 |
|
| FriendFeed is the easiest way to share online. Learn more » |
Marcin › Likes
Thankful for… - http://bytesizebio.net/index...
Marcin, Khader Shameer, Nils Reinton and Anders Norgaard liked this
P't'aiiiin... je vais avoir ça en tête toute la journée ... http://www.youtube.com/watch...
  |
Marcin liked this
Our paper on Chemistry in Second Life is marked as "Highly Accessed" in Chemistry Central Journal - that's nice to discover http://www.journal.chemistryce...
Marcin, Khalid Mirza, mjc and 12 other people liked this
Nice indeed.....
- Graham Steel
That's quick :)
- Egon Willighagen
it would be nice if the BMC journals put the number of views right on the paper - like JoVE does
- Jean-Claude Bradley
Article level metrics FTW.......
- Graham Steel
Graham - do you mean that in the old or new meaning? It could work either way :) http://netforbeginners.about.com/od...
- Jean-Claude Bradley
Congrats, Jean-Claude! :)
- Berci Mesko, MD
Thanks for the link. I always thought FTW meant "for the world".....
- Graham Steel
Graham - if there ever was an abbreviation subject to miscommunication that would be it :)
- Jean-Claude Bradley
It turned out quite unexpectedly that I will be attending ScienceOnline2010.
Bill Hooker, Jean-Claude Bradley, Christina Pikas and 6 other people liked this
Now I just have to attend
- Deepak Singh
Yes! Open Access beer for everyone ;-)
- Bora Zivkovic
Looking forward to finally meet you in person :).
- Pawel Szczesny
it is important to make a distinction between Free Access Beer and Open Access Beer: http://tinyurl.com/qfrvvd
- Bora Zivkovic
fucking delicious - http://fuckingdelicious.tumblr.com/post...
Marcin, Noah Gray, Nils Reinton and 3 other people liked this
What the fuck? So you’re delicious, too? Not just prey? Fucking changes everything.
- laura
from Bookmarklet
awesome blog! thanks
- Alexey
lol
- Christopher Harris
Visual CV attempt - http://www.flickr.com/photos...
 |
Peter Murray, Deepak Singh, Mike Chelen and 15 other people liked this
Feedback request. I try to make a visual overview of my experience so far and my future plans. Any comments regarding both, visual side and scientific/career side really appreciated.
- Pawel Szczesny
One quick suggestion: increase the font size and color differences. It might emphasize your primary interests a bit more.
- tim
from Alert Thingy
Thanks Timothy. That's a good suggestion. I work on another version that would incorporate some more details on the past projects, but so far it's even less readable than this one.
- Pawel Szczesny
I really like the concept of this. I take it the colors correspond to particular positions you held? Have you tried using a color gradient for the categories (photography, science, programming, ...) and different fonts to distinguish each job/educational position?
- Chris Lasher
Thanks Chris, that's a great suggestion! Having a "now" line makes current color code a little redundant.
- Pawel Szczesny
Good idea. How would you show projects that are still on? Maybe you can change the text direction?
- Marcin
Most people with color deficient vision (like mine) will not be able to tell your red from your green (I can't). Also it seems a little odd that there is only one thing in the photography category (a hobby?) and so the columns do not really line up. Maybe a third color for non-work-related? And seconding Chris' idea to use fonts to distinguish where you learned/worked on each item in the list.
- Bill Hooker
@Bill Did you notice Pawel plots the words according to two axes: skillset along the X-axis, and time of gaining that experience along the Y-axis? I missed this at first and was wondering about the Photo category, too, but then I realized how "scientific animations" and "molecular visualizations" spanned both Science and Photography, and hence, they're in between them on the X-axis. That's neat, because you can see that Pawel's interest in visual things started off in night photography...
- Chris Lasher
...and when combined with his exposure to science led him to do, say, visualization of biological networks. Really cool concept. Also, good call about reds and greens.
- Chris Lasher
Marcin, things still going are around the "now" line (dashed line in the middle). I don't think exact start/end does matter, it's more about how things circulate in time. Bill, Chris explained already what is the idea behind three "columns" and placing things. In the first approximation phrases were connected (and it was easier to get the idea about various inspirations), but I removed them for the clarity. Colors will be changed.
- Pawel Szczesny
Thank you all for comments. Updated version with more explanations and feedback request is here: http://freelancingscience.com/2008...
- Pawel Szczesny
Can you describe the method and source data used? It is informative and looks nice :)
- Mike Chelen
Mike, it was a manual work done in Inkscape. I work on something similar done in Processing, but it's still at a draft stage.
- Pawel Szczesny
That would cool to see, definitely more challenges though. Thanks
- Mike Chelen
it's a great idea, it looks great, and it's a great way to have a quick overview of your competences! congrats!
- Adrien Joly
Journal club. A bioengineer gets schooled by Escherichia coli. - http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez...
Marcin liked this
Beagle Project Blog: The Cambridge Darwin Festival http://thebeagleproject.blogspot.com/2009...
Marcin liked this
Some new science twitter peeps interested in good places to host data from abandoned projects. Good time to make a list?
