Friday 20 March 2020

Killing time while in quarantine

There are many posts in blogs and social networks these days about what some people do or what suggest to others to do while they are isolated in quarantine. Well, this is my suggestion.
Find a difficult and interesting open problem and try to solve it. Some problem that you may understand its definition but you and the rest of the world have no idea about its resolution. In computer science and logic good candidates are the famous NP vs P problem or the Continuum Hypothesis; of course there are numerous others.
Reading about the problem and working on any idea that you may have about it will not only be an interesting task but will probably make you learn something interesting and it will surely help you in killing time. Who knows, eventually you might actually solve the problem and gain fame and fortune.
In case you follow this advice here is another one on how you should approach it. If you want to solve an open long standing problem you have to think innovative and differently than everybody else. If thinking like everybody else and following the mainstream would be enough to solve the problem then it wouldn’t have been open as someone would have already solved it.

Tuesday 10 March 2020

CONVID-19 coronavirus quarantine. A chance to promote e-conferences.

The quarantine that has been imposed to many parts of the world due to the spread of the CONVID-19 virus creates a lot of problems in transportation and in events like conferences. This may be a chance to reconsider the way that scientific conferences are organized. Although modern technologies of teleconferencing are used in a wide scale in education they are not used in conferences. So in parts of the world were the organization of gatherings is nowadays impossible, conferences have to be canceled.
A good alternative in all these trouble is simply teleconferencing, probably including an archive of video presentations and lectures. But if the scientific community will ever move to this direction there will be more benefits than just dealing with a temporary uncomfortable situation. Promoting teleconferencing and establishing a new type of e-conferences will make conferences open to a wider audience, not just to those people that make it to attend the event. Even without the quarantine, traveling to other countries and continents to attend a conference is not always an easy case and for many people is a difficult issue.
The demand for open science and data should not be restricted to the free dissemination of papers and preprints. In an era were multimedia flood the web and MOOCs are the latest trend in education, conferences should follow the same direction and become open platforms for exchanging ideas and interesting results in global scale.