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This is going to be a bit of an experiment.
The typical Lab thread seems to fall into one of two categories. The first is the question-answering category, in which a poster poses a question and a flurry of usually not-terribly-informed responses follow. The second category is that of the science news soundbyte, in which a science-related news story is posted as an item for casual discussion. The problem with both these types of discussion is that there's little impetus for the reader to go out and actually do any in-depth research or learning.
To try and improve the standard of discussion in the lab, I'm going to propose that we found a science-oriented reading group. The idea is that this thread be used to discuss topics for group readings or research and plan followup discussions.
To get things rolling, I'll throw out a few ideas of things I'd like to learn more about. If anyone else is interested in one or more of these topics, we can plan a set of readings and establish a thread to follow discussion as we go along.
Possible initial topics:
The current state of the art in artificial intelligence. Readings would include journal articles freely available online and research might include playing around with freely available toolkits for machine learning.
Physics 101 Readings could include sections from the Feynman Lectures on Physics (which are also available online as MP3), class notes from freely available online courses provided by CalTech, and other introductory physics material. Research could include a collaborative effort to understand some of the mathematics underlying general relativity.
Readings on Climate Change An analysis of peer-reviewed articles related to climate change and the models used to make predictions about the future of climate. |
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