Researchers' Home Pages Serve Scientific, Educational, Personal Goals

Personal Goals Author: Robert Finn With the explosion of the World Wide Web-Wired magazine estimates that new home pages are being added to the Web at a rate of one every four seconds (N. Negroponte, February 1996, page 188)-there are many informative home pages scientists can turn to. Researchers, for example, often check out Web sites that have been established by manufacturers of scientific equipment, professional societies, funding agencies, and universities, among others. But it's not just scientific institutions that have set up Web pages. Some individual scientists have invited their colleagues to turn to them for information by establishing their own personal Web sites. Their purposes range from science education to personal advertisement to indexing an entire field's online presence. The Scientist recently investigated five noteworthy Web sites and asked the scientists who developed them how and why they did it. The sites exemplify several styles of home pages, from the simple to the highly complex. Their authors agree that developing a worthwhile Web site requires a bit more than just learning some HTML (hypertext markup language) formatting codes. Yet it remains simple enough that any scientist with an idea and a spare computer or a little disk space on the institutional server can do it. Community Outreach: Biologist Paul Grobstein's Serendip page consists of "a set of problems we find interesting" and encourages visitors "to interact with us." One of the more ambitious scientific Web sites is the Serendip Home Page (http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/), established by Paul Grobstein, the Eleanor A. Bliss Professor of Biology at Bryn Mawr College. "Many Web pages are essentially advertisements: 'Here I am,'" Grobstein notes. "Our vision was of a much more interactive, community-oriented Web site, one in which we would say, 'Look, here's a set of problems we find interesting. Here's what we currently know about those problems. Here's the sort of things we think are important. Let's put them out there more as a publication than as an advertisement, and see whether we can get people to interact with us, think about these things, and so forth.' "My own research and my interests at the moment are very much in the area of the role that chance, randomness, plays in organized systems, particularly the brain," says Grobstein. Serendip reflects his interest by including sections on free will, on the mind-body problem-the question of whether or not the mind is a non-material entity-and on pattern recognition. It supplies valuable lists of links to related Web resources, as well. There's also a forum for interactive discussion. "There's typically an essay posted, and people are invited to respond," explains Grobstein. One of the most active current discussions centers on R.J. Herrnstein and C. Murray's controversial book The Bell Curve (New York, Free Press, 1994). Another section is the Playground, where visitors can work puzzles and games that illustrate some of Serendip's themes. Michael J. Tarr, an assistant professor of cognitive and linguistic sciences at Brown University, has taken his Web page a step or two past the simplest level. In addition to descriptions of his research and links to his collaborators' pages, Tarr's page (http://www.cog.brown.edu/brochure/people/mjt/people/tarr.html) has pictures of his "Greebles"-one of his lab's major contributions to cognitive science. "The Greebles are a set of objects designed to study face recognition," he explains. "The problem is that most people who study face recognition never had a good control set of objects which are like faces in that they are very visually similar." Just as human faces are made up of number of common elements-two eyes, two ears, a nose, and a mouth-yet are individually distinct, the Greebles were designed to have a number of common, yet subtly varied, visual elements. By placing all 60 Greebles on the Web (they come in two "genders" and five "families"), Tarr increases the possibility that they will become widely adopted by other researchers as control stimuli in studies of facial recognition. Greeble recognition research may sound fanciful, but it's an important part of cognitive science. And Tarr recognizes the need for playfulness on the Web. "We try to have a little bit of fun with it," he explains. "You don't want to be too stodgy." For example, Tarr has added an illustrated section that chronicles a unique experiment in social psychology when, in response to a dare from his sister Maya, he decided to dye his hair blue. Cynics like to say that one day soon every Web page will consist entirely of links to other Web pages, and none of them will have any actual substance. This cynicism may be misplaced, not only because the amount of scientific content on the Web seems to be increasing on a daily basis, but also because pages that index other sites can be as useful as a library's card catalog. Dr. No: Jack Lancaster of Louisiana state University Medical center set up the Nitric Oxide Home Page, a Web site that highlights NO's diversity of functions. A good example of a Web page that's valuable precisely because it's a list of links is the Nitric Oxide Home Page (http://www.lsumc.edu/campus/phys/jlanca/jussayno.htm), set up by Jack R. Lancaster, Jr., an associate professor in the departments of physiology and medicine at Louisiana State University Medical Center in New Orleans. Formerly known only as an atmospheric pollutant, nitric oxide is now known to have a host of roles in biological systems. Last year, while searching for nitric oxide-related sites, Lancaster made a practice of saving the addresses of his finds in the bookmark section of Netscape, a popular Web browser. He realized that when Netscape saves its bookmarks, it inserts them into a properly formatted HTML document. He used this document as the core of his page. "Then I embellished it with some nice graphics and textures. It's super-simple. I did it in essentially a day." In addition to links directly related to NO, Lancaster's page has sections with links to scientific organizations, to various publications, and to useful Web tools. The result is a broadly useful page that highlights NO's diversity of functions and is informative for the experienced NO