Marcin, Ruchira S. Datta, Michael Habib and 14 other people liked this
Chemspider, Talis Connected Commons, Neurocommons...
- Cameron Neylon
The institutional repository.
- D0r0th34
as long as it is google accessible...and I think several of these people come from unis without repositories that are good on data but nonetheless, this ought to be the first choice...
- Cameron Neylon
Most IRs are. :)
- D0r0th34
How many are set up to cope with data? I should know this - but I've always tended to go off site or have our own services. It always seemed difficult for the Cambridge people to get stuff in and out.
- Cameron Neylon
What sort of data are we talking about, and what kind of coping do you need?
- D0r0th34
Bleh, I should have read the OP. Here's the basic skinny: IRs will do fine with discrete files in pretty much whatever format you care to throw at them. Actual databases are liable to be a problem, however -- the IR won't have built-in query capability for them. Ditto anything (model, visualization, whatever) requiring specialized interaction patterns. Does that help?
- D0r0th34
(free) Amazon Public Data sets... (free?) http://www.freebase.com/ (not free) Amazon S3... Microsoft Azure...
- Richard Akerman
D, yes that's helpful. Presumably anything with specialised metadata is also unlikely to be exposed? I think the problem is that most of these are collections of files, sometimes with some sort of descriptive file that a specialist could make sense of. Google Data Sets would have been perfect for this....[sigh]
- Cameron Neylon
from twhirl
maybe archive.org? also think direct p2p release will become an increasingly viable option
- Mike Chelen
Specialized metadata may be manageable; talk to the IR specialist. The tech infrastructure will unfortunately determine a bit too much... but even DSpace can deal with novel key-value pairs. (Hierarchical XML metadata, unfortunately, it won't do much with... not without srs Manakin hacking.)
- D0r0th34
So key message is talk to your local IR people... ;-)
- Cameron Neylon
OAI-ORE is built for this kind of thing of course but I don't know if there are any tools for packaging arbitrary things up that way.
- Cameron Neylon
Not yet, I don't think, but yes, one hopes it's coming. (HvdS may have built it already, of course!) And yes, a lot depends on how accommodating and enterprising the local IR folks are. Some are more, some unfortunately not so much.
- D0r0th34
You need an institutional affiliation to use it, but Dataverse (http://thedata.org/) is pretty good -- easy to set up, web or local, lots of options. For instance, each lab could have its own dataverse for the sorts of "odds and sods" that Clare mentions.
- Bill Hooker
I think that a torrent tracker for scientific datasets would be sweet
- Marcos de Carvalho
torrent is kind of cool/amusing idea but if no one is seeding the torrent, it is effectively gone
- Richard Akerman
from BuddyFeed
mininova provides free torrent hosting & seeding through their content distribution program http://www.mininova.org/distrib... however researchers may feel opposed to the use of consumer grade solutions
- Mike Chelen
from IM
Web seeding from one of the providers cited above could be an alternative, in addition to the swarm. This could help relieve the bandwidth from a unique source and also acts as a backup in case everybody stop seeding a specific torrent or the default provider goes out.
- Marcos de Carvalho
Although Mininova is a cool service I agree that people would be a little afraid to use it. However, searching SourceForge I found lots of opensource torrent trackers, LAMP based, ready to install.
- Marcos de Carvalho
nice thing about mininova is that they provide the file hosting, and maintain at least 1 seed indefinitely. a web seed can accomplish something similar now too, given how inexpensive hosting plans have become. here's an example of scientific data (fasta dna from ensembl project) being distributed: http://www.mininova.org/tor...
- Mike Chelen
from IM
another promising p2p filesharing system is made by http://wuala.com using a modified bittorrent protocol, and features filesystem integration allowing the distributed data to appear as a standard network drive. however, it isn't backwards compatible with bittorrent
- Mike Chelen
from IM
Clare, I don't argue with multi-institution work as long as one of the collaborators is from my institution. I agree that we have to work past institutional boundaries.
- D0r0th34
Data torrents was something that came up in a discussion about how to preserve DNA sequencing data - seems like there is a potential there - also perhaps some built in measure of peer review? Clare, I suspect if you have a proactive and friendly IR manager they will be happy to take data from multiple institutions. The main thing is to check with those other institutions (and the people you worked with) to make sure they are happy with it. People often get very strange about posting "their" data.
- Cameron Neylon
There are some issues about data copyright/re-use. I use satellite imagery and the re-use constraints can be a nightmare. Whenever I purchase it I try to get the licencee to be as big as possible (at least university level but possibly wider (anyone have experience of this?)). So open sharing is not completely possible. One way I have looked at this is to use an institutional repository...
more...
- Ant Beck
@Cameron, I think that some sort of peer review could be implemented through a comment/rating system coupled with a user trust certification (like the one used by Advogato) as well as by the number of seeders, in the case of data torrents. Taken together, these metrics may help identify datasets that can be trusted.
