuals. People can now discover and consume information resources and services globally from their homes. Further, new social computing approaches are inviting people to share in the creation and edification of information on the Internet. Empowerment of the individual—or consumerization—is reducing the individual's reliance on traditional brick-and-mortar institutions in favor of new and emerging virtual ones. Second, ubiquitous access to high-speed networks along with network standards, open standards and content, and techniques for virtualizing hardware, software, and services is making it possible to leverage scale economies in unprecedented ways. What appears to be emerging is industrial-scale computing—a standardized infrastructure for delivering computing power, network bandwidth, data storage and protection, and services. Consumerization and industrialization beg the question "Is this the end of the middle?"; that is, what will be the role of "enterprise" IT in the future? Indeed, the bigger question is what will become of all of our intermediating institutions? This volume examines the impact of IT on higher education and on the IT organization in higher education.

From ORCID's "About Us:" 

Name ambiguity and attribution are persistent, critical problems imbedded in the scholarly research ecosystem. The ORCID Initiative represents a community effort to establish an open, independent registry that is adopted and embraced as the industry’s de facto standard. Our mission is to resolve the systemic name ambiguity, by means of assigning unique identifiers linkable to an individual's research output, to enhance the scientific discovery process and improve the efficiency of funding and collaboration.

Accurate identification of researchers and their work is one of the pillars for the transition from science to e-Science, wherein scholarly publications can be mined to spot links and ideas hidden in the ever-growing volume of scholarly literature. A disambiguated set of authors will allow new services and benefits to be built for the research community by all stakeholders in scholarly communication: from commercial actors to non-profit organizations, from governments to universities.

Thomson Reuters and Nature Publishing Group convened the first Name Identifier Summit in Cambridge, MA on Monday, November 9, where a cross-section of the research community explored approaches to address name ambiguity. The ORCID Initiative is moving ahead with broad stakeholder participation (view member gallery). As the Initiative develops, we plan to engage researchers and other community members directly via social media and other campaigns.  Participation from all stakeholders at all levels is a cornerstone of the Initiative’s mission.

For additional information, please see the December 2009 announcement.  We will also be updating this website and adding new features as the ORCID Initiative develops. 

Here's the Nature  leader:

Nature 462, 825 (17 December 2009) | doi:10.1038/462825a; Published online 16 December 2009

Credit where credit is due 

A proposed author ID system is gaining widespread support, and could help lay the foundation for an academic-reward system less heavily tied to publications and citations.

In his classic book Management Teams, UK psychologist Meredith Belbin used extensive empirical evidence to argue that effective teams require members who can cover nine key roles. These roles range from the creative 'plants' who generate novel ideas, to the disciplined 'implementers' who turn plans into action and the big-picture 'coordinators' who keep everyone working together.

Much the same range of roles is critical for science. Unfortunately, the academic system tends to reward only some of those activities — notably those that have easily measured outcomes, such as the publication and citation numbers so heavily weighted by promotion and tenure committees.

On page 843, Nature profiles a research group composed largely of what Belbin would call 'completer finishers' — perfectionists who are driven to fix all the flaws, fill all the gaps and get the job finished correctly. This particular group is trying to complete the reference human genome sequence, which is still full of errors nearly a decade after the first draft was announced in 2000. It is essential work: modern sequencing techniques still use the reference to anchor new data even as they grind out genomes at a fraction of the cost of the original. But it is also work that offers few academic rewards beyond the satisfaction of a job well done — it is unlikely to result in a high-profile publication.

Such unsung contributions to science may soon be easier to evaluate and quantify through an author ID system proposed earlier this month and backed by 23 organizations, including Thomson Reuters, Nature Publishing Group, Elsevier, ProQuest, Springer, CrossRef, the British Library and the Wellcome Trust. The Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCID) would be an alphanumeric string that uniquely identifies an individual scientist in much the same way that a Digital Object Identifier uniquely identifies a paper, book or other scholarly publication (more details and the complete list of participants will soon be available at http://www.orcid.org). The system would distinguish between the world's multitudinous Dr Smiths and Professor Wangs, but would not be affected by name changes, cultural differences in name order, inconsistent first-name abbreviations or the use of different alphabets. It would be attached to researchers' journal publications, and could also be assigned to data sets they helped to generate, comments on their colleagues' blog posts or unpublished draft papers, edits of Wikipedia entries and much else besides.

This kind of 'microattribution' could ultimately make it possible for each researcher to have a constantly updated 'digital curriculum vitae' providing a picture of his or her contributions to science going far beyond the simple publication list.

ORCID is hardly the first proposal for an author ID system. A number of publishers have been exploring the idea, and the International Organization for Standardization in Geneva is developing an international standard name identifier to track contributors to media content such as books, television programmes and newspaper articles. But most of those developers have already joined or are working closely with the ORCID group. Moreover, the intention is to make ORCID freely available for anyone to use, and interoperable with existing ID systems.

The next step is for the ORCID group to turn the concept into a working system. That is scheduled to happen over the next six months, with the software being based on Thomson Reuters' existing ResearcherID system. In parallel, the group will be setting up an independent organization to run the system and assign ORCIDs to individual researchers.

