R&D spending as percentage of federal budget, FY 1962-2009

Sure, federal spending on R&D more than tripled in the past 50 years to about $147 billion in fiscal year 2009, as Lane pointed out Saturday in a talk at N.C. State University. But R&D’s share of all federal spending has been shrinking from nearly 12 percent during the height of the Apollo program in the late 1960s to about 5 percent in 2009, according to numbers from the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Lane, a professor at Rice University and a senior fellow at the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy, is particularly concerned about federal funding for research in physics, mathematics and engineering, the disciplines that brought forth computers, the Internet and mobile devices such as the cell phone.

AAAS numbers show that much of the increase in federal R&D spending over the past 30 years has gone to biomedical disciplines. Last year, funding for the National Institutes of Health made up about half of all federal spending for basic research and for R&D that was not aimed at defending the U.S.

Neal Lane

“We do have a president who cares about science,” Lane said. He called the scientists whom President Obama appointed as scientific advisors and government administrators a “terrific team.” But considering the rising federal deficit, budget shortfalls and polarized political leadership, Lane added, “I’m worried that federal research spending will get squeezed.”

Lane visited NCSU on invitation of the College of Physical and Mathematical Sciences, or PAMS, which celebrates its 50th anniversary this year. But his talk had significance beyond PAMS, even beyond NCSU, one of many U.S. universities tasked with educating tomorrow’s scientists, furthering technological development and feeding the U.S. knowledge economy.

Federal R&D spending is the lifeblood of the entire Research Triangle area, a state economic engine and national R&D hot spot that is known around the world.

Research Triangle Park, which has NCSU, Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as its corners, reflects the federal R&D funding evolution that began during World War II. Work to establish RTP began in 1957, the same year the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the first earth-orbiting satellite. The science park opened in 1959, just as the space race between the Soviet Union and the U.S. got under way.

In the past 30 years, RTP’s development has mirrored the shift in federal R&D funding priorities from the space age with its focus on national security to the age of medicine and a new focus on health. Today, first signs are emerging that RTP, which employs more than 40,000, is tapping into the next phase in federal R&D funding, a phase that focuses on renewable energy, reduction in greenhouse gas emissions and technologies that reduce the U.S. dependence on oil.

This phase rests on climate changes that remain controversial even though scientists have tracked them for years.

“The threat of climate change is out there,”  Lane said. “But it’s less urgent than the economy, jobs and health. The message is muddled. There’s some work for us to do out there.”

About 60 percent of all Americans consider public funding for R&D essential, according to a 2009 survey report from the Pew Research Center. More than 70 percent say that government investments in basic research and engineering and technology pay off in the long run.

Despite the broad support, Lane said, “science has never really emerged to be important at the ballot box.”

Scientists have to do a better job conveying this public support to the politicians, he added. “We have to figure out how to be more helpful, how to interact better with the public.”

Where are the scientists and engineers?

Why? Because it could help the U.S. remain a technology exporter in a world where emerging countries such as China and India are gaining ground.

“China is a rising player,” Lane said, pointing to AAAS numbers that show about one-quarter of the world’s 5.8 million scientists and engineers were in the U.S. in 2006. China had about 21 percent and the number was rising, Lane said.

A similar picture is emerging in R&D spending. The U.S. still spends more on R&D than any other country, but Asian countries are turning up the heat.

To bolster his argument that the U.S. is in danger of falling behind, Lane referred to writings by Norman Augustine, retired chairman of Lockheed Martin. In a 2007 essay called “Is America falling off the flat earth?” Augustine quotes UNC President Erskine Bowles:“Think about this: in the past four years, our 15 schools of education at the University of North Carolina turned out a grand total of three physics teachers. Three. And we’re going to compete with those guys in Asia? Come on – not that way.”

Today, I asked Mark MacAllister, Coordinator of On-Line Learning Projects at the North Carolina Zoological Society to answer a few questions:

Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Where are you coming from (both geographically and philosophically)? What is your (scientific) background?

