It's always worth seeing the first lecture at any popular introductory-level college course, because that's when the professor rolls out the crowd-pleasing stuff.

Like electrified pickles!

"This is a standard pickle into which we are pumping 110 volts AC," says Massachusetts Institute of Technology Professor Anant Argawal, 25 minutes into his first Circuits and Electronics lecture from fall 2000. His assistant flips a switch and a lowly gherkin, impaled on two electrodes, begins to glow. It quickly becomes a hissing, pulsating, red-and-green mutation, much to the delight of the full lecture hall.

The point of that smelly demonstration, Argawal says when the pickle has finished being fried, is to bring home the realities of practice versus theory. The pickle has a fixed resistance to the electric current, but the result is not as fixed as abstract formulae indicates.

"You don't want to go berserk on this abstraction binge – too much of anything is bad for you," Argawal tells the class, gesturing pickle-ward. "Abstraction cannot predict the nice light and sound effect."

I did not attend MIT or take any electrical engineering courses, but I can ponder Argawal's pickle point, thanks to what may be the biggest change to hit science in a long time. Call it the YouTube-ification of research.

Professors, field researchers, theoreticians and laboratory bosses have begun to embrace the idea of free online videos, starring themselves. They want to reach both the public (indirect source of public funds) and their colleagues (direct source of citations and collaboration).

MIT is leading this charge with its OpenCourseWare system, which has put video of all lectures in all classes, and various course materials, online for free.

A truly dedicated home learner can now get a complete MIT education for free, sort of. You can't ask questions if you get stuck (if you don't get stuck in MIT classes, you're not paying attention) or take exams or get any credit, but the raw information is there to be used as you wish.

Lots of other colleges are following suit, combining online video and the open-source philosophy to expand that whole educating-the-masses thing.

And now this idea is beginning to branch out beyond universities, with a couple of Web sites that want to be the YouTube of Ph.D.'s.

"The goal isn't to diminish value of a scientific publication, it's to draw attention to it. . . . In turn, we're hoping that that promotes citation for those publications," said Apryl Bailey, production manager for SciVee.tv, based at the University of California at San Diego. (It's the first Web site I've visited with a "dot-tv" domain name. How exciting!)

A similar site, called Scitalks.com, is on a hiatus while it prepares to relaunch with new code. As a good local journalist, I hunted through both for New Hampshire researchers' videos but couldn't find any.

SciVee.tv was started by Philip Bourne, a professor in the pharmaceutical-science school at UC-San Diego, after he noticed his students' propensity for watching videos online "even in class, at times," Bailey said.

He hooked up with the San Diego Supercomputer Center, which was working on a system for scientists to pull publication information online with video, got some National Science Foundation seed money, and SciVee was born.

A year later, it's still an infant, with fewer videos about all of science than you'll find on YouTube about people doing odd things with cheese. Graphics are usually basic, and the narration can border on the soporific, although you do hear some interesting accents.

It's sort of like a local-access cable channel built on calculus and protein folding instead of selectmen's meetings. But content is king, and these videos are nothing if not crammed full of content.

SciVee has plans to move beyond this. They're developing software that connects supporting material and videos and, most importantly, allows Web search engines to find specific portions of a video and jump right to that point.

The board is hiring a real CEO and hopes to create a self-sustaining entity, perhaps separate from the university, based on some sort of income that will lead the march of scientific progress into the digital-video century.

Maybe, instead of the new YouTube, sites like SciVee could become the new Nature and Science journal.

Bailey said the idea of science videos has not run into opposition from stuffed shirts. I'm surprised, because the ethos of "if it's accessible then it's not good science" runs deep. It's even got a name: Carl Sagan Syndrome, because that Cornell astronomer got the cold shoulder from some colleagues after he became a science-popularizing TV star.

You would think chatting up your work in front of a camera would enflame science snobbery, but apparently not. And as today's video-swapping undergrads become tomorrow's department heads, I imagine that it will become more and more acceptable.

Maybe MIT should consider adding some new courses to its curriculum. How about "The Hyperbolic Geometry of Flattering Camera Angles"?

originally posted at: http://www.nashuatelegraph.com
by: Dave Brooks
Published: Wednesday, July 9, 2008