Ambitious web developers and/or technical experts take note:

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I will start off by saying that this isn't a "general interest" post, nor does it have anything specifically to do with autism, but it's an idea I've wanted to discuss for a while and I think this may be a first place to present it. If this idea actually works, it could be a big thing!

The people who should read on are anyone with deep knowledge of the work being done in any particular technical field (within science, technology, engineering, architecture, you name it), and/or people (including Alex if he feels up to it) who are interested in creating at least moderately big-name websites.

The idea was prompted by my observation that problems of a similar "structure" often come up in very different areas of science, and conversely many research projects even within the same field (i.e. molecular biology, pharmaceutical chemistry, etc.) often have a quite different intellectual "flavor". Also, I have the sense (shared by some others on the autism spectrum) that I have certain unique modes of mental processing that might really come in handy for solving certain particular problems, even if I'm not sure what those problems are. Even though I have a quite broad educational background in the sciences, I feel there are quite some research questions out there that I haven't been exposed to.

The idea is this--a centralized online database into which people working in any field can submit representative problems or research questions from their fields, along with a particular type of clarifying explanation. People in the private sector can create "toy" examples so as not to give away exactly what they're REALLY working on, while those in academia (whom I'm envisioning to be a larger percentage of the users anyway) can use real examples.

The submissions should be constructed so that they present as clearly as possible the underlying schematic nature of the problem (preferably using diagrams), while stripping away as much of the experimental details and peculiarities of their particular field as possible. This makes it so that someone with only a basic education (i.e. without advanced college courses in the field in question) could understand the nature and constraints of the problem. This format is really only well-suited to theoretical problems, i.e. those that can be approched well without having to do new experiments or collect new data. The examples should also as closely and realistically as possible match the typical type of question in the submitter's field whose answer would actually be of VALUE (as opposed to merely passing interest) to people in the field.

Then, people with exceptional abilities could browse this web portal and see if there are any problems that they feel their special abilities would enable them to tackle. The kind of abilities I am referring to here are not just general academic proficiency, nor are they experience in a particular field, nor are they necessarily the stereotypical "savant" abilities such as incredible rote memory. I'm thinking of something along the lines of Temple Grandin's ability to predict how livestock will react to certain handling equipment, or Nikola Tesla's ability to mentally imagine ways of transmitting and converting electrical energy.

In my experience, as intellectually stimulating as it is, the university environment of seminars, department meetings, etc. is rather poor in helping people who have these talents be able to find the right area in which to apply them. This is partly due to the fact that many professors are experts in their particular fields but their vision becomes very hazy with distance from that field. This makes it hard to walk up to anyone, ask "is there somewhere in science where you could make use of this ability to do this?", and get a meaningful answer. In addition, and somewhat more troublingly in my opinion, many areas of modern science and technology seem to get locked into what I think of as a "technique-centered" frame of mind. People start thinking solely in terms of wanting a procedure or "recipe" that will find the solutions to their problems for them, often involving somewhat brute-force methods (whether using experiments or computerized number-crunching). This creates a disconnect between the field and someone who comes in wanting not to use any of the fad tools of the year, but rather to "see" the solution using primarily using his atypical mental ability.

The website I am proposing would break down a lot of these barriers, and would hopefully be easy for everyone involved to use. The submitters of the problems would need no initial knowledge of the relationship between their field and unrelated fields, nor would they need to anticipate who might have what unique mental capacity. The people with the necessary talents would identify themselves. There would be a place for contact information on the site, such that if someone was really interested in one of the problems, he/she could contact the submitter to find out more, but quite a bit of self-selection would presumably take place before this point. The site operator would only need to provide storage space for the problem descriptions, plus the processing capacity for manipulating the links if the "concept map" idea (see the next paragraph) were to be implemented. The people who believe thy may be talented would need to browse the site, but if they're at all like myself, many would even look through something like that on their own for enjoyment. The most difficult aspect would surely be for the submitters to abstract the descriptions in such a way that the necessary information for getting a rough sense of the demands of the problem is readable by someone without much prior knowledge of the field. It would take some advertising of the site (and possibly some "the next big thing"-style hype) to get people to start submitting.

In addition to behaving as a talent search for people with unusual abilities, this site could also have a feature where users could rate the conceptual similarities between two fields, regardless of their relatedness in terms of the traditional academic disciplines. If a user was browsing and realized "hey, this problem in designing reactors for manufacturing pharmaceuticals strikes me as just like that question regarding the detection of quarks in a particle accelerator", he/she could note that fact by voting to strengthen an imaginary "link" between the two problems. After enough votes, a virtual web linking different problems throughout science and technology could be constructed by assigning higher weights ("thicknesses") to connections ("lines") between problems lots of users found similar. This web could then be displayed in a visually user-friendly format to all users to navigate through. This way, aside from the somewhat narrow goal of matching people who can do phenomenal things in their heads with real-world applications of those abilities, the site can serve to stimulate collaboration between people who are grappling with similar problems on the level of abstract theory, although the very distinct concrete manifestations of this theory for those different individuals would mean they would be unlikely to ever meet otherwise.

I personally don't have the necessary web development expertise to get a site like this running, and don't know anyone who would be interested in trying to get something like this started. However, I would find this type of thing very useful, so I would like to get the idea out there and maybe someone will pick it up. Right now I can't think of a good place to post such an idea, but since people on the autism spectrum would logically be in need of this kind of service more than the general population, I thought I'd put it on here.

I think you might have something there. I don't have enough talent, but if you don't find anybody else here either, don't give up. Eventually you might find a group that gets interested.

I think that you want to do a sort of Wikipedia ?

Softwares for that are free

I hope I find someone, or better et a group of people, who are interested in this idea.



That's an interesting idea, doing this in a Wiki format. I probably wouldn't want people other than the original submitters to be able to modify the descriptions though. Some comment feature might be useful if people have a problem almost identical to one already posted and don't want to make their own submission, but allowing everyone to edit might make it so that all submissions end up running together after a while.

Also, the "concept map" idea would need some different kind of framework, if it were to operate like I was envisioning.