[google earth and beyond]

At the AGU conference this evening Michael Jones (Google) is talking about "The Spread of Scientific Knowledge From the Royal Society to Google Earth and Beyond."

Some notes (live blogged)

• implicit role of communication within technologies (telephone, television etc...)
• Roger Bacon
• Knowledge was lost with the Greek and Egyptan civilizations, kept alive by Syrians, Moors, Jews and other then advance and diffused by Arabic-speakng peoples

• spreading of scientific knowledge "by people on camels" is why we know what we know
• the rise of the university - efficacy of printing, the compuass as aid to navigation, the royal society (1645, England, Newton, shared knowledge in a very collegial way)
• This conference is like the Royal Society but only for a week, the next step in knowledge sharing is regular, informal meetings, R.S was more like a chat room rather than like a structured oratory
  
• it's not just about getting data together but organising it
• three great means for spreading knowledge: printing, the compass as aid to navigation, the royal society - says Joseph Glanvil (1630-1680). A Defence of the Royal Society, 1678
• radio was a wasted opportunity, could have been used to reach people who weren't able to go to schools etc...
• with computers you can do 100 times more than what newton did in the pub!
  
• in the last 10 years, 1.4 billion people went online
• there are 1.530,000,000 google searches daily... "and probably 100 other kinds"
• 400,000,000 google earth activations, everyone has to find grandma's house
• says communication online via social networks is very important, so are e-mails and IM's
• 10 billion YouTube videos streamed monthing in the USA, closest things used to be grandparents showing home videos so YouTube is changing how we communicate
• the point of google earth is allowing people to access information about their own world
• you have to care about knowledge in order for it to really make a logical understandng
• google earth is the equivalent of the blank web page or static on the radio, google earth is the empty graph paper for you to plot your graph - that's like the academics when they used to meet in the bar
  
  
  
  


• context brings knowledge to life
• Google Earth is most popular in countries where knowledge is restricted
• jones says he won't have a slide on this, talks of Obama and says how he has a preference to put money into technical advice
  
• Jones says academic research is about always needing more money to find out more, publish cursory results then ask for more money. instead, find rocks, glaciers etc... then publish the data, on your website etc. so other researchers can see it. then you can play a game of how smart you are, who can interpret the data and how, bring your notebook to the bar
• who is going to start doing this, scientists - the tone of increased funding should come with increased visability
• transparency of communication avaiable on the internet - don't apply for a grant to put your information on google earth, if things are intrically productive you would just do it, you wouldn't need funding for it