I'm going to do a round of looking at some of the Science Social Networking sites again. Is anyone active on ResearchGate, Epernicus etc. and interested in testing functionality?
I'm willing to keep an open mind but so far FF surpasses these in terms of networking and ease of use. But if you want to experiment I have accounts in many of these and I would be willing to try.
- Jean-Claude Bradley
I'm really just looking to make sure that things haven't moved on and improved significantly, particularly in the light of the NIH projects.
- Cameron Neylon
I tend to migrate to social networking sites based on "pull" - virtually the only time I go on LinkedIn or Facebook is when I get an email alert to something relevant to my interests. I would assume that if there was anything really cool going on in these new sites I would get these alerts generated by actions by you and my other friends.
- Jean-Claude Bradley
BTW Cameron - that is one of the issues I'm finding with Wave - I tend not to check it because I don't get alerts that there are updates - is there a way to get an email alert for Wave updates?
- Jean-Claude Bradley
Yes, there is an email alerter. I'll add you and it to Wave...
- Cameron Neylon
Agreed to the general point though - if there isn't a pull, I'm not going there really. And I think that is a big issue with Wave - people just aren't checking in.
- Cameron Neylon
@Jean-Claude I don't think there's currently a way of doing this with the current interface without adding a robot but I saw there's a robot on the Haskell public wave which has similar support http://wave-xmpp.appspot.com/public...
- Dan Hagon
I'd be interested in testing (I recently started looking over Epernicus for an article on NGS). Where is the email alerter for Google Wave? Currently, I'm using Waveboard (Mac), which alerts you when there's activity. However, it needs to be running in order to do so.
- Walter Jessen
Just added you to a Wave with the email notifier Walter...
- Cameron Neylon
I have accounts on Epernicus, SciLink, Laboratree, and maybe could consider BenchFly a social networking site too, but like JC, I don't go to any sites besides FF and Twitter (and those are typically through 3rd-party apps), not even Facebook or LinkedIn, unless I get some alert. But I would be happy to see if anything's changed in those science-oriented sites I mentioned
- Shirley Wu
from twhirl
This is important for science as it may help us to have open systems even where there are issues with confidential data. It also may help to bridge the idealism of the open data community with the harsh realities of commercial situations where CTOs have to manage their CFOs
- Cameron Neylon
yes, this sort of thing is why talks about e.g. Shibboleth are heating up on research campuses in the US -- researchers fear and resent open data, but they want and need translucent data, and that means reliable authentication/authorization mechanisms larger than individual campuses
- D0r0th34
Terrific. Are we still maintaining that list of "outputs resulting from FriendFeed"?
- Neil Saunders
I was planning on doing a demo of annotation at PLoS before the end of the year - perhaps this article would be a good candidate. As always, anyone willing to join is welcome.
- Daniel Mietchen
i added a note once, but now it won't let me add any other notes :( I don't see a rule about one note per person. I should have held off for a good one.
- Christina Pikas
I also just noticed that my "annotation" - provided the link to StackOverflow - shows up in the general discussion, where the title "Link" certainly is not helpful, and there is no way I can edit it.
- Daniel Mietchen
maybe something is broken, my note appears in general comments but also in that portion of the text as a comment. maybe that's why I couldn't add other notes?
- Christina Pikas
Not sure why you can't add more notes. Certainly been able to in the past. I see both notes where they are supposed to be I think. But they will also appear in the general comments as well I think.
- Cameron Neylon
Great article! I really need to add some comments or notes, just to prove the authors' point :-)
- Björn Brembs
BTW, when does PLoS finally get karma? I've been asking for proper 'show off' userprofiles for like ever :-)
- Björn Brembs
Cameron, et al. - What's the most useful thing I could do to nurture and support this renewed interest in article level metrics? (not from a competing data product point of view, but a let's get some good technologies out there with good visibility)
- Mr. Gunn
@Cameron: Exactly! I even think having a profile where you can post a pic and see how many papers and comments were published, papers edited, etc.was the very first thing I asked for when I signed up :-)
- Björn Brembs
But it needs to be federated across publishers... :-)
- Cameron Neylon
if authors put in their 'customer' weight, this will go faster, so why not go syndicate :-)
- Claudia Koltzenburg
I think I'll use this paper in my spring thesis class -- this is the main one where I discuss publishing models -- and maybe I'll demo Diigo with this as a class project next to an article that discusses IF.
- Mickey Schafer
While we're on the subject of functionality wish lists, I would also like an embed functionality for PLoS papers. Collecting my publications together but don't want to duplicate copies and reduce googlejuice for the journal - at least not for the OA papers anyway...
