This is a cool idea: a space book for the visually impaired and blind. Using a combination of braille, embossing and textured images, this amazing new book is aiming to bring space and its beauty to a new slice of the demographic pie.

(This is good timing for the internet, what with the recent YouTube videos of the sounds of Jupiter and Saturn.)

The book also points out that a lot of what we see in images from space is already beyond the human eye’s perception.

By showing these images, we remind readers that most of the universe and its beauty is hidden for all of our eyes unless we use special telescopes - Doris Daou, Co-author

The book contains images of stars, planets, nebulae and some telescopes too. I think this is wonderful and would be very interested to hear what a blind person might have to say about ‘images’ of space. and whether any new insights can be gleaned from them.

If you know any blind astronomers, or are blind yourself, please let me know what I can do to make this sight more easily accessible to the visually impaired.

“Touch the Invisible Sky” was written by astronomy educator and accessibility specialist Noreen Grice of You Can Do Astronomy LLC and the Museum of Science, Boston, with authors Simon Steel, an astronomer with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., and Doris Daou, an astronomer at NASA Headquarters, Washington.

For more information, visit the NASA site.

[Via the Bad Astronomer]

If the tail was smarter, the tail would wag the dog.

Two things have just come back to me at the same time and collided wonderfully, thanks to an article over at Universe Today. The article is one about the liquid mirror telescope that a NASA researcher proposes could be built on the Moon in the near(ish) future. The eagle-eyed among you may recalled I blogged the same story back in May, thanks to a link from Wired.

This isn’t me trying to say ‘I got the scoop’, because clearly I didn’t, but it got me thinking about the effect the internet can have on science. I think about the internet quite a bit, and its possible long-term influence on our culture. In fact my friend writes a blog about the internet and its effect on literature and fiction. Also, I found myself an almost-expert on blogs in recent years. So I would say I was a knowledgeable person on the matter.

The Wired article, so far as I can tell, was an original piece (compared to my own which was a link to it). They had interviewed this guy, Roger Angel, and created a journalistic piece on his research for NASA. Digg found the story, as did a host of other astronomy and science blogs (I can’t be bothered to link to all of them) and it did the rounds in the blogosphere. That was all back at the end of May. now, one month later an official NASA news release describes how the technical article for a giant liquid mirror telescope has been made public etc etc. The article is to appear in Nature.

So what happened? Clearly the internet knew about this before Nature could publish it. So this concept had reached the public domain before the journals had processed it. I rather like this fact and it was the first thing that occurred to me when I realised the echoed story had occurred.

The other thing that came back to me today was a book called ‘The Long Tail’, by Chris Anderson the editor of Wired magazine (a coincidence!). I found out it is out in paperback, but I listened to in on audiobook a while ago. The book outlines how massive niche markets have been shaping the economy in recent years thanks to the internet and sites such as eBay, iTunes and Amazon. It turns out that millions of highly selective minor purchases (such as niche music on iTunes) actually make up most of the sales compared with the more popular, mass marketed items (i.e. hit songs). Once the restriction of shelf space is removed, retailers no longer have to only stock certain items and the internet provides a forum for distributing digital media on an unlimited scale. No shelves required. Well its a great book - read it.

Anyway, my point is that science could easily go the way of entertainment because it is now digital. Papers no longer need to be published by journals to be read, they are instead deposited on vast pre-print archives online. Good ideas that capture minds can be distributed via the niche interest blogs, email, and within university department - all instantaneously and without the restriction of paper, time and money.

I am finishing my first year of an astronomy PhD and have never, not once so far, picked up and read any edition of any journal. Weird, huh? Not really, I get an automatic daily email from the astro-ph pre-print server and I browse a daily list of new articles and papers related to my subject. I can also just as easily read a Canadian or Japanese paper as a UK one.

So what about the liquid telescope? Well it seems that in this case, Wired beat Nature to the scoop. In fact there is very little about astronomy which Nature picks up, that I do not hear about first from some other source. Now maybe at this point we still need Nature to tell us, retrospectively, what was important and notable. Perhaps they have the skill as mavens of interestingness.
Imagine if the ocean of scientific ideas was truly democratic, in the internet sense of the word. I don’t know what it would mean for science long-term but I have a feeling that if it could be kept free of the corrupting influence of marketing, then an open source science community could be the future of many discplines.