- Marcos de Carvalho
Ant, this is a big problem. Which is why some of us are arguing for research data to be made explicitly public domain wherever possible. I think you're doing the right thing by trying to make it as widely useable as possible. Do you have permission to re-publish to support derivative results that you are putting into journals? Some interesting questions raised by this, e.g. can people actually trust your claims if they can't see the original data?
- Cameron Neylon
Marcos, that's true, I was thinking more the peer review of archiving that is implict in whether people are seeding particular data sets. Not sure this is a good way of determining what gets kept but nonetheless it is a possible mechanism...
- Cameron Neylon
For storing databases inside repositories, Ben O'Steen is your man. http://oxfordrepo.blogspot.com/2008...
- Jodi Schneider
SQL databases can be safely imported and exported as a series of text statements. Also, other systems such as SQLite exist natively as files.
- Mike Chelen
Cameron: One advantage of BitTorrent for peer review is the unique identification of data sets through integrated CRC checking. Another is resilience, because as long as at least 1 seed exists the files can always be duplicated and distributed by anyone.
- Mike Chelen
Ben O'Steen is definitely da man. Mike, thanks for the info about BitTorrent and checksums -- I didn't know that! Can it be told to check against one particular set of source materials?
- D0r0th34
D0r0th34: Yup indeed, at the file and block levels. Most clients are designed to see such mismatches as data corruption, which is corrected by re-downloading the appropriate sections, however the checksums and protocol could have an interface designed to compare different versions.
- Mike Chelen
Cameron: AFAIK all providers allow publication of derivatives (web and trad. print) but with onerous provider specific constraints. However, the common format for derivatives is jpg. This degrades the data structure in the imagery and means that re-users can not conduct reconstructive image analysis. Discussed this in a paper here: http://www.univie.ac.at/aarg...
- Ant Beck
The Incredible Shrinking Genome - http://bytesizebio.net/index... (via http://friendfeed.com/iddux...)
Marcin, Daniel Mietchen, Pawel Szczesny and Abhishek Tiwari liked this
mammalian genomes have been losing mobile DNA elements since the kt extinction. Connection to extinction somewhat tenuous but interesting.
- Iddo Friedberg
New protein structures replace the old : Nature News - http://www.nature.com/news...
Marcin, imabonehead, Chris Lasher and 13 other people liked this
"...Gert Vriend at Radboud University Medical Centre in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, and his colleagues are writing software that they hope will eventually automatically re-refine, at the click of a mouse, all the data deposited in the PDB."
- Wladimir Labeikovsky
"Vriend occasionally contacts the scientists who deposited data that he has refined, with mixed reactions. "Sometimes people are very grateful, and sometimes they are insulted," he says." Ego in science, surely not.
- Neil Saunders
Imagine how much more validation and cleanup they could do if everyone also deposited raw data (eg raw diffraction images, or unprocessed NMR spectra) ! This is why fledgling initiatives like TARDIS are important ( http://www.tardis.edu.au/ ). Personally, I would love to run my structures through their pipeline during analysis and at submission - this way everyone's data is polished,...
more...
- Andrew Perry
@Neil Heh, ego aside, Gert's brand of diplomacy is a bit... rough-edged (EDIT and his sense of humour too)
- Andrew Clegg
:-) A lot of the work I did in grad school was done using WHATIF. Wonder how much he's added on to it in the last decade
- Deepak Singh
Live-blog from Tehran including video: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009...
Marcin liked this
Thank you for interesting news.
- Marcin
Empowered Patients and Doctors: Webicina Flash Presentation - http://scienceroll.com/2009...
Marcin and Berci Mesko, MD liked this
Open-access publishing gains another convert : Nature News - http://www.nature.com/news...
Marcin liked this
"University College London (UCL) has become the latest institution to adopt an open-access publishing policy, adding to a rapid increase in such mandates over the past year."
- Björn Brembs
from Bookmarklet
Open Data: license, rights, aggregation, clean interfaces? - http://chem-bla-ics.blogspot.com/2009...
Abhishek Tiwari, Daniel Mietchen, Marcin and 7 other people liked this
Too much to think about to respond sensibly at moment but just one point is that there are two issues, one is the technical issue - can it be managed legitimately - and the other is the social confusion issue - how many people do you lose because they assume that you're not allowed? I would certainly make the assumption that I can't mix CC-BY, GFDP, and oDBL together so would walk away....
more...
- Cameron Neylon
The thing is, we have pretty much all the technology to not have to mix the data. That is really the point I want to make. Look at what Bio2RDF does... they have a common (SPARQL) interface, but the data in different databases. Hence, they have no need to mix the data, but only link the data. And linking the data can go even via a clean, independent interface... InChI, for small molecules, rdf.openmolecules.net for InChI's as URLs...
- Egon Willighagen
ah man I need to think about this properly. Are you going to be online for the OKF working group meeting this afternoon?
- Cameron Neylon
from twhirl
Yes, I planned to.
- Egon Willighagen
Required reading for anyone interested in Open Data. I would still say PDDL/CC0 makes things simpler by removing all question, but I *think* you may be right about clean interfaces making PDDL/CC0 not strictly necessary.
- Bill Hooker
BBC Scitech: Bee alert: Hive thieves pose new menace to keepers http://news.bbc.co.uk/1...
