II. Pedia Sapiens: A Planetary Progeny Comes to Her/His Own Twintelligent Gaiable Knowledge

B. The Spiral of Science: Manican to American to Earthicana Phases

Bollen, Johan, et al. Clickstream Data Yields High-Resolution Maps of Science. PloS One. 4/3, 2009. Teams from the Digital Library Research and Mathematical Modeling Groups at Los Alamos Labs, and the Santa Fe Institute, which include Luis Bettencourt, achieve a novel visualization of a nascent global knowledge web by graphing some billion cross-clicks between scientific and humanities journals as users course among these online resources.

Boorstin, Daniel. The Seekers. New York: Random House, 1998. This volume along with The Discoverers (1983) and The Creators (1992) by the onetime Librarian of Congress chronicles the great adventure of humanity to learn everything about its extant natural universe as it tries to forge a new worldly civilization. Typical chapters from The Discoverers are Seeing the Invisible, Cataloguing the Whole Creation, Paths to the East. But at its present term, a sense of expectancy has been lost, the hope of finding a greater identity and meaning wanes. Here is a selection from a preface to The Seekers:

Our Western culture has seen three grand epochs of seeking. First was the heroic Way of Prophets and Philosophers seeking salvation or truth from God above or the reason within each of us. Then came an age of communal seeking, pursuing civilization in the liberal spirit, and then most recently an age of social sciences, when, oriented toward the future, man seems ruled by forces of history. In this long quest, Western culture has turned from seeking the end or purpose to seeking causes - from the Why to the How. Might this empty meaning from our human experience? Then how can we recapture and enrich our sense of purpose?

Borner, Katy. Atlas of Science. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2010. This illustrated coffee table volume gathers a decade of research by the Indiana University information scientist and colleagues to present a unique visual history and exposition of humanity’s local to global advance of knowledge. Its integral approach is the use of mappings of many kinds from medieval explorations and periodic tables to scale-free networks to display our communal, ever recursive, encounter with a suitably amenable nature. For our purposes, one can now observe a sudden passage, transition or leap to a new mode and phase of international collaborations, broached in conclusion as “Growing a Global Brain and Heart.” An online site for the project with some 119 map graphics, and much more info, can be accessed at http://scimaps.org. Yet for all the luminous diagrams and images, an implied presence of a greater phenomenal creation, a sense of quest unto discovery, quite eludes. We altogether inscribe, catalog, witness, but do not yet see, realize and know how to read.

Borner, Katy. Making Sense of Mankind’s Scholarly Knowledge and Expertise. Environment and Planning B. 34/5, 2008. The Indiana University information scientist traces various pathways to “collecting, interlinking, and organizing what we know” both for web approaches already in place such as www.scholar.google.com, along with proposed uses of a semantic web and mapping networks. But all these online encyclopedias (as is Britannica) are still absent an organizing that would reflect a natural genesis.

Borner, Katy. Plug-and-Play Macroscopes. Communications of the ACM. 54/3, 2011. An April 26, 2011 New York Times Science News report, “Digging Deeper, Seeing Farther: Supercomputers Alter Science,” extols the multimedia presentation “Life: A Cosmic Story” at the Morrison Planetarium at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco. The article goes on to cite Katy Borner, the Indiana University expert on visualizing information (search) who views, as described in this reference, the computational capabilities upon which the exhibits are based, that can handle immense data sets as in cytogenetics and climate studies, as opening a wide holistic window able to uniquely join myriad bytes and whole images.

Borner, Katy and Andrea Scharnhorst. Visual Conceptualizations and Models of Science. Journal of Informetrics. 3/3, 2009. Indiana University and VKS Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences information theorists introduce a special issue on the “Science of Science” for its 21st century phase of global cumulative collaboration. Typical papers are Spatial Scientometrics, and Untangling the Web of e-Research. Yet, similar to the 2012 volume Models of Science Dynamics herein, edited by these authors, the project becomes immersed in abstract schemata with little inquiry or wonder about what hath humankind wrought.

Bowler, Peter and Iwan Morus. Making Modern Science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. An introductory text for the historic pathways and achievements of scientific inquiry. Two main parts cover the revolution itself and its domains from cosmology to human beings, while noting relevant themes such as gender, religion and ideology.

