I wish I could have recorded this lecture.
I have never found physics or biometrics to be interesting before - I mean, I could see how they were valuable fields as a whole, but I have never found them personally interesting - but Andrea Scharnhorst is phenomenal. She is a researcher who started as a physicist and is now thinking about other things, but SHE IS FANTASTIC.
She mentioned Bruno LaTour, whom Joe Tennis was a huge fan of in 530, which makes me think I really need to read more of him. And also Paul Otliet, Bradford's Law of Scattering, Derek de Solla Price, Milgram, and Lotka. Wow, I've got a lot of reading to do.
She talked about indicators, impact factors, number differentials, bibliometric evaluation, and I was hooked. I wish all my math teachers had been as interesting, I might have chosen a different field.
And also, she mentioned that story in Matthew where there's three guys who each get some money, and two bury it and don't do anything, and one uses it and gets more, and how if you start out with something you should use it.
Mostly she went a variety of places, but asked lots and lots of really great questions I am still pondering and probably won't have answers to for a long time.
But I really loved this broad sweeping overview of how things are connected to each other in helping us think about how knowledge emerges, how we evaluate it, and how science helps in that process.
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