Marcin liked this
Macronuclear Genome Sequence of the Ciliate Tetrahymena thermophila, a Model Eukaryote - http://www.citeulike.org/user...
comment = {Found via a search in PLoS Biology for "kinesin." I only read the abstract but learned that Tetrahymena has two nuclei--one for sexual reproduction (MIC) and one for gene expression (MAC). This is fascinating to me, and hopefully someday I can learn about it. At this point, I have no idea what benefits this could have for the organism. I also wonder how it impacts DNA damage repair and genome stability. } PLoS Biol, Vol. 4, No. 9. (29 August 2006), e286. The macronuclear genome of Tetrahymena thermophila is sequenced and analyzed. Conservation in this single-celled ciliate of some features normally observed in only multicellular organisms sheds light on early eukaryotic evolution. Jonathan Eisen, Robert Coyne, Martin Wu, Dongying Wu, Mathangi Thiagarajan, Jennifer Wortman, Jonathan Badger, Qinghu Ren, Paolo Amedeo, Kristie Jones, Luke Tallon, Arthur Delcher, Steven Salzberg, Joana Silva, Brian Haas, William Majoros, Maryam Farzad, Jane Carlton, Roger Smith, Jyoti Garg,...
- Steve Koch
Skin flick - http://bytesizebio.net/index...
Marcin, Jim Hardy, Neil Saunders and 3 other people liked this
great, embedded wolfa looks great
- Abhishek Tiwari
Fascinating. And gross.
- Steve Koch
Ah, the gluteal crease.
- Shirley Wu
@Steve. Just be grateful I didn't actually link the gluteal crease.
- Iddo Friedberg
Shirley, sometimes you worry me... :-)
- Bill Hooker
@Bill, don't worry, I'm merely appreciative of a fine turn of phrase ;). Thankfully, long shirts that cover the bum are in these days.
- Shirley Wu
Did the subjects use gluteal crease floss first? Sisqo recommends it to keep away the microbiome creeps.
- Steve Koch
There are some great science challenges in the human microbiome. What's "normal"? Is there a shared, "core" microbiome? We need to know these things before we can say whether it can indicate disease states.
- Neil Saunders
@Neil: regarding the exisence of core miciobiome: see http://bytesizebio.net/index... Jeffrey Gordon from WashU claims that there isn't much of a core micriobiome, at least for the gut.
- Iddo Friedberg
Farms downsize with miniature cows - Los Angeles Times - http://www.latimes.com/news...
Private Sanjeev, MiniMage TKDteacher of FF, Andrew and 25 other people liked this
"They bought minicows -- compact cattle with stocky bodies, smaller frames and relatively tiny appetites. Their miniature Herefords consume about half that of a full-sized cow yet produce 50% to 75% of the rib-eyes and fillets, according to researchers and budget-conscious farmers. "We get more sirloin and less soup bone," Ali said. "People used to look at them and laugh. Now, they want to own them." In the last few years, ranchers across the country have been snapping up mini Hereford and Angus calves that fit in a person's lap. Farmers who raise mini Jerseys brag how each animal provides 2 to 3 gallons of milk a day ... one animal needed less than an acre for grazing. Because the minicows could be grass fed, the couple were spending at least half the amount on feed than they would have on regular-sized animals. The minicows also reached their mature weight faster, so they could be sold for meat sooner."
- Paul Buchheit
from Bookmarklet
I kind of want to own a mini-farm now.
- Paul Buchheit
They're cows the size of schnauzers but they're cattle!
- Akiva Moskovitz
I could swear I saw this on a Jack in the Box commercial....
- Alan Chamberlain
Paul, you've never struck me as a farmer, but if you get a mini-farm, I definitely want to see it.
- Clare Dibble
Yeah, I think the "taking care of it every day" part might be a problem for me. I'll probably have to hire a mini-rancher. I've been thinking about finally getting some ducks too. I think our yard is big enough that the mess won't be too bad, and we'll have a lot of fresh eggs.
- Paul Buchheit
Paul you will have much more poop than eggs from ducks..Trust me. Been there done that. They are fun and cute but very very messy. Unless you have many acres, which maybe you do. Just my two cents.
- Bill Heslin
Speaking of chickens... http://statlerchick.blogspot.com/
- beethoven
Apparently, Los Altos is chicken friendly.
- beethoven
Do you really have to take care of it every day? Can't you just leave it in your back yard until you're ready to eat it?
- Gabe
quail: meaty miniaturised chicken
- John Hardy
I'm thinking the proportion of meat to bone would be identical, "less soup bone". LOL.
- Kevin Gamble
Reaching their mature weight faster suggests to me that they develop even less flavour than regular cows. OTOH, being half grass-fed can't hurt.
- Andrew C
Andrew: calves are immature, yet people seem to really like veal for some reason.
- Gabe
Fair enough, but veal is deliberately raised to be mild and tender and unlike beef. (OTOH, speaking of flavourless beef, people do seem to like filet mignon.)
- Andrew C
" They also had a tough time finding collars for ID tags small enough to stay put on their calves. So the owners of the Sonoma Little Cattle Co. in Santa Rosa, Calif., went to a pet store and bought dog collars. "It wasn't until later that we realized they had tiny hamburger and hot dog designs on them," Mintun said."
- Clare Dibble
I wonder how much tri-tip one of these makes relative to a normal size cow.
- Clare Dibble
I think this is the sort of cow that White Castle uses for their little burgers.
- Gabe
First postdoc paper formally accepted in PLoS Bio. Its about the evolution of phosphoregulation in yeast species. Time to celebrate :)
Chris Miller, Peter Binfield, Bora Zivkovic and 28 other people liked this
Congrats Pedro - nice work!
- Jason Stajich
whoohoo! look forward to reading paper (and perhaps blog post?)
- Neil Saunders
Well done. Buy one on me (seriously -- will pay you back when I next come by SF)
- Jonathan Eisen
Congratulations! Until the concept of journal prestige dies out completely (if it ever does), that's the best bio journal in the world.
- Bill Hooker
@Jonathan, what, you buying beers for all authors in PLoS Biology? _Definitely_ need to put that in the marketing materials... (I bet the I.F. would go through the roof -- sorry Bill...)
- Andrew Su
Well, the plan was that this was specific for Pedro (and what is I think his first PLoS Bio paper but he can confirm ...). But sure, if there are other first time PLoS Bio authors I am more than happy to buy a beer for them. However, after Pedro there will have to be some restrictions - like I have to be there ....
- Jonathan Eisen
congrats Pedro-great work
- Abhishek Tiwari
congrads, looking forward to reading
- chaz2b
hey, well done! congrats!!!
- Thomas Lemberger
Thanks everyone, specially Jonathan for the beer ;)
- Pedro Beltrao
congrats !
- Pierre Lindenbaum
Congratulations Pedro! Can you send me a reprint? Oh wait, it's Open Access :-D
- Lars Juhl Jensen
Lars FTW. :-) :-)
- Bill Hooker
Congrats Pedro!
- Duncan Hull
Excellent!
- Konrad Förstner
Nice.
- Peter Binfield
Congratulations!
- Ruchira S. Datta
ConvoTrack - http://convotrack.com/
Marcin, Steve Koch, Ruchira S. Datta and 4 other people liked this
"Ever wanted to see the entire conversation surrounding a post? Now you can! This simple bookmarklet will load comments from Twitter, FriendFeed, Digg, Reddit, HackerNews and any blog mentioning the article and will load it in a handy sidebar"
- Andrew Perry
The example says: "could not retrieve results".
- Björn Brembs
Must be a temporary outage .. it worked for me ~ 24 hour ago.
- Andrew Perry
Working for me just now. Like it a lot.
- Neil Saunders
Fund Science - Home - http://fundscience.org
Jean-Claude Bradley, Daniel Mietchen, Marcin and 9 other people liked this
Our mission is simple: To enable the public to fund pilot research projects. Accomplishing this goal has immense benefits. First we're providing research funds to a whole new generation of researchers that are our future. Secondly we're walking the public through the scientific process, from grant writing to funding, all the way to the results. Finally we are creating an ecosystem for scientists to collaborate with each other as well as the public on shaping future research projects. Tags: science.funding Posted by: cwhooker
- Bill Hooker
This + sciflies = good links, thanks Bill. I was thinking about this very idea recently - having a PhD student conduct their studies in the open, with funding from the public. There are a lot of issues with such a model. "The public" encompasses such a wide range of background scientific knowledge. And science is expensive - one PhD is $100K+. Maybe a good model would be to use public...
more...
- Matthew Todd
Wow, this sounds pretty fundamental.
- Mr. Gunn
Cool idea, it'll be interesting to see how this grows
- Brian Krueger - LabSpaces
RT @iftf: Demographics: Extreme Longevity - http://www.iftf.org/node/2806 #CalorieRestriction http://myloc.me/show...
Marcin liked this
Frank Lloyd Wright Lego Sets | Gadget Lab | Wired.com - http://www.wired.com/gadgetl...
Andrew Perry, Simon Cockell and Marcin liked this
"Brick by brick, Lego has been building its way out of the near bankruptcy it suffered around the turn of the century. It has done this by a seemingly simple strategy — making awesome product after awesome product. Now it is releasing the almost ridiculously fitting Architecture series, beginning with the Frank Lloyd Wright Collection, six planned sets including the Guggenheim in New York and Fallingwater, the iconic cantilevered waterfall-house outside Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania."
- Shirley Wu
from Bookmarklet
1000 Genomes phase change - http://www.politigenomics.com/2009...
Last year's London Science Blogging Conference is this year's Science Online London, scheduled for Aug 22. Follow @soloconf & #soloconf_09
Jonathan Gross, Deepak Singh, Marcin and 14 other people liked this
mmm I'm notionally on holiday - this may require some negotiation...
- Cameron Neylon
Interesting - who is the organiser?
