Lots of people at Scifoo were talking about patents and their advantages/disadvantages. The debate about patents has been going on with varying intensity since at least the 1820s, and often on similar terms (compulsory licensing, shorter or variable terms, some kind of expert tribunal to set terms based on an equity principle). But what struck me as new about this iteration is that there isn't any longer a single conception of 'science' to which a single IP regime must correspond. In previous generations, proposals for a reticulated IP system of any kind always fell afoul of a commitment to a supposed single scientific culture (characterized generally by 'the' scientific method). Now, there seems to be a remarkable consensus that software, say, is fundamentally distinct from biotech. So the two main sides that I heard at Scifoo were able to agree that it ought to be possible in principle to design an IP system that wasn't posited on a single essence of 'creativity'. That's an amazing thing, if it's real. But it looks like nobody is actually designing such a system. So... can we do it? That is, if we jettison the commitment to a single, unified essence (science, or creativity) and instead try to design a reticulated IP regime about what we think are fundamental distinctions in the practical world, what do we come up with? What specific principles of equity, politics, economics, etc., would we adopt for an IP subsystem optimized for pharma, and how would they be different for an IP system designed for software? (Or publishing, music, etc.)? I think there may soon be a real need in the world for an actual, worked-out schema along these lines.

A web application that integrates with other online citizen science projects like eBird and the Citizen Weather Observer ProgramM (CWOP), but adds data collection for any species (plant or animal) or interesting phenomena (weather, atmospheric, etc.). It would encourage people to become amateur naturalists of the ecologies that they are a participant in every day. It needs to combine "clean" data collection (like eBird) so that the data is scientifically usable, as well as anecdotal observations people would like to record (possibly in a blog-like or twitter-like way. Integration with the Flickr API so that associated photos could be linked to observations. Users would be able to get views of the own data AND views of combined data with other users much like eBird, including discovery of observations made nearby; linking to other users ("friending") might be interesting. Future versions might allow for the creation of groups (eg. local watershed groups could have a presence that aggregates independent observations of their members AND holds the groups data.

By providing the users with an application that fulfills their need for checklisting and nature journaling and desire to participate in scientific research, you'll be able to serve secondary goals like social networking and increasing communication between professional scientists and amateur scientists/public. And done right, you'll get interesting and useful data.

Engage the general public with nature by creating a Facebook app that easily allows people to record their observations in nature. For example, "UserX saw an American Robin in Maryland on August 5, 2007 at 4:45pm ET". Geolocation should be an option, either at a very specific location (lat/long) or on a more generalized level (ie: Baltimore, MD). It would be great if these observations could be broadcast out via Twitter, Google Earth, etc. etc.

As an offshoot on the Social Networks for Scientific Outreach idea, can we embed easy access to social networking applications within the $100 Laptop program so that kids in developing countries can participate in outreach programs for science (among many other things, I'm sure).

Summary:

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)

More details at http://octavia.zoology.washington.edu/game.pdf

Are the large whales really communicating over long ranges, and if so over what distances? Put another way, how does one show that multiple living objects mapped in 2D space are interacting based on a dataset consisting of spatially referenced, time-stamped events for each object? Is this the correct way to frame the question? [Ancillary data storage question: How does one efficiently archive, while retaining rapid access to and manipulation of, multi-10TB of acoustic data in which acoustic events have been annotated?] If society is going to implement functional rules to control and regulate human noise activities in the oceans, this question must be answered. Each species has unique vocal features. Some have dialects. Their voices can be heard over many hundreds of miles. I have almost 10 years of time series data of the lat-long positions of individual animals moving throughout the ocean to test the question. Fireflies blinking on and off, navigating through the skin of the blue deep, food and mates, sex and death. Is it really this simple? Voiced messages so stretched over time and space as to be lost on us, caring but unaware? All of this in jeopardy this past half century as the rising tide of acoustic smog withers acoustic detection range to a fraction of what it was and needs to be? 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.

At http://bioscreencast.com, we have created a resource for scientists to share screencasts of how they use their favorite software and web resources with their peers. Would there be an interest in creating a web based application that would make your task of recording and uploading screencasts easier? Currently you can only request and vote on screencasts (http://bioscreencast.com/bsc_reqsc.html)

At JoVE we publish videos of experimental procedures in biology. Recently I was approached by multiple people with questions, such as "Would you tape experiment X?" or "Have you considered taping such-and-such experiments in such-and-such industry?" Which brought me an idea:

Why not ask members of SciFoo what experiments they would be most interested in seeing on video? Perhaps it would make sense to have a session on the subject or a web site similar to this one (ReQuestR), that would allow people to make suggestions and vote on other people's suggestions?

Social networking tools for scientific outreach. Is there a way to leverage a social network to amplify programs in scientific outreach?

This is a bit weird, and by all means feel free to ignore it, but anyway... I think it would be interesting to make visual displays that showed why past experiments seemed to show things that we now don't think they can possibly have shown at all. E.g., transmutations - there are about 60 well-witnessed transmutations in early modern Europe, and we have recipes for central parts of the process. If you reconstruct the experiment in a lab, you can discover why people said they *saw* stages of transmutation. Bill Newman (Harvard) and Larry Principe (JHU) have done still pictures, (See, I think, Newman's book 'atoms and alchemy'), but video would be much better. What did people see when they saw a homunculus in the vessel?