Large Hadron Collider Open Thread

Good news! CERN is powering up the new superconducting supercollider. Try to imagine all life as you know it stopping instantaneously and every molecule in your body exploding at the speed of light. We may all cease to exist in about 15 minutes!

Very much related to my earlier posts about the Hadley CRU meltdown: Wall Street Journal reports: "More Scientists Treat Experiments as a Team Sport."

Once a mostly solitary endeavor, science in the 21st century has become a team sport. Research collaborations are larger, more common, more widely cited and more influential than ever, management studies show. Measured by the number of authors on a published paper, research teams have grown steadily in size and number every year since World War II.

To gauge the rise of team science, management experts at Northwestern University recently analyzed 2.1 million U.S. patents filed since 1975 and all of the 19.9 million research papers archived in the Institute for Scientific Information database. "We looked at the recorded universe of all published papers across all fields, and we found that all fields were moving heavily toward teamwork," says Northwestern business sociologist Brian Uzzi.

As research projects grow more complicated, management becomes a variable in every experiment. "You can't do it alone," says research management analyst Maria Binz-Scharf at City College of New York. "The question is how you put it all together."

Uh huh. *cough*consensus*cough*

Aaaaah, the black holes are sending me back in time...to when I bitchslapped Rick Moran for being a neo-luddite about the LHC.

posted by Gabriel Malor at 03:20 PM

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