- Maxine
Twitter account works, the website not yet ;)
- Pawel Szczesny
@Pawel website goes live on Thursday/Friday presume that's where you sign up too. Looks like it is "co-hosted by NPG, Mendeley & Royal Institution"
- Duncan Hull
Hopefully, I'll be free to attend again! Diary is clear at the moment...
- David Bradley
Cameron - we would have preferred a later September date as well, but August 22 was the only available date at the Royal Institution (and even that hasn't been officially confirmed yet). Announcement will come later this week!
- Victor / Mendeley Team
You know, when I moved from New Orleans to San Diego, I thought I would be less jealous of people living near a great community of science bloggers, but you Londoners really have us all beat!
- Mr. Gunn
Victor, I'll cope, just have to cope with some more muttered comments about someone being a "blog widow" :-)
- Cameron Neylon
Gunn: that is why online presence of conferences is vital, so interested parties in entirely different regions can participate
- Mike Chelen
mm, I wonder how I can spin it that, attending this will increase sales, definately want to go
- Frank
Bother. I'll be away
- Frank Norman
Website is due to go live Tuesday, after the bank holiday. There's barely enough funding for the conference itself -- there will be a small registration fee, and they didn't pay me anything last year!
- Richard P Grant
At #ASMGM Terry Gaasterland now talking about her software for IDing gene transfer - Dark Horse - http://genomebiology.com/2007... -
Marcin and Deepak Singh liked this
Like Google, Only Much, Much Worse. Wolfram Alpha is yet another pretender to the search giant's throne. - http://www.slate.com/id...
Vesna Gerintes, Darren Heydon, Yaroslav Nikolaev and 91 other people liked this
"Wolfram has discouraged comparisons between his new site and Google, insisting each serves different purposes. But that doesn't make any sense; you'll use both sites to look up stuff you don't know, so it's irresistible to compare the two. On a side-by-side test, Google wipes the floor with Wolfram Alpha. Using the search engine, I found life expectancy information for California and Kansas, the murder rate in South Africa and Baltimore, M.I.A.'s album sales, economic data for San Francisco, and the top speed of a Veyron: 253 mph. When you ask Google how many calories you'd burn on various sports, you find this page on NutriStrategy.com, which lists caloric measures for all those activities and dozens more, including playing drums, horse grooming, and raking the lawn. That example illustrates the difficulty Wolfram faces in trying to match Google. Much of the data that we look for online aren't found in formal, structured tables like the CIA Factbook. Even Wikipedia misses mountains...
more...
- Paul Buchheit
from Bookmarklet
When I met with Microsoft's search team a couple weeks ago, they said most of tech media covers search engines "wrong". So I have held off on giving this a full spin, but I've been quite underwhelmed with the tests so far. Why should it be so difficult to determine what is the right kind of query and the wrong kind? Why should I feel like it's user error when the product doesn't easily define what it is supposed to do?
- Louis Gray
I disagree, I think this is a great tool for research-based searches but not so great for trying to find a specific item
- mjc
It still doesn't seem like a search engine to me. And it's actually hard to define what is and, specially, how to use it.
- Arnaldo M Pereira
@Michael, inspecific research is almost an oxymoron
- בייַ מיר ביסטו שיין
Yes but can google divide the amount of calories burnt playing drums by the weight of a slinky and provide the output in joules per slug-fortnight?
- Mitch
"That example illustrates the difficulty Wolfram faces in trying to match Google" --- a complete straw man, disingenuous and foreshadowed by the opening commentary. Who said Wolfram was trying to match, or even play in the same game as, Google?
- Isaac Hepworth
His test queries were very similar to the Wolfram demo queries though. I ran into the same thing -- it seemed like a cool idea, but I couldn't get it to actually give me any interesting answers even though I tried to construct problems that it should be good at.
- Paul Buchheit
The most succinct response to this question that I've heard comes from Tim O'Reilly: "Why are you asking Wolfram Alpha questions that would be answered by a search engine. Kind of like using excel as a word processor" (http://twitter.com/timorei...)
- DeWitt Clinton
@Alex, I didn't say nonspecific research. what I meant was if you are looking for a specific piece of content, wolfram alpha doesn't have a big enough index yet. if you are however looking for data on a subject that doesn't have to be from a specific piece of content (eg, plotting/solving equations, data about persons or trends...) then you will likely do very well with alpha. it's of course not as mature as google yet though. don't knock it until you've used it for a math course!
- mjc
@DeWitt++
- Isaac Hepworth
DeWitt, I agree with the idea of it being something else, and like the concept, but it just doesn't work very well for me. Have you actually gotten anything useful out of it? (not using a suggested search, but one you thought of yourself)
- Paul Buchheit
Criticism is easy. Innovation is hard.
- Gregg Scott
I wouldn't think of Alpha as a search engine any more than I would consider Wikipedia to be one.