I was born and educated in the Midwest–grew up in northwest Illinois, spent a lot of time on my grandparents’ dairy farm in southwest Wisconsin, and went to undergrad school at Oberlin College. I then came south for the first of three tours of duty in North Carolina, including grad school at UNC-Chapel Hill. Also mixed in there is time spent living and working in Salt Lake City, St. Louis, Buffalo, Toronto, London and Chicago. I’m still a Midwesterner at heart, and really miss long sightlines and cold winters. But I love North Carolina, especially my current and quirky hometown of Pittsboro–it’s kind of like “The Andy Griffith Show” where every third person is a massage therapist. I work for the North Carolina Zoological Society, which is based in Asheboro, but telecommute from my shed-in-the-woods office in Pittsboro.

Philosophically, I tend to find myself most interested in the place where technology, education (especially K-12 but also for adults) and environmental advocacy come together. I feel that each one of those can be improved by the application of the other two–if that makes any sense. I’m an early adopter in all three, and have been lucky enough to be able to be involved in somewhat radically new things in each area. I’ve been self-teaching on computers since 1982, beginning with a Kaypro running CP/M. My Master’s degree is in Environmental Policy and Law, meaning that I took half my coursework in UNC’s Political Science department and the other half through the Law School. And, as far as teaching goes–one of the nicest compliments anyone ever paid me was to call me a “natural teacher,” meaning that I don’t have a teaching license but I somehow manage to pull it off.

Tell us a little more about your career trajectory so far: interesting projects past and present?

After grad school, my wife and I moved to Salt Lake City. I spent five years out there working on wilderness advocacy. I did a lot of research in the field–getting paid to hike and camp in the deserts of southern Utah was a great gig–and also in the public document rooms of various state and federal agencies. The advocacy groups I worked with were involved in mining, grazing, water rights, logging and other threats to wilderness preservation. What I began to notice toward the end of my tenure there was that many issues that appeared to be landscape-related were actually endangered species-related, and as a result I began to become more interested in species preservation.

We came back to North Carolina and in 1996 I went to work for the Chatham County Schools administrative office. The state was just beginning to wire classrooms, the Internet was just beginning to find its footing in terms of K-12 education, and Chatham understood early on that a significant teacher training effort would need to follow close on the heels of the effort to get everything wired. My job was in many ways focused on creating an atmosphere of support for integrating the Internet into classrooms; in other words, I was asked to help teachers understand why adopting technology was in everyone’s best interest, and then to work with them to actually help them gain those skills. Not long after we got started, Chatham was recognized as one of the ten top technology school districts in the country.

While this was all going on, I found myself thinking more and more about the content of the K-12 curriculum. It seemed obvious that a wonderful way to interest kids and meet curriculum goals was to focus the whole deal on the study of animals and wildlife, and to do so with technology-rich methods. I approached the Education Curator at the North Carolina Zoo, and not long after that we were partnering to build two websites focused on field-based wildlife research. These sites eventually evolved into FieldTripEarth, which is one of the many things I’m working on these days. I’ve been at the Zoo for ten years now, and have seen through a variety of other projects, ranging from teacher education (in both the US and Africa) to social media planning to field-based informal education.

What is taking up the most of your time and passion these days? What are your goals?

I’m often thinking about “raw learning materials” (this is David Warlick’s term, see Landmark Project) and how to best put them into the hands of students and teachers. I’m not particularly interested in curriculum–that is, in designing and assembling big packages of resources that teachers can then plug into their classrooms. Rather, I’m curious about how best to make original source material available to classrooms and, better yet, how to put those classrooms in contact with the people that actually generate those source materials (By source materials, I mean first-person narratives, photos, video, datasets, maps and so on that, taken together, tell a story about what a scientist or other field researcher is working on). FieldTripEarth wheels and deals in exactly this currency, and we’ve been successful in providing classrooms a way to access these materials from researchers working all over the world. What they do with them is, for the most part, up to the students and teachers–we do offer some generalized strategies for using the materials found on the website, but for the most part we urge everyone to apply them to meet their specific needs.

