Posts from — February 2003

Wallace & Gromit Through The Nose. New Wallace and Gromit movie ~ “Cracking Contraptions” from Atom Films and Shockwave… but $9.95 to download it? Oh, I don't think so! I guess I don't expect them to give it away for free, but who thought up this hair-brained scheme? I bet that dodgey lodger, the Penguin, is behind it somehow. [MetaFilter]

claymation costs money, we all know it….

'Big Brother' plan to catch rowdy pupils. Plans are being made to install webcams in classrooms in an effort to discourage misbehaviour by pupils. [BBC News | Technology | UK Edition]

I really don't think that we need to do this, adding technological supervision to the immense peer and heirarchical supervision of schools is just silly.

this is an online conference with some nifty papers from a wide variety of disciplines…

Feedback. So I see my blog's been picked up by Adrian Miles, Jill Walker, and Mark Bernstein (all of whom have kind and generous things to say, here, here, and here, respectively). Actually, I suppose I cheated a little, having sent… [Matthew G. Kirschenbaum]

mmm hmmm, well we'll see…..

Blogstreet launches visual neighborhood.

Blogstreet just launched a new tool that uses Java to let you view your Blogstreet “neighborhood” and click on your neighbors to expand and see their neighborhoods, etc. You get the idea. The tool is on their site and the developer, Veer, blogs about it.

I think the tools is fun, but two notes. I don't know my neighbors very well, but maybe that's not the point. Maybe it is about who I SHOULD know… It would be neat to be able to view Technorati data this way. Also, although it is fun, I'm not sure exactly how useful these visualizations are when you're in high-efficiency, I'm-too-busy-to-eat-lunch-because-I'm-blogging mode…

Although I'm enjoying dragging Doc and Dave around and watching the other blogs wiggle as they follow Doc and Dave around the screen. It's particularly fun in show “all” mode where there are a lot of blogs following them around…

[Joi Ito's Web]

nifty toy

Robert K. Merton, 1910-2003. I just heard from my friend Courtney Bender that Robert K. Merton died this morning. He was 92 years old…. [Kieran Healy's Weblog]

oh, bloggit!, one of the greats of sociology of science is gone…

Semantic Blogging and Bibliographies. Semantic Blogging and Bibliographies – Requirements has some useful notes for scientists sharing bibiographies via weblog communities. Of most interest are sections 2 and 3, and the illustrative scenario. You can already do the first part of this scenario with HubMed and Movable Type – each individual abstract page contains the metadata for use with a MT bookmarklet, including the TrackBack URL – but at the moment no metadata is passed to the weblog entry (so you don't get the semantic bit). The logging software is therefore the part that needs to be customised to accept postings of this kind – can Movable Type pass metadata through the posting API?By the way, the newest release of Movable Type “changed all visible instances of blog to weblog in the system and in the documentation”…. [HubLog]

this looks interesting, more and more I am thinking about moving to moveabletype

Visualisations of political polarisation. Orgnet uses Amazon's 'also bought' lists, while TouchGraph uses data from BlogStreet's visual neighborhood (based on weblog linking patterns) to visualise the disconnect between spheres of political thought…. [HubLog]

oooo this is nifty

New Ways of Publishing Science. There is an ongoing discussion dealing with new modalities of scientific publishing. This is one of those areas that will greatly change in the next few years. Scientific authors want as many people as possible to read their work. They do not need remuneration for writing. They get support from their institutions. Journals can potentially publish as many reputable papers as their servers can store, reducing the ability of some publishers to restrict the number of papers, thus permitting them to charge huge subscription fees. BioMedCentral is working on many aspects of these new paradigms. With its open access journals, the Faculty of 1000 filtering system and the customizability of My BioMedCentral suggest new ways to publish new scientific information, while retaining necessary filtering and peer review abilities. Excuse me now. There are several interesting articles that have shown up in my own 'My BioMedCentral.' [A Man with a Ph.D. - Richard Gayle's Weblog]

This set of links are very interesting, especially the new modalities link which has a response to one of Peter Suber's articles that is in my opinion the right position to take…

Study shows strong association between academic collaboration and scientific publishing productivity [EurekAlert!]

I love reports like this one entitled >The Impact of Research Collaboration on Scientific Productivity. They surveyed a lot of scientists regarding several aspects of their research, such as collaboration. They found that the most productive scientists, those that publish the most, are also the most collaborative. They did all sorts of data mashing and found some nice tidbits. They found that the most productive years for a scientist are between the 19th and 28th years following the award of their doctorate. Now measuring productivity purely by publications may skew matters somewhat. It would be interesting to get some idea how important these papers were or whether these just factories chugging out material. But is a nice first start and one that indicates important aspects of how future research will be performed Because Google is such a wonderful device, and since this work is about collaboration, I was able to find a site through the lead author (Barry Bozeman at Georgia Tech) that provides a Word version of the second paper mentioned, Research Collaboration Strategies among Scientists and Engineers. So you can download and read the real thing rather than only a synopsis. I love Google. And I love researchers who are generous with their work. [A Man with a Ph.D. - Richard Gayle's Weblog]

Interesting, the 19th through 28th year…. beyond that i wonder what actually accounts for productivity, i suspect it has a bit to do with publishing….. but I suspect that publishing is much more indicative of an extensive networking and mastery of the necessary skills to get published, than the actual productivity of the scientist….