Feedback to Hotjar at iopscience.iop.org Is there anything more we could do

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1361-6382/ab685e

Dear HotJar and IOP Readers,

Your questions are too specific. I came here because of a search on Google for gravitational waves software, particularly how the signal on the two arms of each detector is extracted from the single interference strain data. Now your articles are all in text and pictures, so I have to read them and convert them back into mathematics and computer languages manually. You don’t seem to know that most of the time of people trying to work together is lost because of this “human in the loop” from your publishing on paper (a computer screen that a human has to read is “paper”).

Try to find the models and data of each person writing a “paper” and get that to readers, users, collaborators, and learners. You (iop.org) can host the applications and tools, or at least make sure everyone involved can find ways to verify, reproduce and use the data and models and data streams immediately. Not have to spend (each reader) hours or days or months finding all the little pieces.

This, your and the authors still putting everything into “paper” formats is what is delaying global response on every major global project — “covid”, “global climate change”, “gravitational wave detection”. The individual groups are learning to share better and reduce the “time to find all the dependencies and required pieces” from years to months, but in total (for the tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands per problem needed to solve the most difficult global problems) it is still too slow by two orders of magnitude. Things that (if all the tools and data were in best practices form for the Internet) would take minutes per person are now taking months or years. And, for many of the roughly 2 Billion first time learners in the world from 5-21 years, many simply give up. But the tools are not that hard. Just every organization on the Internet is lazy. They put things on the Internet and never check how it gets used, nor do they try it themselves and never bother to find broken links, missing information, all the parts needed to do something. I would say it is not their fault because everyone is doing the same bad things. But this hurts the whole human species and lets millions of people die (covid) when a fast response globally with everyone really able to work together on one set of tools and models and data and assumptions and one project – to solve in weeks, what now takes decades.

The chance of anyone at IOP reading this is so small (most organizations never read their feedback. And those who have a contractor read it, don’t have mechanisms for tracking across a whole organization. The organizations act as thousands of unconnected individuals with individual motivations and backgrounds, not as single entities wholly aware of global projects and all relationships in the world.

Richard Collins, Director, The Internet Foundation

RichardCollins  at  TheInternetFoundation.Org

It is best practice for any feedback to ask for the name and email of the submitter, and to copy the content to them by email. Then you can have a dialog and work together for continuous improvement. Now this kind of feedback, however heartfelt usually goes into the circular file, or glanced at and ignored.

Richard K Collins

About: Richard K Collins

Director, The Internet Foundation Studying formation and optimized collaboration of global communities. Applying the Internet to solve global problems and build sustainable communities. Internet policies, standards and best practices.


Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *