Often in my day-to-day work I encounter some little problem in software or mathematics that I figure somebody ought to know the answer to. In my years as a graduate student, I’ve learned that the quickest way to solve these problems, if a cursory search of the internet and a few standard references doesn’t help, is to actually go around the office and ask the people I know who work around me. Sometimes they don’t happen to know either — but I can’t shake the nagging feeling that somebody I know knows how to solve the problem. My solution to this, on a few recent occasions, has been to turn to Facebook.
Thus last Thursday afternoon, my Facebook status was:
Seth Zenz needs a statistician. Or anyone else who knows how to find the error on a correlation coefficient.
Within a couple hours, two of my friends, one a physicist and one a friend from college, had replied with the correct answer, which turned out to be explained on Wikipedia — which pointed, in turn, back to the original statistics paper from 1921 that answered the question. So Facebook is good for more than just keeping up with my friends; it also expands the size of “the office” I can go around to ask questions in!
Tags: collaboration, culture, facebook
as long as you don’t mind having your worlds collide!
but if you use twitter, you potentially have the ear of the whole hive mind! of course you’ll need some way to have people actually read your question, but physicists have solved tougher problems than that, right? (and you can link up twitter to facebook as well…)
The solution on Twitter is quite simple: find one of your contacts there who is helpful and has a ridiculous number of followers, then send that person a tweet asking “Might any of your followers know the answer to this?” That way you don’t need to build up a colossal followers list yourself in order to get thousands of people to see your question, since your helpful contact will retweet it for you.