As I have mentioned elsewhere, I spent that last 2 weeks in the US, catching up with various friends and colleagues I am collaborating with in Woods Hole and San Diego. My trip culminated in SciFoo ’07, at Googleplex in Mountain View, California – a 3-day science fest organized by Nature and O'Reilly, and hosted by Google. The “unconference” comprised of 200+ invited scientists, techno-geeks, entrepreneurs, artists and writers who are using science and technology to change the world. SciFoo has no predefined agenda; instead attendees collaboratively create one during the first evening of the event. There are numerous accounts of what happened at SciFoo ’07 (just Google SciFoo, or check out the blog posts on Technorati and the pictures on Flickr). Here are a few personal highlights:

Friday 3rd Aug.

In the opening session Charles Simonyi recalled his recent journey into space, and his time aboard the International Space Station. Martha Stewart added some celestial culinary tips on gourmet space dining, and then Charles closed with a Q&A. The first question was “What does space smell like?” – arguably not the most scientifically insightful question, but it was a similar sensory question to the one I was thinking of (Was the space station noisy?). These are the kinds of questions that testify to the value of manned space flight. Machines may do better (non-human) science in space, but they would never be able to answer most of the questions Charles received during this session.

That evening Saul Griffith talked about the flow of energy on Earth, how we use it, and how we might change these patterns. His talk introduced me to Howtoons, and how it is possible to communicate science to politicians (and children of all ages) more effectively.

Saturday 4th Aug.

David Mindell (not the evolutionary biologist!) ran a session on the future of manned space flight. All but two of the participants were British, and Kevin Fong advocated some kind of exclusive British participation in a manned space program as a way of getting more British kids interested in science. Personally I thought this was crazy as someone’s nationality seems irrelevant to his or her ability to inspire young scientists, but perhaps I am just too naive. I was reluctant to speak up, but I sat next to Martin Rees on the bus to Googleplex the following day, it turns out at least he agreed with me.

Michael Kurtz, Geoffrey Bilder and Carole Goble ran an inspiring session entitled “Scientific Communication in 2030”. I was fascinated, not because the sessions content was particularly new to me, but because it echoed what I had been thinking about methods of scientific communication for some time. In data rich fields like biodiversity science, traditional methods of communication act as a bottleneck to scientific progress, hiding what we actually do and distorting our working practices. During the session I talked a little about my attempts to solve this for biodiversity data, and Paul Ginsparg asked me how this would change the type of science I do. I said the science would not change (we will still be addressing the same basic set of questions), but our ability to answer these problems will be greatly improved.

A person from Google (sorry – I can’t remember their name – I came in late!) talked about their efforts to archive and distribute the world’s largest scientific datasets. It turns out that for most very large datasets (multiple terabytes up to a few petabytes), it is easier to collect them by FedEx’ing hard drives, than sending them by wire (the so called “FedEx Net”). I guess this should come as no surprise, but the project (code named palimpsest) has no web presence, no search interface, and no cast iron guarantee that Google will even keep your data (though they’d be crazy not to). The argument is that countries with the biggest need for this service lack the necessary bandwidth. For emergency storage of public data I think this is a great idea. Perhaps when Google does something with all the dark fiber it has been buying up, this project will be a bit more accessible.

The last session of the day culminated with a talk by Adrian Johns on the history of intellectual piracy. Adrian gave a spellbinding account of the intrigue and murder surrounding a pirate radio station owner (Reginald Calvert), and how events surrounding Calverts death challenged the monopoly of the BBC, paving the way for commercial broadcasting in Britain. The preceded a more general discussion on different forms of intellectual piracy. It turns out that to establish the priority of scientific discoveries, the UK’s Royal Society once transcribed the scientific letters and papers they received into a book. It struck me that biological taxonomists still use the same principles of priority when naming new species. It is just unfortunate we’ve forgotten to track of these discoveries in the equivalent of the Royal Societies lab notebook - shame on us!

Sunday 5th Aug.

Reverting back to my biological interests I went to a session by Philip Campbell on how to celebrate Darwin’s 200th birthday in 2009. Unlike the UK, this event has a very different meaning in America, which sees confrontations on the subject of evolution on a regular basis. I was disappointed to learn that there is relatively little coordination of US activities, and that while a number of important institutions are planning a series of major events, organizations like the Smithsonian have been remarkable quiet about their plans. The US politicization of science is something we (largely) escape from in the UK, and while I left the session with a number of ideas to supplement what is already being planned in the UK, I am uneasy about the US plans (or lack thereof) for 2009.

With the Tree-of-Life session cancelled, I stumbled into Aaron Swartz’s session on digital libraries. Aaron gave a demo of Open Library, a new project with the simple aim of making every book (ever) available online. The project allows users to create and curate its catalog, contribute to its content, and have full, free access to its data. Rights issues aside, the project shows what can be achieved when a group of smart people get together to quickly make something happen. Aaron opened the discussion up to ask what people are doing with literature and bibliographies. I spoke about my work on the Scratchpads, and Aaron asked me to give a demo of the different sites. Tim Hubbard suggested that the Wellcome Trust could help by buying up all the publications from Elsevier! After the session I chatted with Tim about the difficulties of funding infrastructure projects like the Scratchpads in the UK. At present there is no easy way of supporting this type of digital repository.

Finally Henry Gee ran a session called “Science Fiction: what is it for?” Henry talked a little on the Futures section in Nature that has made a welcome return to the journal. A number of high profile authors chipped in on their motivations for writing Science Fiction and various scientists gave their motivations for reading it. Richard Satava (formally from DARPA) said that he gets his best ideas from Sci-Fi books, which he saw as a kind of scrapbook of possible projects. Personally it was Science Fiction that inspired me to get interested in science. As a boy growing up in a small Somerset town, books like Clarke’s “Profiles of the future” and “The fountains of paradise” fed my imagination and kept me interested in science, at I time when I could do little to contribute to the scientific process.

To sum up, the real value of SciFoo can never be captured in words. It’s the serendipitous meetings with people that I would otherwise never meet, which really defines SciFoo. People like Manu Prakash, whose bubbling enthusiasm for fluid dynamics is matched by formidable skill in the lab (Manu designs micro plumbing computer chips that make things with droplets of liquid, and in his spare time figures out how insects and birds swim and feed); Vaughan Bell, a clinical psychologist that stretches the boundaries of what we know about how the brain works (check out his Mind Hacks blog); Geoffrey Bilder who is fighting the battle against linkrot with DOI’s at CrossRef; Jean-Claude Bradley, who with a 2 minute demo before his batteries went flat gave me an epiphany on how I can use Second Life for outreach at the NHM; Nature Publishing Group (especially Timo Hannay, Sara Abdulla and Henry Gee) who amongst other things produce the one science journal I am guaranteed to look at every week; and of course, the bloggers like PLoS’s chief evangelist Bora Zivkovic, plus Duncan Hull, who keeps me informed about all the science I should be doing via NodalPoint, when Duncan’s is not being a biochemist / bioinfomatican at the University of Manchester. Thanks to all those at SciFoo ’07 for making it the best conference I have ever attended.