- Gabe
wolfram alpha is much closer to public semantic data and querying platforms such as freebase than to search engines like google
- Mike Chelen
Gabe: further innovation exists in mathematic queries and comparison to wikipedia is apt because of integrated data set
- Mike Chelen
Paul, try searches that take disparate pieces of data and compute an answer, e.g. http://www91.wolframalpha.com/input... (or try population of USA/population of India)
- Deepak Singh
You need to use your imagination a little bit to grasp that the comparison of life expectancies in all US states, or all countries in the world, is really within the reach of Wolfram|Alpha, even if "it doesn't know, *just now*, what to do with your input", when you ask it about these things. Same remark about homicide rates. Sure, those may not be easy numbers to get at for some...
more...
- François Dongier
Paul: practical usage similar to online spreadsheets, for calculation of frequent tasks such as finding equations by regression http://bit.ly/18FZD7
- Mike Chelen
I get the concept Deepak, but was that an actual query for something you wanted to know, or a demo of Wolfram? My question remains, has anyone actually used it to answer an actual question they had? When I tried (something about the mass of oxygen in a 20cm sphere), it didn't answer. I go to go to Google for answers. I go to Wikipedia for answers. I could go to Wolfram for answers. In that sense, they all compete.
- Paul Buchheit
@Paul -- in response to have I gotten something useful out of it? -- no, nothing other than a contrived query for weather data (http://www16.wolframalpha.com/input...) that I heard would work well (it did). But I don't see that as a failing of Alpha. I don't use Excel much either, and never Mathematica. But I do know what they're good for, and if I ever needed a spreadsheet or a computational software I'd know where to turn. I'm fine with Alpha being designed for a specific need.
- DeWitt Clinton
Google (and Wikipedia of course) were in a much less advanced state than Alpha when they launched.
- François Dongier
I agree that it could be very useful as "Mathematica on the web", but the demo video and other hype made it out to be much more. Hopefully it will get better though -- I do like the concept of what they are trying to do.
- Paul Buchheit
Forget the hype, think for yourself. Alpha is Mathematica 7, 8, 9 on the web.
- François Dongier
I think the underlying thread in this thread, as it were, is that we want to believe in something innovative and new, but we are frustrated as to how we are expected to modify our behavior to work around its limitations (intended or otherwise).
- Louis Gray
It's qlpha, right? Let it go through beta and then full release--and then if it doesn't execute mathematical computations go ahead and dismiss it.
- Gregg Scott
So you're waiting for WolframBeta Gregg? :)
- Paul Buchheit
Yes! Gmail is still in beta after 5 years. I don't think it was intended for widespread use by non-academics anyway. It's machinery is for researchers, mathematicians and scientists. We should always support the innovators. Remember those black and white Apple ads?
- Gregg Scott
Raise your hand if you use Google or Yahoo to search the web. Keep your hand up if you think Alpha is overrated. Now put your hand down if you *don't* use Mathematica or NumPy or Maple or Matlab on a regular basis. How many hands are still in the air?
- DeWitt Clinton
Gregg, do you think the media coverage was an accident, and that they only intended for academics to use it?
- Paul Buchheit
When Alpha (or Beta) will incorporate some simple logical reasoning ability, its applicability and overall usefulness will explode.
- François Dongier
Paul. I don't know about their media strategy. I do know that tech journalism loves a new story so they may have inflated expectations by misunderstanding it's application. Or that could've been WA's marketing mistake. I heard Leo's interview with Paul Wolfram and I didn't get that he believes this is an app for the masses at all.
- Gregg Scott
Leo's interview was excellent: go 2/3 towards the end of http://www.podtrac.com/pts...
- François Dongier
Paul, WA may be guilty of inhabiting that bubble that all of us who love new technology inhabit by thinking that all the world is just like ourselves. It's a niche but potentially very powerful application. I think over time it will become more non-academic friendly. I could be totally wrong. Of course.
- Gregg Scott
It didn't help that Doug Lenat gave a ringing endorsement. :)
- Ray Cromwell
Comparing Google to WA is like comparing a cell phone to a graphing calculator.
- Gregg Scott
Search engines always have this problem where you don't know their domain coverage exactly. If you don't like the results, are you asking the question wrong, or does it not have the answer? Even Google has this problem, but when you can't tell who has what, you end up always using the search engine with the broadest coverage -- which is Google right now.
- ⓞnor
What I would like from WA is a nice hierarchical directory of all the data they have broken down by subject area. Their directory of examples is close, but isn't quite authoritative enough. That way I could really get my head around what they have. A well-curated set of general data banks with a good calculation engine on top seems like it could be really useful, especially if they make it possible for the community to participate in the data curation process. But it's not a search engine.
- ⓞnor
The thing which seems to be missed by a lot of people is that Google has a pretty decent "computation engine" right now. See, for a useless example http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub... vs http://www30.wolframalpha.com/input... Obviously Google isn't exposing many entities ("facts") to it now, but the possibilities are pretty clear (See Google Squared...)
- Nick Lothian
Wolfram|Alpha reviews seem to be a very interesting litmus test... there are those that grok the concept who may be disappointed by what it delivers - in this very early incarnation - but they don't write off the ideal. Those that don't grok it end up comparing the service directly to the Google in one way or another (often while proclaiming that they aren't) and write off the company...
more...
