Tyler / Research interests – WhyNotWiki

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[–] Category:Tyler / Research interests Tyler / Research interests

Aliases: Tyler / Things I’d like to research, Tyler / Things I’d like to learn about, Tyler / Things I’d like to study

I like ideas. I’m like an idea sponge. I also like words. I could easily spend a whole day and night in front of my computer doing research, and then wonder where all that time went. Pretty sad, huh?

What do I mean by “research”?

I guess one meaning of research would be w:primary research — actual cutting-edge, new research, doing new experiments, trying to push the envelope of what we (as a human race) know in the context of a certain field or domain.

The other meaning, of course, is w:secondary research: “(also known as desk research) involves the summary, collation and/or synthesis of existing research rather than primary research, where data is collected from, for example, research subjects or experiments.” [1] This kind of research involves more reviewing what other people have already done, perhaps compiling it in some way or doing meta-research / analysis.

I’m not sure if this deserves it’s own category or if it falls under secondary research as well, but this category would be “curiosity research” — learning simply for the sake of learning, to become educated/knowledgeable on a subject, possibly purely for the sheer joy of learning or satisfying one’s innate curiosity. If it could be differentiated from secondary research it would be in this way: it would be primarily for one’s personal (selfish??) benefit, without as much (if any) hopes of publishing the result or sharing the “results” of this research (although I love to share what I learn, so that would still be an option, but I think would be secondary to learning simply for the sake of learning)…

Personally I’m interested in all 3 of these types of research — all the way from learning “old information”, which many people already know and have written books about, to doing cutting-edge research, pushing the envelope, seeking to be the first to discover something.

In my list here so far, I haven’t really specified which type of research I want to do in each of these areas. It can probably be assumed, though, if not specified otherwise, that it’s primarily for “curiosity research”.

This list is bound to change a lot and also to be highly inaccurate and out-of-date. So don’t bet anything on the information you see here.

My biggest research interests right now are:

  • Finding software solutions to various problems, such as organization (My software projects, Sedgewik, …)
  • Writing:
    • Non-linear writing system
  • History
    • Chart the trend/speed of certain things over the course of history: the amount of information and technology, inventions (I’m sure that one has been done many times before), religion, diseases, morality, government trends, etc. I bet it would be discovered that the amount of (and our access to) information (and technology) has increased exponentially; my generation can’t even imagine how new so much of technology is and how it wasn’t available, say, 100 years ago
  • America, Freedom, Political science
  • Religion, God
  • Economics
  • Geography, the history of the world, anthropology
  • (Computing topics):

Also:

Also:

Many others which I may list someday… 🙂

[Free software (category)] / [GNU/Linux (category)]

Interview/survey people and ask them:

  • What are your reasons for using Windows / not using GNU/Linux?
    • See how many of their reasons are legitimate and how many are just a result of misinformation, myths, Microsoft FUD.
    • Of their valid concerns, which ones are / are not being addressed by the GNU/Linux community?

Similarly, ask them if they were aware of some of the reasons to use GNU/Linux or to not use Windows/Mac

  • Risky. Trusting big corporations. How can you be sure what’s in those closed binaries? It would be so easy for them to put in something malicious.
  • Expensive
  • Anything you can do on __, you can do on Linux. For most users, Linux has all the apps you need (e-mail, web browser, audio, video, etc.), and they are all free.

Meta

Duplication

  • [Questions (category)]
  • [Problems (category)]
  • Specific interests listed/mentioned under the appropriate topic page/category (For example, I may mention research interests on the Software page or Writing page — so why should I have to mention it here too?)
  • [To-do list (category)]: I think research interests would actually be simply a subset of tasks. They would be different than “normal” tasks only in that they are more long-term (“goals”)…

Is this list necessary?

This whole site, in part, is a a direct [manifestation] of my research interests. In other words, the only topics included in this site are those that interest me (but are they “research” interests?), and eventually the goal is that the only topics that interest me are the ones discussed on this site (in other words, this site is complete).

So to answer the question “what are my research interests?”, couldn’t I just [adverbly] say “whatever’s on my site” or “everything that’s on this site”? Well, maybe… Let’s see…

The information on this page seems to be largely a duplication of the category tree for this wiki. So it would be better if instead of duplicating it, I simply added a “is_a_research_interest” flag or a “how_interested_tyler_is_in_this” field to the rows in that tree.

How it is different?

  • It’s a subset of the entire tree — only the top 10%-20% should be listed here
  • I suppose this list is currently pretty flat, not hierarchical by topic, although I could create a view like that.
  • Many of the topics on my site, although they are interests, are not necessarily “research interests” in the strictest sense (so how strict do we want to be?). Like what? Like these:
    • Things that I’m collecting (Annoyances, Names)… Then again, those wouldn’t properly be called “topics” either; simply categories, or lists…
    • Fun, entertainment, humor, … I wouldn’t say that I’m researching any of those types of topics, per se.
    • Topics that I’m interested in only to the extent that they are tools, technology, skills I need to know and be familiar with in order to be productive, do my job, etc., but I don’t have any interest really in doing primary research — I’m perfectly content reading what others have to say about them and pretty much leaving it at that — Vim, Graphic design, …