- Cameron Neylon
BTW, why isn't there a way to register this thread with the article? Why are we posting here and not on the article? There's got to be a lesson to be learned from this :-)
- Björn Brembs
from iPhone
I've included a link to this thread in a blog post: Article-level metrics getting attention http://ff.im/bGuNY
- Jim Till
+1 Bjoern :-) another question along these lines would be: why does Cameron's intial FF message link to CiteULike and not to http://www.plosbiology.org/article..., or plainly doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1000242 ?
- Claudia Koltzenburg
Because that was the way I brought the link in. I think that that pointer is appropriate. It is a pointer to the fact that I bookmarked it. Other people linked to the paper directly. Perhaps the issue is that we accidentally aggregated around the "wrong" item to talk about the paper. I'm not sure this is a problem as long as the referral works - its a UI irritation not a problem with...
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- Cameron Neylon
well, not directly, maybe in this ff-thread we're just providing some material for what you say in your paragraph "Technical Solutions to Social Problems", namely: "approaches that gather information from processes that are already part of the typical research workflow are also much more likely to succeed." - even though ff may not be part of 'the typical research workflow' (yet?) - and...
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- Claudia Koltzenburg
That's true, and certainly conversation sparked by the paper. But how to capture that in a way that is useful further down the line might be tough...
- Cameron Neylon
A really nice simple javascript that takes a chemical identifier and provides a 3d chemical visualiser. Exceedingly simple and could work well for lots of things.
- Cameron Neylon
Slightly more complex case that uses a template. The drop down menus are fed from the same feed as in the previous example but in this case they can be filtered to only show relevant items. Construction of a template therefore merely requires the selection of number of table columns, deciding whether each cell an input box or a drop down menu, and any filtering that should be applied to the drop down menu.
- Cameron Neylon
SWAT4LS2009 – Keynote Alan Ruttenberg: Semantic Web Technology to Support Studying the Relation of HLA Structure Variation to Disease - http://semanticscience.wordpress.com/2009...
I finally actually read this and didn't really feel that it said very much. But I like the title...[reminder of the article via Anna Croft]
- Cameron Neylon
"It's a rare startup that doesn't build something the founders use" - Wisdom from Paul Graham (no suprises there) http://paulgraham.com/apple...
This is kind of the issue with Wave, in that it's basically a tool for Jens and Lars to communicate with each other, and only secondarily a Google product for the masses.
- Richard Akerman
Seems to me the central issue with tech startups is how to prevent this being a weakness and turn it into a strength. Somehow about being both self critical and demanding but also having a wider view.
- Cameron Neylon
Nice simple starting point. Philosophy here is to make it easy for the user to connect up objects that already exist somewhere on the web when they write up a lab report.
- Cameron Neylon
I am particularly interesting in the 'publish-in-database-x' features... someone mumbling ChemPedia?
- Egon Willighagen
My thinking at the moment is limited to some sort of centralised data store just so that we can keep things simple in terms of building an exemplar. So objects get pushed via REST to the store and then the store generates RSS feeds. Theory being that in the longer term one can build "plugins" for any service that has a REST deposition system and generates a suitable RSS/Atom feed.
- Cameron Neylon
incidentally the other half of this is something that looks like DropBox on scientific steroids. Files dropped into a directory get posted as blobs to the store with whatever metadata can possibly be captured - as far as possible with no user intervention.
- Cameron Neylon
Playing around in #Balsamiq. Impressive while friendly at the same time. TIme to wireframe some #googlewave tools methinks
Great tool. And it's constantly evolving with weekly updates.
- Todd Harris
Apparently some issues with linux version so I think I'll play with the free web version (irritating popup every five minutes) until I get my Mac back and make a decision about purchasing...
- Cameron Neylon
Um, no. At the present time, universities are looking hard at the bottom line. Fee increase or no fee increase, that means paying customers, which means bums on seats. True "anywhere, anytime" won't pay the bills.
- AJCann
Not for the existing universities but does anyone really care about them anymore?
- Cameron Neylon
Yup, the parents who pay the bills care about them. Ask the Ivy league and Oxbridge. The staff who work in them care about them. Employers are also keen on them. And students.
- AJCann
But will parents continue to care if they can get the same cheaper elsewhere? Will employers if they can get a better idea of a prospect's interests and skills from a detailed and diverse portfolio? Students want to make connections I grant and that remains the one major strength of a single site, branded education, that I can't see going away. Looking at the parallels between newspapers and universities is instructive IMO and not comforting.
- Cameron Neylon
Can people get the same elsewhere? Ask an 18 year old looking forward to leaving home and campus social life for three years. The decision to enter HE is not purely academic.
