POE Preliminary Report

Posted on May 21, 2005 by Jenna

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I. Metascience

The mission of metascience, first presented in [7], is to scientifically evaluate hypotheses regarding methodologies for scientific progress. Such methodologies include the laboratory, the corporation, the establishment of standards, degrees of specialization, and the various approaches to student education. The basic units of metascience are the singh (sng) and the moore (mre). These are, respectively, the amount of progress necessary to publish a single peer-reviewed paper in a leading journal and the amount of progress necessary to accomplish twice as much work in a fixed amount of time.

II. The Nevermore Project

The Nevermore Project is a revolutionary approach to scientific progress that attempts to dramatically increase productivity (as measured in nanomoores per hour) within the scientific community. If successful, the current scientific community could be phased out over the course of seven years and replaced with the Scientific Community 1016, an organic computing engine whose principal components are scientists.

II.a. Principles

Increasing specialization reduces the functionality of the scientific community. It is less possible as time goes by for a single specialist to understand affairs outside of their immediate focus of expertise. This makes systemic errors and oversights in the sciences more likely.

Our technique for overcoming the detrimental effects of increasing specialization is to organize experts with orthogonal skill sets into a large parallel processing engine. This approach is herein dubbed the Polymath Organic Engine (POE) or Nevermore Project.

II.b. Testing Methodology

The POE principle was tested in a microcosm dubbed the Not Just Now Anyway Project. We recorded the nanomoore-per-hour progress of a control group of unaffiliated scientists at intervals of project completion. This was compared against the nanomoore-per-hour progress of a small Scientific Community organized into a hybrid hypercube-mesh architecture with eighteen possible configurations. Results were adjusted based on the known administrative efficiency coefficients described in [9] and the normalization constant listed in [4].

II.c. Early Problems

The microcosm test of the Nevermore Project ran into obstacles early on as we were inadvertently subjected to placebo scientists released into the general population as part of a double-blind doctoral thesis defense project run by the American Metascience Association. These placebo scientists did not alert us to their status as they believed their own doctorates legitimate. These obstacles were smoothed over after we began calibrating all of our scientists with basic nanomoore-per-hour measurements before integrating them into the POE and tossing the outlying 5% of all scientists into a kind of bubbling green pit that came with the test facility.

II.d. Intermediate Results

Due to the AMA experiment it is difficult to present firm results at this stage. However a strong statistical correlation is conclusively shown between increased funding for this project and the nanomoores-per-hour-squared (nmre/h^2) generated by the Not Just Now Anyway Project.

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