There will be many challenges along the way — not least of which is establishing rigorous protocols for validating and authenticating ORCID assignments. No one wants to see the system abused by individuals seeking to pad their academic credentials.

But perhaps the largest challenge will be cultural. Whether ORCID or some other author ID system becomes the accepted standard, the new metrics made possible will need to be taken seriously by everyone involved in the academic-reward system — funding agencies, university administrations, and promotion and tenure committees. Every role in science should be recognized and rewarded, not just those that produce high-profile publications.

The abstract:

The evolution of computer and telecom technologies is resulting in smaller and more powerful portable devices, expanded coverage for wireless and cellular networks, and a flourishing pool of applications that take advantage of these technologies. Mobile IT promises to change the way users interact with resources and applications, moving services away from desktop and laptop computers to devices that increasingly embody a convergence of formerly disparate functions. Moreover, mobile IT affords new opportunities for applications to deliver current, location-specific information. The role of mobile IT will continue to take on new dimensions as technologies mature and converge, and higher education will both guide and benefit from those developments.

As very capably summarized by Good Morning Silicon Valley: 

Daily news diet: constant snacking from a moveable feast

By JOHN MURRELL

People of a certain age remember when the standard American news diet consisted of three square meals delivered to your home at the same times each day — the paper in the morning, the network news in the evening, the local news before bed. These days, as reflected in the latest Pew Internet survey, news consumption is something more akin to non-stop nibbling from a diverse buffet of sources.

It is, of course, the Internet at the root of this change. The newcomer in the media mix now ranks second only to TV among the news platforms Americans turn to on a typical day, surpassing radio and newspapers in popularity. But it's not a zero-sum game; the vast majority of Americans get their news from a variety of sources each day, and while it's increasingly common for online news to be part of that menu, few depend on it as their sole sustenance. According to the Pew study: "Nine in ten American adults (92 percent) get news from multiple platforms on a typical day, with half of those using four to six platforms daily. Fully 59 percent get news from a combination of online and offline sources on a typical day. Just over a third (38 percent) rely solely on offline sources, and 2 percent rely exclusively on the Internet for their daily news."

In fact, the survey found, exclusivity in general is disappearing, noting, "The days of loyalty to a particular news organization on a particular piece of technology in a particular form are gone." Only 21 percent of those surveyed relied on just one online site for their news. Most said they used between two and five online news sites, and 65 percent said they had no single favorite. And that old business of waiting for the news to be delivered — forget it. "The process Americans use to get news is based on foraging and opportunism," the study says. "They seem to access news when the spirit moves them or they have a chance to check up on headlines."

Other news consumption trends that showed up in the study:

• Portability — "One quarter (26 percent) of all Americans say they get some form of news via cell phone today — that amounts to 33 percent of cell phone owners," says the report.
• Personalization — According to the survey, "Some 42 percent of the Internet users who get news online ... say that it is important to them when choosing news sites to be able to customize the news they get at that site," while "28 percent of Internet users have customized their home page to include news from sources and on topics that particularly interest them."
• Participation — "News consumption is a socially engaging and socially driven activity, especially online," the report says. "The public is clearly part of the news process now. Participation comes more through sharing than through contributing news themselves."

Steve Jobs and Control

When Steve Jobs was demonstrating the iPad last week and the screen suddenly showed one of those broken icons on the New York Times web page, indicating that a Flash animation was unavailable, I realized that the guy wasn't making a rare gaff--i.e. mistakenly showing a poorly-rendered web page--but rather indicating that the NYT had better step it up. Jobs isn't interested in Flash, and not because it's buggy or performance challenge. Instead, Jobs is interested in control. And Flash isn't going to make it on his devices.

Jobs has exerted his control in a related way with publishers, by enforcing a pricing scheme that damages consumers by raising the average price of eBooks from the $9.99 Amazon had been charging to the $12.99 to $14.99 range. This makes publishers happy, of course, as Amazon had been taking a loss on each $9.99 in a bid to get that to become the normal price for eBooks (which it should be) as its Kindle reader became more and more popular.

But wait, there's more. While Apple heavily advertises the 5 gajillion apps that are available on its iTunes Store, the fact remains that the vast majority of users only have a small handful of apps (5 to 10) on their phone and regularly use even less. So this app ecosystem does benefit a small number of developers greatly, but most of them, of course, make nothing. At the top is Apple, which makes the devices that run these apps. Apple still barely breaks even on its entire iTunes/App Store ecosytem, so the point of this endeavor, of course, is to just sell hardware. And if they are just selling new devices to the same customers repeatedly, so be it. A sale is a sale. If sales are down, just invent a "new product category." The lemmings will wait in line.

What emerges here is an interesting picture. Beloved Apple, as it turns out, isn't really so benevolent. I'm curious that we've got another Google/Microsoft in the making here and that no one seems to have an issue with this. Price fixing in collusion with the publishing industry? Creating a closed, central clearing house for selling other company's products? Orchestrating products to shut out competition? Doesn't all this sound kind of familiar?

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