Brush, Stephen. The History of Modern Science. Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1988. A comprehensive sourcebook and bibliographic essay. The reign of a “clockwork universe” of insensate objects devoid of spirit is well documented.

Bryson, Bill, ed. Seeing Further: The Story of Science, Discovery and the Genius of the Royal Society. New York: Morrow, 2010. Leading scientists and writers chronicle and exclaim the 350 year course of this “Fellowship of the world's most eminent scientists and is the oldest scientific academy in continuous existence.” The first woman was admitted in 1945. Its history provides a good capsule from Isaac Newton to the ends of the earth, matter and multiverse. For a sample, James Gleick sets the outset scene, Margaret Wertheim notes an early parting of religion and cosmology, Henry Petroski lauds engineering technology, Ian Stewart revels in mathematical insights, while Georgina Ferry tells about x-ray crystallography. Add Paul Davies, Richard Dawkins, Margaret Atwood, Stephen Schneider, Maggie Gee, John Barrow, and a view ahead by Martin Rees, and others, for a grand ride on the spiral of science. But as usual sans any imagination of a greater reality and creation, the metaphysical quest that inspired Newton, indeed the very thought seems so remote today.

Buettel, Jessie, et al. Astro-Ecology? Shifting the Interdisciplinary Collaboration Paradigm. Ecology and Evolution. 8/19, 2018. An editorial by University of Tasmania biologists which cites a 1994 article by Paul Keddy (Applications of the Hertzsprung-Russell Star Chart to Ecology) in Trends in Ecology and Evolution (9/6, 1994) which then refers to Robert MacArthur’s 1972 work Geographical Ecology that scientific studies whether about bioregion ecosystems or celestial environs should be pay attention to common patterns amongst their separate pieces. Some decades later, as this website seeks to document, a revival of this broad vista is evoked by comparing how trees fall in a forest to topological arrays of sunny stars.

Robert MacArthur's Geographical Ecology turned 21 last year. As it enters adulthood, we may ask whether or not it is still influencing contemporary approaches to ecology. The opening sentence, “To do science is to search for repeated patterns, not simply to accumulate facts...”, sets a theme for the entire book. As ecologists, we are faced with the problem of finding patterns when there is a large number of species, an even larger number of possible pairwise interactions, and when these are dispersed across a bewildering array of habitat types. How do we look for general patterns in nature? The Hertzsprung-Russell star diagram provides an inspiring example for meeting MacArthur's challenge. (Abstract)

Burns,, Randal, et al. From Cosmos to Connectomes: The Evolution of Data-Intensive Science. Neuron. 83/6, 2014. A robust neuroinformatics community, with journals and international conferences, search Google, is underway in this field. Johns Hopkins University neuroscientists here draw upon data analysis methods in astronomy, aka astroinformatics, to further bolster these efforts. Our interest is to note their disparate, far flung affinity as a common project to discern and sequence universe and human. Might one propose an overall cosmoinformatics?

The analysis of data requires computation: originally by hand and more recently by computers. Different models of computing are designed and optimized for different kinds of data. In data-intensive science, the scale and complexity of data exceeds the comfort zone of local data stores on scientific workstations. Thus, cloud computing emerges as the preeminent model, utilizing data centers and high-performance clusters, enabling remote users to access and query subsets of the data efficiently. We examine how data-intensive computational systems originally built for cosmology, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), are now being used in connectomics, at the Open Connectome Project. We list lessons learned and outline the top challenges we expect to face. Success in computational connectomics would drastically reduce the time between idea and discovery, as SDSS did in cosmology. (Abstract)

Callebaut, Werner. Scientific Persepctivism. Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences. Online January, 2012. The University of Vienna and Konrad Lorenz Institute philosopher worries that the rush to “big data biology” as digital machines take over will cause life to become an engineering subject. He decries the absence of any natural philosophy, which used to lead, such as Carl Woese’s 2004 call for a “guiding vision.” (search) But the paper seems to get caught in the very internal jargon that impedes such a traditional project. There is no perception of an historic, major evolutionary transition to such a worldwide collaborative noosphere as they may commence to learn on their own.

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