What I wish I could spend more time on–or at least be more successful at doing–is bringing various classrooms into substantive contact with each other. I don’t mean waving at each other through Skype…rather, what I’m on the lookout for are ways to help students in various locations work together to solve learning problems, to interview field scientists, to author a video about a particular topic, and so on. I think there’s a lot of potential in this, but I’m not convinced that teachers and administrators will buy into it.

More generally, I’m interested in teaching process and thinking skills to whoever will sit still long enough to learn them. What we commonly call the scientific method can of course be used to learn in any academic or technical area. Unfortunately, most schools aren’t teaching thinking as an organized process; that’s why I try to focus on the work being done by field researchers, because I consider them role models of sorts when it comes thinking that is both multi-disciplinary and systematic.

I have some other goals, of course. I’d like to figure out a way to make hiking and biking more a part of the K-12 classroom. I’d like to read and write more, and to think out loud with colleagues more frequently.

How does (if it does) blogging figure in your work? How about social networks, e.g., Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook? Do you find all this online activity to be a net positive (or even a necessity) in what you do?

I’ve never really taken to blogging as part of my work, though I do read several blogs focused on politics and policy, both of which are hobby horses of mine. Twitter and Facebook are a relatively small part of my professional life, mostly because right now my employer focuses more on their utility in serving members than in educating them. I think these tools form a net positive, but will be much more relevant once we figure out how to use them as educational, rather than informational, resources.

What was the best aspect of ScienceOnline2010 for you? Any suggestions for next year? Is there anything that happened at this Conference – a session, something someone said or did or wrote – that will change the way you think about science communication, or something that you will take with you to your job, blog-reading and blog-writing?

The best thing about the conference was witnessing the various interests people brought with them–as well as the varying levels of expertise. It helped me remember that this is still such an evolving area. The sessions were all strong, but for the most part my strongest impressions were formed outside of the meeting rooms.

As far as suggestions for next year–it would be cool to invite some consumers of science communication and let us see how they put it to work in their lives. There was a bit of that at 2010, but there’s a lot of untapped experience out there.

And while we’re at it, I’d love to have a session focused on the question “How do we make our students’ experiences with technology at school at least as rich and relevant as the experiences they are having outside of school?”

It was so nice to meet you and thank you for the interview. I hope to see you again next January.

Today, I asked Andrea Novicki from the Duke CIT blog to answer a few questions:

Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Where are you coming from (both geographically and philosophically)? What is your (scientific) background?

Hi, thank you so much for asking. I’m currently employed at Duke University in the Center for Instructional Technology as an academic technology consultant for the sciences – I work with faculty who teach science or math, to help them figure out how to effectively and efficiently help students learn, using technology. My work is a satisfying combination of science, education and technology. Scientifically, I began as a marine biologist as an undergraduate and in early grad school; still, marine biology feels like my natural home. I became inspired by a summer course to study neural systems and behavior, because investigating changes in behavior at the level of changes in molecules in single, identified neurons was both exciting and satisfying. After a couple of postdocs and a tenure track faculty position, I stepped away from research and teaching and I went sailing, driven by a restless sense of adventure. I’m now back in academia, working with smart, interesting people.

Tell us a little more about your career trajectory so far: interesting projects past and present?

I have been involved with some great projects; if there is a theme, it is change, both in my research projects and in my career. I’ve investigated the neural pathways that mediate color change in squid and octopus and I participated in research cruises identifying midwater ocean animals. On land I worked with insects, monitoring and altering activity in single neurons that correlate with behavior change, and predicting and then, satisfyingly, finding a neuron with particular characteristics.

I (and many other people) began to question the traditional lecture way that science was taught and early on, I began using computers and technology to help students learn biology.

What is taking up the most of your time and passion these days? What are your goals?

My goals? Do I have to be realistic? I’d like to contribute to making science accessible; I’d like for everyone to recognize the beautiful complexity and interconnectedness of the natural world at all scales, and find joy of figuring out for themselves how things work.

What aspect of science communication and/or particular use of the Web in science interests you the most?

I’m excited about the increased openness and social nature of science. In my grad school days, the model was that successful scientists kept to themselves until they published, and then only in reputable, peer-reviewed journals; anything else was considered frivolous and distracting. Now, because of the web, science is now more public and more accessible (accessible both technologically and in presentation style). I’m a huge fan of Jean-Claude Bradley’s open notebook science approach, ever since I heard him speak at the first science blogging conference. This project (and many others) make the process of science more open. Passionate blogs by students and post docs as well as people who run their own labs show what science is really like – it’s done by caring people with feelings and emotions, not just some distant, always-right white-coated professor. This openness about the process, as well as the explanations of results made accessible (like at researchblogging.org) have the potential to illustrate the appeal of science to everyone.

I’d like to see people use some of the new visualization tools to explore publically available data sets to make new discoveries, just because they are curious, regardless of their final degrees or institutional affiliation.

How does (if it does) blogging figure in your work? How about social networks, e.g., Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook? Do you find all this online activity to be a net positive (or even a necessity) in what you do?

I lurk on numerous blogs, and I love scienceblogs, it’s a great way to keep up on how science is changing, and visit my favorite topics. I’m very fortunate, in that monitoring how people use technology to communicate science (for science education) is part of my job. I follow people on Twitter and find it a useful way to find new ideas and resources, and contribute occasionally. Although I do have an account on Facebook, I rarely look at it.

I do contribute to a blog, but it’s more about technology in education than about science, and is part of my job. As a confirmed introvert, I find blogging difficult. I am, by nature, a lurker. I’m in awe of people who can toss off a post without thinking it over and over and over.

In other words, all of this online activity is necessary for my work; I do not contribute enough, but I benefit tremendously.

What was the best aspect of ScienceOnline2010 for you? Any suggestions for next year? Is there anything that happened at this Conference – a session, something someone said or did or wrote – that will change the way you think about science communication, or something that you will take with you to your job, blog-reading and blog-writing?

Every session I attended was thought-provoking! Stacy Baker’s students stole the show again; my notes have many observations about their attitudes towards technology. I also welcomed the sessions by librarians – their ability to find information, and think about how it is organized will continue to be invaluable.

I observed that the conference had many people attending who were not exactly science bloggers (people like me, for example), which showed how many options there are for people to participate in science online in some way, even if they are not, strictly speaking, science bloggers.

There’s still something wonderful about meeting someone for the first time after you’ve already read their writing – it’s like you can peek into their brain. When you meet a blogger (or any writer), your first impression has already been formed and modified and added to, and their physical appearance is irrelevant. It’s an almost utopian ideal – people are judged by the quality of their thoughts, not what they look like.

At one session, during a discussion of Google Earth and GIS, Cameron Neylon thought aloud about using visualizations as a way of distributing data, which is something I had been thinking about, as a way of making science, and raw data, more accessible. He, of course, said it more elegantly and I will be thinking about this for some time. How can good visualizations be used as a way of distributing data, in a way that does not immediately shape a conclusion but allows for exploration?

It was so nice to see you again and thank you for the interview. I’m sure I’ll see you before then, and I expect you’ll join our event again next January.

They have recently been digging around and finding projects with which I am involved in one way or another:

For example, a few days ago, they profiled science blogs in general and scienceblogs.com in particular, but mainly focused on ResearchBlogging.org which aggregates and gives a stamp of approval to blog posts covering peer-reviewed research. The aggregator is a local thing – it is a brainchild of Dave Munger here in Davidson, NC, and it was first announced to the world at the 2008 Science Online conference here in RTP.

Blog posts that show up on ResearchBlogging.org are also tracked by PLoS articles as a component of the PLoS article-level metrics program, designed to provide researchers, readers and administrators better insight into the quality, visibility and popularity of scientific papers than any single-digit metric can accomplish (most notoriusly, the incredibly misused Impact Factor).

The blogging guidelines for getting onto the PLoS press list are taken directly from ResearchBlogging.org. Aggregation on ResearchBlogging.org is also a requirement for eligibility for our Blog Pick Of The Month prize.

A couple of days ago, folks at Knight Science Journalism Tracker stumbled onto an article in Raleigh News & Observer and were curious where the original local science reporting is coming from, knowing that the paper has laid off its science reporters a while ago.

Having a lot of well-connected readers and commenters, they got their question answered quickly: the brand new Monday Science section, a collaborative project of Charlotte Observer and Raleigh News & Observer (both owned by McClatchy group).

Instead of full-time reporters sitting in the newsroom, the articles are written by freelance writers (mostly) residing in the area, including Dave Munger (remember Cognitive Daily blog?), DeLene Beeland, Sabine Vollmer (former science reporter at N&O), Cassie Rodenberg and a number of others (mainly writers organized around SCONC).

But the new Monday section is not the only thing the folks at Knight Science Journalism Tracker learned about in this effort. They also heard about – and thus blogged about – Science In The Triangle.org (and its blog), a new online project designed to fill in the vacuum in science, environmental and medical reporting left by the deep cuts in local newsrooms. The site is still in its infancy, but we are working on it. Currently we have one videographer (Ross Maloney), one professional journalist (Sabine Vollmer), and two bloggers (DeLene Beeland and myself). I hope you take a look, subscribe/bookmark, and watch the site evolve in the future.

What dawned on me was the beginning of an understanding how the Internet can be so ephemeral and yet so powerful.

I realized that we can follow the nematode’s example and adapt to emerging technologies to further our knowledge exponentially or we can dig in and watch idly while cellphones, Facebook and Twitter change how society works. It’s all a matter of mindset, which we as humans can change thanks to evolution.

Clay Shirky, an adjunct professor in New York University’s graduate interactive telecommunications program, lays out how the Internet is disrupting the hirarchical flow of knowledge. With cellphones, Facebook and Twitter everybody becomes a consumer and a producer. That means, information no longer is passed on from a producer to a select group of middlemen, such as journalists, who then distribute it to the consumers. Instead, information originates from multiple sources – including television, newspapers and magazines – and is distributed on the Internet. The multiple sources can then connect with each other and create more information.

To illustrate how different this Internet network of information producers and consumers is from the linear, top-to-bottom model, Shirky points out a successful Internet effort to monitor voting irregularities in the 2008 presidential election. In a reversal of technology transfer trends, the U.S. copied the idea from a less developed country, Nigeria, where it was deployed during an election a year or so earlier.

It seems to me that such a network of producers and consumers would perfectly suit science, which always struggles to solve more problems the more scientists know.

There is, of course, the pesky question whether an exploding amount of information automatically translates into better information. That’s where the book comes in.

Published last year by the California University Press, “Natural Security: A Darwinian Approach to a Dangerous World” is not only a novel approach to gathering scientific information, it also provides some astonishing insights.

The book was edited by Raphael D. Sagarin, associate director for ocean and coastal policy at Duke University’s Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions, and Terence Taylor, a former United Nations chief weapons of mass destruction inspector for Iran. In the book, Sagarin and Taylor bring together experts from different walks of scientific life, including marine biologists, an anthropologist, a paleontologist, security experts and a virus researcher, who look at ways nature has developed over millions of years to defend itself against ever-present dangers and what humans can learn from natural defense mechanisms.

The nematode, a worm of about 1,000 cells, is featured in the book, because it has a highly efficient and adaptive immune system that appears to be capable of protecting the worm from all known viral parasites. The nematode’s cells do that through RNA interference, a method that many researchers are currently trying to tap for drug development.

The book’s authors argue that natural defense mechanisms work because nature never puts all of her eggs in one basket. The nematode’s way is different from the ways of bacteria, which are different again from how bony fish or birds do it.

When nature has been able to advance its knowledge base by using multiple methods simultaneously, shouldn’t humans then be able to do the same? In that context, the Internet should reduce the risk of misinformation and improve human knowledge.

Afterall, humans are part of nature and its evolution – a point that is bolstered by brain research.

