Open Source Science

[Zolobrine]

Hello everybody,

 

I am working on a non-profit project which will let any student get free books and self-educate with ease.

Throughout my life I found that self-education is one of the best things you can do to improve yourself and I want to make it a more common thing, thus why I created a forum-like place where everybody can learn with entertaining videos from many creators and a PDF library that will contain all of the educational books from all over the globe in as many languages as possible.

And ofcourse this project is not very easy for a 16 year old kid so I decided to post here for help.

 

May you help me with:

1. Finding education books (or online libraries which contain them) and giving me the link.

2. Sending me all of your lectures and stating the school, adress, and which class the lectures are for.

3. Sending me programs (or links to it) which are useful when working on a science related thing.

4. Giving feedback on what I can improve.

 

Thank you so much for your time, I hope together we can make the world a better place.

My mail: mher.movsisyan2011@gmail.com

The website: opensourcescience.enjin.com

[fiveworlds]

You're joking right unless you are really wealthy you aren't going to be able to do this regardless of wheter you can code or not. You are talking about exabytes of data at least

[Zolobrine]

Nothing is impossible my friend xD

[fiveworlds]

Nothing is impossible my friend xD

 

 

A petabyte retails at about $500,000 a single exabyte would cost over a thousand times that amount. Plus cabling, staff, electricity costs etc. Maybe if you had 2 or 3 trillion dollars. I never said it was impossible I could get it done for an insane amount of money.

 

It would be much easier to make something like wikipedia and get rid of duplicate data. But that takes either an unbelievable amount of staff or the expectation that users will correct mistakes themselves.

 

It seems like an enormous amount of hard drives but all data should be stored in triplicate and even if you only had 1 data center for every 3 countries you would only be working with about 40 petabytes after you factor in the space the os etc will take. To put it in perspective the US library of congress has more than 10 petabytes of data alone.

Edited May 21, 2017 by fiveworlds

[KipIngram]

So, what do you plan to accomplish with this that's not already available? Just as you yourself note, the internet IS a great source of materials for self-education. One does have to weed through some stuff that's just incorrect / deliberately biased (e.g., http://www.electricuniverse.info/Introduction), but generally speaking there is a lifetime's worth of good education out there for free.

 

If your goal is to eliminate the need for that weeding, I laud you, but how do you plan to establish your reputation such that people can count on having all good and no bad by using your site?

 

Do you plan for this to be science and math only? Or do you plan to include things like history, philosophy, political theory, etc.? I ask because those latter ones are areas particularly subject to bias and propaganda.

[Manticore]

Take a look at Khan Academy https://www.khanacademy.org/

Quote: "Our mission is to provide a free, world-class education to anyone, anywhere."

[Zolobrine]

So, what do you plan to accomplish with this that's not already available? Just as you yourself note, the internet IS a great source of materials for self-education. One does have to weed through some stuff that's just incorrect / deliberately biased (e.g., http://www.electricuniverse.info/Introduction), but generally speaking there is a lifetime's worth of good education out there for free.

 

If your goal is to eliminate the need for that weeding, I laud you, but how do you plan to establish your reputation such that people can count on having all good and no bad by using your site?

 

Do you plan for this to be science and math only? Or do you plan to include things like history, philosophy, political theory, etc.? I ask because those latter ones are areas particularly subject to bias and propaganda.

I will be careful about that as history books are really unreliable, but I will not fight against it, and I'll make sure to include the counter statements: so for example if I upload the history books of Armenia I will make sure to include Turkish and Azerbaijanian history since they have hostile relationships with Armenia thus their history books are purposely written to teach hate against each other. But I will put an [Approved] tag in the names of valid info which will have proof of it's validity. This is not a small project but I'll do my best and I know I'll be facing a lot of problems doing this. I'll let people further develop their biased opinions, it is their choice.

[KipIngram]

Ok, but what it sounds like you're talking about developing is "the internet." I don't yet see how it brings something that's not already there.

Not trying to be critical here, at all, by the way.

[fiveworlds]

Ok, but what it sounds like you're talking about developing is "the internet." I don't yet see how it brings something that's not already there.

 

 

That is basically it only all open source scientific data isn't on the internet really. The problem with it is the sheer scale of the data. Astronomers alone make exabytes of data a day that could be shared so anybody could access them. However global internet traffic worldwide is only 90 - 100 exabytes a month just putting the data from the square kilometer telescope https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square_Kilometre_Array online and making it so anybody could access the data would involve being able to transfer 10 times the current global internet traffic.

[KipIngram]

I suppose that's true, but I have to believe that the 80/20 (or 90/10 or 95/5 or whatever) principle applies here. As far as educating the public goes, you could achieve the lion's share of the goal with only a fraction of that data being available online. I don't think it's necessary to have every single bit (in the data sense) of it online. I feel I've been very effectively self-educating in the last few years using what is available already.

 

It's possible that our culture is already doing a good job of "selecting" the right parts of that data for general accessibility.

[Zolobrine]

Well the data isnt really gonna be stored inside a single server for many reasons:

The immense ammount of space needed as you said,

It will be vulnerable and backing it up will cost alot.

Instead I'm aiming for the PDF library to just hold the links of the books unless it is required to be hosted on it's own. And I'll use public clouds to stpre the rest and compress it aswell. And I dont think It'll be above 10 petabytes and I can manage anything less then that. Once the website gets a bit more constant traffic I'll start working on assembling a team for this and hosting properly.

[KipIngram]

Well, I think you face an uphill climb, but you clearly have a fire burning for this, so good luck to you. My favorite recent paper (in terms of how much I think it's helped me with my particular quest) is this one:

 

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1204.4616.pdf

 

so you can consider that my first contribution.

[Zolobrine]

Thank you xD

[Mordred]

Instead of storing the data why not just have a listing of good links and take advantage of storage already in place?

 

As long as you regularly check the links are still valid wouldn't this accomplish the same purpose?