- AJCann
No, they can't. Not at the moment. I'm wondering what happens when someone starts to offer it though. I can see the whole edifice coming crashing down around our ears.
- Cameron Neylon
I see distance education as a different market from traditional campus-based universities. In some cases, the two may cross over, but they are distinct. Take a look at any university brochure and see what they're selling, it's very different from an online course. I'm not arguing that distance education will continue to grow, or that campus-based universities will serve increasingly...
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- AJCann
How about a model that satisfies a multitude of needs: developing world education - tutors on site in volunteer projects - students arrive, get their education by remote, but at the same time do volunteer work (hands on). (also allows local provision improvements) - then students are happily away from home. Although I suspect many of them won't want to be _that_ far from home ...
- Anna Croft
There was a heroic attempt to create a campus on a ship that sailed the world: http://www.thescholarship.com/ . It sailed for only one year, due to problems with the bottom line. I would love to see further attempts in this direction!
- Daniel Mietchen
@cameron The open university has offered the option of taking a degree at a ditance for years. Their 18-25 demographic is increasing, but very slowly. The traditional reasons for going t university for the experience of leaving home still persist, even when it is cheaper to take an OU degree than a campus based one in terms of fees alone.One of the big problems with openlearn was lack...
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- Jo Badge
But we're still thinking about degrees. Is a degree a useful measure of education or training any more? What is more valuable to a job applicant: a degree from [insert name of rubbish university here] or an independent verifiable certificate that someone has done a course on biological science from MIT? Not saying that the answers are clear, just that I fear we're in danger of being blinded by the assumption that education can, will, or should continue in the way it is at the moment.
- Cameron Neylon
I agree accreditation is the key problem - but its already the key problem as soon as you step outside your comfort zone. There are Chinese universities with entry standards higher than Oxford but I have no clue which ones they are or what to look for a student transcript.
- Cameron Neylon
agree that accrediation and international standards are a major issue. Our own VC has plans on the accessiblity of a transcript for degrees ;-) (http://www.guardian.co.uk/educati...)
- Jo Badge
Of course, if we go the independent verifiable certificate from MIT, we loose the diversity of the current system (well, the government wants that anyway, but still). Knowledge automatons. I guess though that your CV will then have to have MIT certificate + specialist course from xxx to differentiate you from the crowd.
- Anna Croft
We might lose diversity of courses - not necessarily a bad thing, do we really need 50 slightly different chemistry degrees in the UK? - but doesn't that enable an increased diversity of outcomes? 1,2,5,10 year courses based on what suits the person, picking and choosing from what will give them what they need?
- Cameron Neylon
Like Cameron says, I think accreditation is a issue, but when you look past that what about infrastructure? 50% of research grants goes to universities to support the infrastructure. Seems like the major challenge would be in having that sort of ecosystem with the open format.
- Mr. Gunn
Actually its only around 9M I think but I'm losing the last twelve months of posts. Too late now, I'll email Bill tomorrow and see if he can raise the quota.
- Cameron Neylon
Aim to feed some of this in - or at least get some answers - we also have some other significant issues that need to be solved so will try to make a list soon.
- Cameron Neylon
Nico Adams talks about questions asked at a Royal Society workshop about data management and (rightly) despairs that some of them are questions at all...
- Cameron Neylon
However, over the past couple of years I have sat through far too many presentations where the presenter got up and talked about the development of a proprietary model/machine learning tool using a proprietary dataset and proprietary software. Now that is NOT science – at best it is a piece of local engineering which solves a particular problem for the presenter, but it does not advance human knowledge at all
- Frank
The irony of sharing this through Google Reader is not lost on me. In terms of licensing this can readily be included in the RSS feed. My feed should include a cc0 stamp within it if all is working properly. Whether it is visible is another question entirely.
- Cameron Neylon
I have to admit that I haven't included copyright information in my RSS footers, but since all my blogs are published under CC Noncommercial - Share Alike 3.0 Unported License, I don't care - it's just another distribution channel. Of course, it screws up my metrics and makes it impossible to accurately estimate impact.
- AJCann
One OpenID enabled WikiMedia installation up and running. Now to tackle the evils of Wordpress...
*sigh* it's a depressing but understandable development. rare-materials collections have been making spare cash off selling stuff (including digital stuff) for quite a while now, as support from Teh Taxpayer has been dwindling. it's fairly natural to think in terms of perceived sustainability rather than mission. regrettable, but natural.
- D0r0th34
NPG responds to a series of questions about the new journal Nature Communications. Some interesting responses but nothing terribly earth shattering.
- Cameron Neylon