Today, May 1, is the International Workers' Day. A celebration of labour and working classes. It is a public holiday in more than 80 countries (but only some of those countries this day is officially known as Labor Day).
Once upon a time the workers organized themselves and fought against the negative social effects of the industrial revolution. Strikes were new measures and it may be that the Haymarket affair in Chicago (May 4, 1886) was the reason to choose May 1, as date for International Workers' Day.
Time has changed working regimes dramatically. We know throughout ideologies that Taylorism is the wrong working principle and that instead of preaching the dignity of "slavery work" we should concentrate on motivation factors.
But traditions are long runners as such. Although we know that traditions may kill innovation, this will not change much?
Once upon a time begins a scientific paper written by school children, published in Biology Letters, on bumblebees.
Children, or, say it more general, amateurs, are scientists, you know?
There were always barriers that inhibited amateurs doing research - like the difficulty to read scientific papers. It's to make infrastructure, experimental and analytics methods and tools available to amateurs to motivate them to conduct science outside traditional institutional settings. And I am not thinking of Big Data to replace scientific method.
I am thinking of an infrastructure for interactive documents, documents that are programs. Documents that can be easily extended programmatically - on and on.
Once upon a time begins Sascha's program in Functional Goats, Wolves and Liens.
In quant finance, young quants find groundbreaking results and share them in forums, the blogosphere, … they are scientists, you know .. and bring much needed diversity into science.
It is May 1, and officially, I have a day off. And I tend to forget why?
Picture from sehfelder