Digg.com’s science categories are - on the whole - reflective of current interests and may act as an experiment of sorts. The question is whether the old boy’s club of astronomy will be open to the idea of the internet in their lives. I shall be watching very closely.

I have been listeing to the audiobook version of J. Surowiecki’s ‘The Wisdom of Crowds’. Its a really intetresting book that looks at the way group decision making and decentralised organisations can produce results better and more intelligently that the members of those groups individually. Its a look at the modern penchant for decentralising everything and asks, in a round about fashion, whether or not people can work effectively in groups and if so, how to use that ability wisely.

Surowiecki (pronounced surwikky) gives lots of examples of good and bad uses of groups of people. Good examples include Linux, the open-source computer operating system created by submission from its users; Google and its search results gleaned from the collective clicking of all its users; and oddly, Zara the Spanish clothing shop chain. Bad examples include the team at NASA responsible for dealing the aftermath of the Columbia distaster and TV ratings system in America.

Its a really good book, well laid out and if you’re into your non-ficiton its lovely to read something outside of the normal Popular Science genre. Best of all for me though, and the reason that I am writing about this on Orbiting Frog, is that it discusses science and scietists as a group gathering collective knowledge and how we are a great example of open source people in action. It also enlightened me as to how clever the Zara clothing chain is, and having a good friend that used to work there I found this of interest. Its also funny that science and Zara have so much in common.

Science is obviously ‘open source’ if you’re inside it. Information is freely made available to all other community members and everyone is contributing to the common good. Those ideas that are accepted, become ‘knowledge’ and are thus used more by others to continue on and find more knowledge.

Suroweicki uses the SARS outbreak as a good example of an organised international scientific endeavour and points out that no one person disocvered the nature of the SARS virus, it was the results of collaboration between many labs all over the world who met regular via the internet and phone to exchange the latest results. Interesting the WHO’s SARS teams were not the WHO’s at all, really. They were simply approached by the WHO and asked to join and fter that the teams were left to organise themselves in many ways. Each team specialise naturally according its strengths and they all exchanged data on different viruses and samples. There was no design to the way the teams worked, many labs could work on duplicate viruses and in fact many did. But despite what seems to be an obstacle to their success, namely, their apparent disorganisation, the labs discovered the cause of SARS in the fastest time any disease has been uncovered - ever.

How did they do this? Well greater control was given to each level of the hierarchy and less structure was placed between the teams. The teams were each able to go where the results lead them without having to rigorously pursue a list of prescribed avenues of investigation. In economical terms they were lead by the market. In the SARS case, the market is the flow of information and profitable results are ones that lead to identifying SARS.

Curiously it seems that comanies like Nike are not lead by the market very tightly and could do with learning a lesson from the way science works. Nike outsources all its manufacture in huge, bulk orders. This means that Nike has to guess what items will be popular in advance and order large volumes of stock months before it will ever go on sale. What this means is that they end up throwing away huge amounts of their products or selling them at a reduced price. This is where Zara comes in and wows me.

Most Zara stores (there are 600 worldwide) get stock in twice a week. They only carry around a months worth of any item compared to 3 months for most other stores. Zara’s average product lifetime is a week and the time from design to shop floor is a mere fifteen days. Despite this, Zara still manufacures everything itself, in Spain. The only created around 300 line sof clothing at any point, compared to the 20,000 designed by most other stores. How do they do this? Well every Zara manger is always reporting back, in real time (more or less) to the HQ in Spain. Within days, Zara knows if a product is selling and because it produces its own stock in just runs of a few hundred (compared to tens of thousands by Nike) it can simply stop making those items that don’t sell or increase production on those that do. Within days the shop floor will relfect these changes.

In some ways Zara is more like Google than it is like Top Shop. Zara wastes very little, virtually nothing compared to Nike, and yet still competes with those companies on the high street. Because Zara can go from design to store so quickly it rapidly reflects the wants of the public and so there will rarely be many items on sale and certainly very few thrown into piles to be sold at discount outlets.

Zara treats clothes the same way science treats knowledge. Both go with the flow in each case and those things deemed not worth persuing are left by the wayside, in real time.

‘The Wisdom of Crowds’ can found on Amazon, Audible and many others. Check it out.