Alun Salt › Likes

It would be really nice if the Google Docs API supported the right hooks for use to do this. - Mr. Gunn

Carl, you point a big problem that goes beyond managing citations for a blog. I'm a big fan of DOIs, and I'm always confused why so many places prefer their own internal identifier (PubMed is a prime example). - Martin Fenner

For the last few weeks our first year Biological Sciences students (n ~250) have been using Google Documents to write group reports on a biological topic of their choosing. We've been using Google Docs on our first year key skills module for several years now. It was originally introduced to Smash The State! Sock it to the Man! persuade students of the value of social software, but it was only this year I figured out how dumb I'd been in asking them to write individual documents when I could save myself tons of work by getting them to work in groups using the social features Google Docs provides. Or could I? Except for a few squabbles, the writing part went fairly smoothly. The Turnitin originality reports are OK, apart from a few bad habits we use Turnitin as a tool to flag up. So it was time to start marking. Which is hell. Why? Because abandoning a simple bigbox VLE has its costs. Here's my workflow: 1. Copy group allocations from Excel (used to randomize assignment to groups of... - AJCann

Now that Mendeley is providing an API, Andrew Lang has written code that significantly leverages the information in our private ONS collection. We can now create public links that return the most updated results for specific tags, including multiple tags (which I don't think you can do on Mendeley). - Jean-Claude Bradley

MG I don't think that will be too much of a problem - that service is specific to our collection only - people will have to modify the source code to put in their own authentication info and run themselves to use for their own collections The source code is also available at http://onswebservices.wikispaces.com/mendele... - Jean-Claude Bradley

Oh that's awesome. Alarmingly crowded... At the end there are discoveries in two directions at once at odd angles - anyone know what that was? - Matthew Todd

Ah. The Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer. My bad. - Matthew Todd

A nice app for Mac trackpad (or Magic Trackpad) users - Tom Goskar

It says: "error: authentication needed" But it also says I'm logged in... - Björn Brembs

Ah: wrong password does not result in error logging in! - Björn Brembs

I think this might be a bug we know about by now: When you mistype your username/password, it still looks like you're logged in without actually being logged in. If re-entering your account info doesn't fix it, could you let support@mendeley.com know? Thanks Björn! - Victor / Mendeley Team

read this wonderful post and made a comment. Bora, I support your decision, too much energy and passion came to this blog from your side, so it's understandable. See you on new URL! - Danica Radovanovic

Lovely piece of writing, Bora. I teared up at the end. Sigh. - Mickey Schafer

I'm not sure it's about rewarding effort, I think it's appreciating and rewarding solid work that makes incremental advances instead of expecting everyone to get home runs. - Christina Pikas

A related aspect is the 'old' findings that could (or still cannot) be 'explained' for lack of appropriate technology. The rhombomere segments in the hindbrain, for instance had been known of since the late 19th century, but until lipophilic dyes and hox genes walked into the labs nobody could make much sense of them. One reason I hate old issues of journals are not available on shelf for browsing. - Kubke

Well my view, like I said previously is that we should measure use of individual works/objects. This isn't even all this hard if we do it properly. But something that is page-rank-like and captures all sorts of outputs and all sorts of uses could actually be quite interesting. We're just going round in circles shifting from one kind of observation bias to another at the moment. - Cameron Neylon

"The depletion of ethane and acetylene become significant in the astrobiological sense because of this latest report of a hydrogen flux into the surface This is the key that suggests that these depletions are not just due to a lack of production but are due to some kind of chemical reaction at the surface." - Anthony Citrano from Bookmarklet

"It is one of Leicester's most famous exports – but no-one seems quite sure who invented Blu-Tack. And as manufacturer Bostik prepares to celebrate 40 years of the sticky putty, an appeal is being made for the mastermind to step forward. The substance, made from chalk, oil and other chemicals, was a by-product of an experiment to make a new sealant. The experiment was a complete failure, but someone started using the goo to put up notices. Once the company realised what they had, they turned it blue and the rest is history." - AJCann from Bookmarklet

"Image of the solar transit of the International Space Station (ISS) and Space Shuttle Atlantis 50 minutes before docking, taken from the area of Madrid (Spain) on May 16th 2010 at 13h 28min 55s UT. Atlantis has just begun the "R-bar pitch maneuver": the shuttle performs a backflip that exposes its heat-shield to the crew of the ISS that makes photographs of it; since its approach trajectory is between the ISS and the Earth, this means that we are seeing Atlantis essentially from above, with the payload bay door opened. Transit duration: 0.54s. Transit band width on Earth: 4.8 km. ISS distance to observer: 391 km. Speed: 7.4km/s." - Mark H from Bookmarklet

"Takahashi TOA-150 refractor (diameter 150mm, final focal 2500mm), Baader Herschel prism and Canon 5D Mark II. Exposure of 1/8000s at 100 ISO, extracted from a series of 16 images (4 images/s) started 2s before the predicted time." - Mark H

"Interplanetary travel may not be the first thing that springs to mind when you think of Leicester. But the East Midlands city is home to a group of scientists and engineers trying to answer the question: is there life on Mars?" - AJCann from Bookmarklet

Seems appropriate: Mars is the red planet, and Leicester is the red cheese. - Noel O'Boyle

Ho ho, very good :-) - AJCann

They're playing in Edinburgh on Sept. 11th. I am getting my tickets today. - Jan Wessnitzer from iPod

Oh, didn't know that Jan (although I knew they were on da road) so thanks. £17.50 from Ticket Web. Can I say "This just has to be done" again? I think I just have !! - Graham Steel

"The Great Debate – or the Shapely-Curtis Debate – took place at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History between two eminent astronomers, Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis. Shapely was arguing that the ’spiral nebulae’, that were observed at the time, were within our own Galaxy – and that our Galaxy was the Universe. He also argued that the Sun was not at its centre. Conversely, Curtis argued that the Sun was at the centre of our Galaxy but that the ’spiral nebulae’ were not inside our Galaxy at all. He suggested instead that the Universe was much larger than our Galaxy and that these nebulae were in fact other, ‘island’ universes." - Mark H from Bookmarklet

"Autumn 2010 promises to be an interesting time for University-level science courses in the UK. Although many colleagues around the country are presently unaware of the fact, students joining their degree programmes in October may arrive with very different background training in science compared with previous generations." - AJCann from Bookmarklet

“...technologies like spread spectrum encoding are already masking straightforward radio communications, while conventional broadcasting is giving way to such heavy use of fiber-optics that a planet like ours may go dark at radio wavelengths within a relatively short time as civilizations go, and no more than an infinitesimal flicker in cosmological terms. Thus the interest in alternatives like hunting up Dyson spheres...” - Anthony Citrano from Bookmarklet

"Why did the recent volcanic eruption in Iceland create so much ash? Although the large ash plume was not unparalleled in its abundance, its location was particularly noticeable because it drifted across such well populated areas. The Eyjafjallajökull volcano in southern Iceland began erupting on March 20, with a second eruption starting under the center of small glacier on April 14. Neither eruption was unusually powerful. The second eruption, however, melted a large amount of glacial ice which then cooled and fragmented lava into gritty glass particles that were carried up with the rising volcanic plume. Pictured above two days ago, lightning bolts illuminate ash pouring out of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano." - AJCann from Bookmarklet

I can't believe it has its own Twitter account, although "I'm a lava, not a fighter" had me rolling with laughter - Benjamin Tseng

"We’re excited to reveal that the Zotero project has begun preliminary development of a standalone version of the research software that will interact with browsers other than Firefox. Code has already been committed to Zotero’s open-source repository that provides a glimpse of how this new version might work. This proof of concept is allowing our developers to study how best to integrate Zotero with other popular browsers like Google Chrome and Microsoft Internet Explorer. Of course, Firefox is still an excellent web browser, and we’re confident that it will remain so for years to come. That said, we also want to provide the Zotero community with the opportunity to use other software when they choose to do so, or when they face institutional barriers to using Firefox." - AJCann from Bookmarklet

"There is no connection between illuminated, nocturnal calls of nature and cancer, despite what certain newspapers are claiming. Readers of today’s Daily Mail will have seen a story, Cancer danger of that night-time trip to the toilet, citing research by Professor Charalambos Kyriacou from our Department of Genetics and Dr Rachel Ben-Shlomo from the University of Haifa. The article begins: “Simply turning on a light at night for a few seconds to go to the toilet can cause changes that might lead to cancer, scientists claim.” In fact, neither Professor Kyriacou nor Dr Ben-Shlomo suggest anything of the sort." - AJCann from Bookmarklet

I know Charalambos "Bambos" Kyriacou, he would never claim such ridiculous things (except as a joke, he is very funny!). - Björn Brembs

Good list here: http://www.facebook.com/group..., but one must be careful since Facebook gives you cancer: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health... - Matthew Todd