Some things of interest from today’s IDS

I love the local student paper. It’s free, and it’s got some interesting things you don’t get even in the other local paper (which, grrr, restricts access to its web stories). A sample from today …

Wikipedia to take on academia
Hot on the heels of the Wall Street Journal article on a debate between big wigs in Wikipedia and Encylcopedia Britannica comes a local story on how much professors are accepting the free encylclopedia as an academic source. About 3000 email surveys were sent to IU professors asking about policies in citing Wikipedia in papers. While the IDS fails to mention the number of surveys returned, of those profs who complied, 49% allowed it, 35% did not and 16% didn’t think it was applicable to their courses (and thus had no policy). The article quotes Christian Sandvig, an assistant professor of speech communication at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, as providing this description to students:

“I tell them to picture some fish,” he said. “There’s a larger fish eating a smaller fish, and that one’s eating a smaller fish and so on. Those are all different sources. Wikipedia is the smallest one, and the biggest is a peer-reviewed journal.”

According to Wikipedia, 57 academic articles were published with citations from its pages. (I just edited that page to say 5700. jk.)

Experiment shows how traffic patterns are created
Cog-sci professor Robert Goldstone conducted an experiment suggested by former U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower when he was a lowly university president at Columbia. Ike’s theory was that, if you plant grass seed and let the pedestrians go where they may, the paths their feet make will locate the best place to put the sidewalks. This is a very complex adaptive systems idea, so it’s no wonder Goldstone and the Percepts and Concepts Laboratory found it interesting. He also sees this as a metaphor for non-physical paths, such as the political and social directions a country takes by building the knowledge and actions of one generation on top of another. Paths don’t find themselves, either; it takes a pioneer to take the first steps and thus entice others to follow.

“We want a society that makes the most of the previous generation’s path but is not locked into following it exactly,” he said. “If the old paths are too strong and indelible, then future innovations are impeded.”

Goldstone’s wife, btw, is Katy Börner, who helped put together NetSci 2006 last May.

Collaborative project puts local artists’ work on city buses
Bloomington Transit and Your Art Here, a non-profit public art organization, have collaborated to create a new program called, “Stories in Motion.” Local artists were asked to submit artwork expressing “the spirit of Bloomington” to be displayed on the sides and interior of busses. A jury selected nine pieces by artists as young as three years old to fill spaces on ten busses in the fleet.