As the WSJ’s Hotz points out in his blog post, the human brain works better when we’re not single-minded. Brain scans show, he writes, that “our brain may be most actively engaged when our mind wanders and we’ve actually lost track of our thoughts. Left to its own devices, our brain activates several areas associated with complex problem solving, which researchers had previously assumed were dormant during daydreams. Moreover, it appears to be the only time these areas work in unison.”

Aha!

The Internet is emphasizing how researchers work over where they work. To solve scientific puzzles increasingly requires more than one researcher, one lab, or one organization. And in the global recession government is trading places with industry in stepping up investment in research and development.

What does that mean for economic engines like Research Triangle Park? Established 50 years ago near three universities,  RTP attracted corporate research labs and startups first because of the available land and then because of the concentration of research and development going on in labs built on the land.

Anthony Townsend, a 35-year-old research director at the Institute for the Future, a think tank based in Palo Alto, Calif., offered some suggestions. Townsend is one of the key speakers at the International Association of Science Parks convention, which is expected to bring more than 750 participants from about 50 countries to the Raleigh Convention Center this week.

Townsend will base his suggestions on a 20-year forecast he has compiled for the Research Triangle Foundation, RTP’s landlord and manager. He spoke with Science in the Triangle in advance of his presentation Tuesday. Here is an edited version:

Q: What scientific areas will be likely hot spots over the next 20 years?

A: Research and development in the 20th century was dominated by physics. Biology will be the central source of scientific and technological breakthroughs in the 21st century. That includes the design of micro-organisms genetically engineered to, for example, make fuel and personalized medicine, such as stem cell therapy that harnesses the body’s own ability to heal.

Digital sensors that pick up vast amounts of data from every day life will require smart computing technologies to analyze the datasets for use in research from public health to civil engineering to marine biology.

Efforts to address ecological concerns will require technologies to track output of harmful carbon, manage the data and validate carbon offset claims. Ecological economics will be a huge area of R&D growth.

Q: How will scientists work to come up with breakthroughs?

A: To solve the complicated big scientific puzzles of the 21st century, research will be collaborative and interdisciplinary and will advance within networks aided by the Internet. If research parks want to remain economic stewarts, they must reinvent themselves and organize and coordinate resources on a regional basis.

RTP has already begun to do that by establishing a network with the other six research parks that dot North Carolina from Raleigh to Charlotte. And the Hamner Institutes for Health Sciences, a research institute in RTP, is establishing a partnership with China Medical Cities, an RTP-size medical park north of Shanghai.

Q: What’s the biggest challenge for scientific innovation?

A: Technology transfer at universities is busted beyond repair.

Universities used to be open in sharing information and industry used to focus on patents and staking claims. Now it’s the other way round. Universities’ unwillingness to take risks in managing intellectual property is creating an innovation bottleneck. As the U.S. government is pumping more money into R&D, university scientists will crank out more results. But the research results will not lead to more innovative technologies that industry can pick up and bring to market.

To better measure research production, at Triangle universities for example, an inventory should be done to track who does what and who collaborates with whom. Much of the information could be sucked out of the Internet.

More than 50 years ago, such an inventory was done to attract corporate research labs to RTP. It’s time for an update.

Two years ago, I spoke with seven people who were involved in establishing one of North Carolina’s biggest economic engines in the mid-1950s. The interviews, which ran in the News & Observer, offered many interesting nuggets of information and a few surprises. But I was struck most by an old, black-and-white photo.

Taken from the air, it showed brush, grass and trees as far as the eye could see. That was RTP before three universities – Duke University in Durham, the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill and N.C. State University in Raleigh – a developer and state leaders pursued the idea to turn thousands of rolling acres covered with poor soil into a research park.

Back then, RTP promised to raise North Carolina’s per capita income, which was one of the lowest in the nation, stop the brain drain of college graduates and generate more tax dollars for state, county and local governments. A handful of recruiters worked their contacts to convince research-oriented companies in the Northeast and Midwest to expand their labs in North Carolina. Their efforts finally paid off in 1966, when IBM decided to open shop in RTP.

