Scifoo #1

So Scifoo was awesome.

We've set up an aggregator at Nature.com that'll collect post-foo posts, photos and news articles as they come out, to go along with Andrew's Planet Scifoo. It's at www.nature.com/scifoo.

Something I haven't seen mentioned in any other blog posts - on Friday night Nikita Bernstein from JoVE set up a Digg style 'prototype initiative' where campers could submit ideas for collaborations. A couple of ideas that got discussed at the conference are up there now.

One of my favourites is Carl Bergstrom's Fantasy Journal League:

Create the rules and web infrastructure for a game of "fantasy journals" analogous to the fantasy baseball and fantasy football leagues that are so popular among sports fans. Scientists could draft papers for their own fantasy journal, and then compete to see whose journal was most successful. Such a game would be great fun to play e.g. in a conference setting or in a research group -- and it would also potentially be a source of valuable bottom-up bibliometric tagging information. (Carl Bergstrom, James Hendler, and Dan Chudnov)

Carl's written up the proposal in more detail here. The one problem I see with it is that waiting for citation data takes ages, so it'll be a game without many short term returns...

Like Alex I met Chris Clark, who is fantastically interesting. Chris is head of the bioacoustics research program at Cornell, where he investigates how whales communicate. Chris also has an idea up on the prototype site:

I am convinced, maybe too passionately, that the large whales communicate over great distances, and I have a considerable amount of data by which I believe one could statistically test whether this is true or not.

Was great to meet some other science bloggers in person - not going to list them all here to avoid namechecking dozens of people. What wasn't great was that three days wasn't nearly enough to talk properly to everybody I wanted to.