During research of complex emergent (i.e. hyperdimensional) phenomena the coherent linear character of discussion forums may be suboptimal, because many useful insights gets lost fast in their history. My experience with overunity forums is, only first few pages are really contributory, the rest of threads is merely just a reiteration of their beginning. The tree-like organization of discussion threads with wordmaps visualization may be more effective here.
My experience with overunity forums is, only first few pages are really contributory, the rest of threads is merely just a reiteration of their beginning.
Rather like democracy, the forum discussion process is not perfect, but right now - like democracy- it's the best bad model we have. The good things about forums is that they are (within the bounds of civility) inhibitory, in that they encourage a broad range of viewpoints . Another factor which is not to be overlooked is that everyone knows how they work - a forum is a smorgasbord - consume what you like, leave what you don't.
Not really on topic, but when I try to find my way within the massive internet search data, I use a visualization search tool called carotsearch.
It allows me to visualize search results into three types of visualization of which I find the 'foamtree' visualization the most useful, helping to converge in a very fast way to relevant results.
By hovering your mouse over the segments and double click the most relevant one one can zoom deeper into most relevant search results. In parallel the usual textual search results are displayed in a separate page section.
The owners offer a licence to embed this tool on relevant websites (e.g. forums), but is not cheap.
When embedded to e.g. a scientific forum it will help find the potentially best collaborators, who then could be best candidates for contributing using tools described in the article.
QuoteRather like democracy, the forum discussion process is not perfect, but right now - like democracy- it's the best bad model we have
I didn't comment the discussion forum as such - rather the linear structure of it.
For example, at reddit the threads have tree like structure, which has for example the advantage, various frog&mice battles between close groups of people will soon disappear from sight of most users of forum,
because the number of nested levels rendered at page by default is limited.
That is to say, the linear forum isn't good engine for brainstorming, once more people get involved at the single moment.
Of course, at the case of lengthy threads the problem with navigation through history and repetition of the past reemerges again even at the branched forum, once it gets paged due to its scope.
Another particular problem of this forum is rather bad full-text search. For example, before some time I posted here this list of links - now I'm unable to find it at this forum.
The forum has no export feature of complete list of posts - so I'm forced to link it from another site or from my private archive of posts.
QuoteNot really on topic
On the contrary, it looks like perfect improvement of navigation structure.
The problem persisting with research of cold fusion is low quality of replications.
That is to say, the researchers are overly inventive and even at the case of replications they attempt to simplify or modify the original protocol.
The specific situation with cold fusion, which has strong economic incentives is, every just a bit useful know-how gets classified with researchers itself, which indeed doesn't help the situation.
This both makes the cold fusion research even less reproducible, than it really is.
