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[worldviewer]

If you are going to email, please learn the history for how I arrived at this point of realizing that we must reform the way we discuss controversial science. This is crucial background information for any potential discussions.

[worldviewer]

Each section contains an image:

• [ ] Start it with a short bio
• [ ] EU2016 talk - part 1
• [ ] EU2016 talk - part 2
• [ ] Science as a Personal Journey
• [ ] EdgeScience article
• [ ] We are tracking controversies in the G+ Collection
• [ ] Join me in the comments at phys.org
• [ ] Patreon

[worldviewer]

I need to use this component to visualize my own personal timeline.

When I graduated from Carnegie Mellon in '97, I lacked any personal interest in science at all. My focus was instead on engineering -- at first on hardware engineering and later, web development.

By 2005, a couple of thought-provoking Youtube documentaries led me to take a closer look at the electricity in space debate.

By 2007, I began the process of running claims between these against-the-mainstream theorists, their critics, and laypeople. I began the creation of a library dedicated to scientific controversies.

These experiences would prove crucial in 2012, when I realized that that there was a need for a more scientific social network. I began the creative process of defining the problems of modern science, talking with others and writing ideas down. Although I had dabbled in HTML and some ASP by this point, I lacked a comprehensive web development education.

I attended General Assembly in 2015, and although it definitely helped me to see the bigger picture of web development, after three years of coding, I consider myself by now mostly self-taught. I dabbled in Angular, but kept looking for a better framework.

By 2016, I was working at Wikia as a PHP developer. It is during this period that I created the 182 controversy cards in the G+ collection (link).

By December of 2016, I decided to learn React (and a few months later, Redux). This marked a milestone of sorts, because I finally felt extremely comfortable in a frontend framework. I decided to first build out an animated controversy card demo (link).

I started to realize that I needed a search box for scientific controversies in May of 2017. It was more-or-less in place within a few weeks, but I would continue to put work into it to the present moment.

In June of 2017, I began work on a stealth-mode startup as system architect and first developer. It was my first experience constructing a codebase from scratch. That work continues to the present moment (real-time data), and has left me with a better understanding of how to construct a scalable site using Amazon's AWS.

By mid-June, I had formulated a pitch for why we need to pay more attention to scientific controversies -- which I delivered in two parts at the 2016 Electric Universe conference.

I have noticed over time that a lot of my ideas for how to make science more innovative originate with my online discussions. As that realization has settled in, there emerged a realization that others can benefit from this experience. And that has led me to work towards a solution that relies heavily upon the tracking of scientific controversies over time. In October of 2017, I fine-tuned this pitch into a Thunderblog.

I would next explain the origin of the scientific social network idea in the December 2017 Edge issue (which releases on December 15th).

By this point -- after 5 years of ruminating on a scientific social network and 10 years of immersion in running claims online -- I have become very clear on what I think needs to be built. All of the design features for this social network are reactions to my many online experiences observing people react to controversial science claims.

Although I have over time frequented a variety of online platforms under a variety of pseudonyms (including Digg, BoingBoing, Slashdot and Parlio), my current daily interactions are on phys.org, where I now post under my real name. You can replicate my own experience by opening up the app in one browser and phys.org in another.

My daily routine involves checking online science articles and published papers for new information that is relevant to any of the 182 controversy cards (link) which have already been published. When I encounter something of value, I post it into the comments of those cards. Unfortunately, many of the images associated with these posts have apparently been destroyed by Google, and they have ignored my requests to fix them. When the crowdsourcing features are added to the app, I will transfer all of the best comments to the app.

Another crucial part of my daily routine is the search for new controversies and daily organization of what I've found. This is a very important part of the process because I don't publish a controversy card until some (subjective) threshold is achieved that a coherent argument can be put forward.

I also continue to maintain my immersion within the Thunderbolts Project (TM), and am committed to bringing my most valuable learnings from those experiences to the public with my new platform.

I believe that if we create a space where quality thinking is identified according to the values of each individual component of the larger scientific machine, that great things can happen. Academia can be reformed, but we should expect that this reform will have to come from the outside. And what I am proposing is that this reform will be a reaction to observing that the public can think at a very high level on complex issues of scientific importance. Once academia witnesses this in an undeniable manner, the relationship between layperson and specialist experts will be forever changed.

[worldviewer]

The timeline package was a total fiasco ... so many css issues, looking at other packages ...

[worldviewer]

This timeline is very interesting, but it's honestly a friggin mess. He even threw jQuery into it to perform query selection and keypress event handling.

[worldviewer]

I'm thinking along the lines of just using react-swipeable-views, using the same sort of timeline graphic in the center of the page, very similar to this:

In general, I would just place one date on each page. The article and G+ collection dates could show hyperlinked screenshots of the articles and the video dates could show actual Youtube embeds.

There would need to be some sort of indicator that the user can swipe.

[worldviewer]

I'm going to prevent them from seeing my email address until they have visited each of the panes for at least 5 seconds.

If they swipe all the way to the end without doing that, then I will show a message that they did not actually read the timeline.

Can I save a flag of some sort that indicates that they rushed it? This would be far easier to do if I placed an email form right there on the page.