joergkurtwegner

Here my response to The Calculus of Grit of Venkatesh Rao.

For someone believing that intrinsic motivation [1] is much more important than extrinsic motivation I truly liked this article. I think that intrinsic systems will always require some additional skill for not getting lost in such spaces.

LinkedIn is one of the major platforms for professional networks. Since a few days various people within the scientific community created a visualization of their networks. Here some interpretations of my LinkedIn network, which contains three major clusters:

• On the left we see in orange my company network within Johnson & Johnson (J&J)

What are the measures that can make community genome annotation a success? [Ramy on FriendFeed]

This reminded me about a talk about Altruism (video) of Ernst Fehr:

We have already talked a lot about the long-tail in science, e.g. in drugs, chemical suppliers, and chemistry (section 5 and Rich's experiment with ad sense). In short, it is a kind of paradox that on the one hand people want more choice for really choosing the things they like. On the other hand we are drowning in the things we could choose, and there are so many things to pick from, that it is becoming harder and harder for making really rational choices [1,2]. Nonetheless, new markets and new science have growing long-tail's (in red), if we like it or not.

Here the answers and references from the "most wanted" list of our ESOF2010 discussions ;-)

• With respect to the large amount of career and scientific options I like the "The paradox of choice" principle (video). Update 2010-07-27: See also Sheena Iyengar on the art of choosing.
• For preventing feeling bad about choices I think the strongest motivation is staying truly to yourself and to feel good about the decision which was made (even if it might be bounded rational):
  

  "Do not go where the path may lead; go instead where there is no path and leave a trail." [Ralph Waldo Emerson]

Here some remarkable sentences of the ESOF2010 conference, which made me think.

I had a lot of opportunities talking in more depth to the 20 young scientists of the J&JPRD ScienceBus. I was especially interested in their perception of what scientific communities are, how they connect to communities, and most importantly how they are being found by communities? So, I took a challenging standpoint: I was wondering how the ESOF ScienceBus is helping them to connect their work and themselves, as scientists, to existing communities?

People knowing me are fully aware that I like science, community communication, and community collaboration. This is a reason why some of my young science colleagues thought I might be interested in contributing to the ESOF 2010 science bus community. Actually, since I do this sort of thing since a while I just said: “Count me in!”. And just to be clear, I do this in my private time, some call it holiday, and yes, I have many reasons to believe in ... people and science!

Euroscience is a pan-European association of individuals interested in constructing scientific Europe "from the bottom-up". [EuroScience]

I will join the EuroScience Open Forum 2010 and hope to meet you there! If you are going, too, please ping me via Twitter, FriendFeed, or eMail.

Repost of this post as test case for my new Drupal blog.

Let us not forget that there are different 'scientific personalities' [1] as there exist different 'information management personalities' [2]. I think we should appreciate the diversity and never even try to force all scientists behaving the same. Nonetheless, would I like to see more scientists contributing to social media. Especially supporting various personalities for various reasons in multiple ways !