researcher, for scientists who want to learn more about NO, and even for laypersons. One of the most creative educational sites on the Web is Bugs in the News! (http://falcon.cc.ukans.edu/~jbrown/bugs.html), created by John C. Brown, a professor of biology at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. Attention Getter: Biologist John Brown's Bugs in the News! home page began as a classroom technique for keeping his students alert. As Brown writes on his Web site, "Bugs in the News! began as a way to interest my students in [the course] Fundamentals of Microbiology. I needed to come up with something which would get the students' attention and at the same time would relate all of the seemingly endless array of scientific material to the 'real' world. So, I'd walk into lecture, stand at the front of the room and yell, 'Bugs in the News!' The yelling worked . . . everyone would become quiet and focused on me-apparently all eagerly awaiting the news flash." Bugs in the News! became a regular feature of Brown's classroom presentations about seven years ago, but it didn't make the transition to the Web until the summer of 1994. A rank Internet amateur, Brown developed an enthusiasm for the Web during an effort to find a photograph for his 80-year-old mother illustrating the impact of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 on Jupiter. Realizing the enormous educational potential of the Web, Brown broadened both the focus and the intended audience of Bugs in the News! He started writing and uploading a series of biology-related articles under the rubric "What the Heck Is . . ." Intended for the lay public, the articles include "What the Heck Is Genetic Engineering" and "What the Heck Is an Egg Yolk." "I want to get information out and be helpful to people so they won't be afraid of science anymore," Brown tells The Scientist. "[I want them to] understand the emotional content that's part of it, all the grace that's within it, all the excitement that's there." He adds that he wants them to realize "that knowing something about the fundamental wavelengths of visible light is not in any way going to detract from the glorious view of a sunset." It seems to be working. Brown gets E-mail every day from schoolchildren around the world, many asking basic scientific questions, which he answers on his Web page. In setting up a Web page, Michael Tarr advises, "Steal someone s HTML code. You don't want to waste the time doing this yourself. This isn't our job. We shouldn't be sitting there doing HTML programming, wondering why the tables don't come out right. The best thing you can do is . . . find some pages you like the format of, download the source, and add your own stuff to it. I think most people in the spirit of the Web don't mind that at all." Having Fun: Cognitive scientist Michael Tarr's Web page offers the Greebles, a set of control stimuli for use in facial-recognition studies, and also tells of his personal experiment with blue hair dye. But, cautions Jack Lancaster, "It's one thing to steal the common things that are present in any document-that's like stealing a carriage return. It's another to steal the graphics." And it may surprise many scientists to learn that they could be treading on thin ice not only if they upload graphics they don't own, but also if they upload copies of their own journal articles. The danger comes because authors are frequently required to assign journals all copyright to their articles. As Paul Grobstein acknowledges. "I tend to put on Serendip things that I've written . . . on some faint presumption that I have the right to do so in the same sense that I have the right to send them reprints of my papers. I tend to work in terms of what I hope is common sense." But scientists should be concerned about copyright, maintains Stephen E. Gillen, an attorney who concentrates on copyright and trademark law for the Cincinnati firm of Frost & Jacobs. Gillen notes that once one has turned over a copyright, "any subsequent publication by the author, whether it's in a traditional format or an electronic format, is an infringement of the journal's copyright unless the author has been given permission." Although Gillen maintains that the law in this matter is clear, he knows of no cases in which a journal has sued an author for uploading his or her own article. Nevertheless, he advises caution: "Don't do it without the permission of the publication." Instead, he suggests uploading no more than a brief abstract describing the article. On the other hand, if the journal itself publishes on the Web, Gillen says that it's clearly permissible for an author to create a link on his or her home page pointing to that article. Although his Serendip Home Page is rich with complexity, Grobstein sees value even in very simple Web pages. "Part of the excitement and charm of the Web is how easy it makes it to get information," he says. "And frequently, if I run across an author or hear of a name, I'll go browsing on the Web to see whether there's any information about that person. So I think [even simple pages] are wonderfully useful." Saving a Tree: Brian McCarthy set up departmental home pages to reduce paper handouts. As "webmaster" for the department of environmental and plant biology at Ohio University in Athens, assistant professor Brian C. McCarthy set up a series of simple Web pages for each of the members of his department (http://www.plantbio.ohiou.edu/). The research interests of each faculty member are described in just a paragraph or two, along with contact information and references to about a half-dozen articles. The intent, says McCarthy, is to provide facts about the department to prospective graduate students. In addition, McCarthy is using the Web to provide syllabi, old exams, problem sets, and photomicrographs for the courses he's teaching. "When I think about the volume of handouts that I typically distribute in an upper-level undergraduate or graduate class . . . a lot of this information could be circulated via our Web pages. I think we're going to be able to do away with the waste of a lot of natural resources," he notes with satisfaction. Robert Finn, a freelance science writer based in Long Beach, Calif., is online at finn@earthlink.net.

Researchers' Home Pages Serve Scientific, Educational, Personal Goals

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