In 1959, the year RTP was officially opened as the second research park in the U.S., it was 4,400 acres. Three companies that had established operations employed fewer than 300. Of all the industries in the Triangle, only 15 percent were technology-based, new-line industries.

Today, RTP measures 7,000 acres and is one of 174 research parks in the U.S. More than 160 companies employ about 40,000 in the park alone. About half of the Triangle’s industry is high-tech.

Six more research parks have sprung up along I-40 and I-85 between Raleigh and Charlotte and the Triangle is one of the fastest growing areas in the nation.

Traveling on I-40, which didn’t exist in the 1950s, it’s easy to miss RTP, because most buildings are lower than the many trees surrounding them. The research park was conceived and planned during a time when America was moving to the suburbs and its layout reflects that. Now, we’re concerned with urban sprawl and traffic congestion. The Internet allows us to work from home or a coffeeshop. Countries like India and China, where labor costs are much lower than in the U.S., are competing with RTP.

The park itself has only about 530 acres left to develop. But some of the largest employers in RTP, such as GlaxoSmithKline and IBM, are scaling back. The challenges that RTP and other research parks will face in the future are among the issues that will be addressed at the International Association of Science Parks conference, which  starts June 1 at the Raleigh Convention Center.

Today, the marketplace of ideas is virtual. It has no borders. Everybody can participate and be a publisher. And the number of channels to distribute the information is increasing.

At the same time, ever smaller and more specialized bits of information are spread on YouTube, blogs and Twitter and it is becoming more difficult to figure out which information is accurate, which information serves a hidden special interest and how different bits of information relate to each other.

As gatekeepers of printed information, newspapers were naturally suited to check, organize and analyze the increasing flood of information on the Internet. But most newspapers dropped the ball when they decided to give away their information online. How much can free information be worth? And once you attach no value to your information, doesn’t that change what you gather?

As a reporter writing about science, I learned to measure the value of information by how much readers could act on it. That turns information into intelligence. That’s why I cherish working on stories about breakthrough ideas: the discovery of new medicines, companies with counterintuitive business models, scientists whose innovations change the way things are done.

These stories are special because they tap the thinking of some very smart people. But fewer and fewer of these stories are appearing in newspapers. I hope scienceinthetriangle.org will not only fill that void, but fill it better.

The Internet is more suited to follow thought processes. In print, something gets lost from the fact gathering to the writing. Maybe it’s the immediacy I feel when I research the facts. Maybe its the back-and-forth of the interview. Maybe it’s my own thoughts that were triggered collecting the facts.

More than five years after writing about Oliver Smithies, the UNC-CH professor who received the 2007 Nobel Price in Medicine, I remember Smithies’ collection of laboratory journals. These handwritten accounts and pencil drawings of experiments, the earliest about half a century old, represented Smithies’ intellectual life’s work. But I’m still wondering how I could have better captured what unfolded on the pages of these journals.

The answer is important, because ideas spring from the information we get and digest.

Both were born after the Internet began to challenge established means of communication and public discourse.

So a few days after I lost my job as a newspaper reporter, Alan asked me what I thought about the change the Internet has brought to us, and particularly how this change is shaping the world of our children.

I looked at him, shrugged my shoulders and said, “It’s just a different way of delivering information.”

After getting more involved in scienceinthetriangle.org and thinking about his question some more, I’m no longer so sure about my answer.

I still believe the Internet as a technology is just a different means of delivering information. But it is in the way we chose to use this new delivery method where we change how we relate to each other, what we know and how we use our knowledge. Guttenberg’s printing press brought about literacy, which changed the way we think because reading molds the brain. Who’s to say, the Internet won’t do something similarly spectacular – especially since tectonic shifts are also rocking other parts of our world such as finance, geopolitics and the environment.

I also believe those shifts present opportunities that should be tapped with the help of new ideas and scienceinthetriangle.org is one of those ideas. I’m not sure where scienceinthetriangle.org will lead me and the others involved. But this is North Carolina’s Research Triangle, an area with a history of innovation. So I’m hopping on for the ride.

Along the way, I hope to come up with a better answer to my husband’s question.