- David HC Soul
I think the underlying thread in this thread, as it were, is that we want to believe in something innovative and new, but we are frustrated as to how we are expected to modify our behavior to work around its limitations (intended or otherwise). - Louis Gray -- Think so too. I tried lots of things for kicks and was unable to get to anything really interesting, I had to look elsewhere for...
more...
- ElijahBailey-Zu of FF <0,
Pretty good for crosswords though ;p http://www22.wolframalpha.com/input...
- ElijahBailey-Zu of FF <0,
I agree with François. It is just "Mathematica on the web". And only this "mathimatica" part of the system works well. Other parts are data integration/inference and NLP they both are unsolved problems now. Wolfram|Alpha does not propose any new solution to these problems. It uses state-of-the-art methods and as result it does not work.
- Maxim Grinev
Nor: http://reference.wolfram.com/mathema... gives a good idea of the currently available datasets. Clearly incomplete. The interesting question is whether making it complete enough to be useful is or not realistic.
- François Dongier
From what's new in Mathematica-7: http://reference.wolfram.com/mathema... , the fun exercise is to imagine what new computable datasets will be included in future versions. Things could go very fast if the community contributes.
- François Dongier
Most of my searches,questions and answers are on Twitter and FriendFeed based on my trusted friends(experts).Main trend.
- Igor Poltavskiy
The data representation is great but the problem is that Wolfram expects the user to learn about it instead of it trying to learn about the user
- Kiran Patchigolla
I see Wolfram Alpha more as a competitor to Wikipedia than Google. The media are the ones who are pitching Wolfram Alpha as a Google competitor, yet they are the same ones that are saying that it can't compete... crazy.
- Stuart Maxwell
I hope the arrival of Wolfram Alpha will make Google start asking themselves the question "are we infallible." And I wouldn't be surprised if, in the near future, Google would begin paying more attention to how it presents what it emits. WA's one big and DISTINCTIVE advantage over typical search engine's output, is that it attempts to enhance and embellish the flow in graphically-palatable chunks (even though they've gotten few things wrong, and abuse small type in graphics-tables far too much).
- ianf ⌘
Has anyone tried searching for "swine flu"
- Peter Stuifzand
It is not "a great tool for research-based searches" even because it does not provide references to the sources where the answer was taken
- Maria Grineva
Wolfram Alpha is a good first attempt at building a computational knowledge engine, but it needs to massively expand its database to become useful and appealing for most people. It is still a demo, a tantalizing taste of things to come, not a fully realized product. At a minimum, it needs to convert all the facts in Wikipedia into a computational format.
- Sean McBride
"Maria - it does not provide references to the sources", yes it does, clik "source information"
- Anders
Sean: Wikipedia data could easily be imported through DBpedia right? Haven't heard much about how to bring data from the RDF web (LOD) into Alpha, but that should be relatively easy. The hard part is what to do with it, as long as Alpha doesn't do logical reasoning. Maybe the best way of merging the two would be to extract RDF from the web of data through a SPARQL query, send the data to Alpha's API and have it return some useful interpretation of that data.
- François Dongier
Compare Google and Wolfram Alpha for searches on the population of Pakistan: 1. search[Google; pakistan population http://www.google.com/#q=paki...] 2. search[Wolfram Alpha; pakistan population http://www46.wolframalpha.com/input...] The Wolfram result is more elegant and directly informative -- but takes quite a long time to produce.
- Sean McBride
Compare searches on GOOG YHOO: 1. search[Wolfram Alpha; goog yhoo http://www46.wolframalpha.com/input...] 2. search[Google; goog yhoo http://www.google.com/#q=goog...] The WA search results are clearly superior.
- Sean McBride
I like the concept, but I see two major flaws that need to be addressed. The first is probably easy: You can't, afaict, compare two disparate data sets over time (can you get it to give you a graph of russian gdp vs crude oil price?). The second is that they're asking for "curators" to help shepherd new data sets, but they don't seem to make them publicly available in raw form. I'm not going to volunteer to maintain their private database.
- Joel Webber
Sean: Actually I don't really mind Alpha taking a long time to produce its answer, I even seem to enjoy it... Feels like watching the machine thinking, trying to guess what sort of calculation and graphs it will come up with :-)
- François Dongier
I'm curious how long it would take google to approximate pi to a million decimal places... Mathematica 6 did it on my x2 3800+ w/ 2gb ram in about 8 seconds. Alas, 2gb of ram was not enough to approximate it to a billion decimal places :(
- LarchOye
I think that Farhad Manjoo just wanted to create buzz with this header. It's no sense to compare Google and Wolfram|Aplha. Its like comparing Word and Corel. They can do some same things, but would you use Word to create a graphic? Would you use Corel to write long text? I would use Google to see what food is good for me, and I would use WA to calculate a sum of its calories. If WA weren't any good, Google would not be showing us some of its not-working search experiments lately.
- Pablo Yamamoto
Thanks for that rational comment, Pablo.
- Christopher A Carr
Pablo summed it up pretty well. Besides WA just launched a couple of days ago and as the users themselves its still in a learning phase. I just wish i had an iphone + WA back in school during all my horrible maths exams lol
- Pretty Monkey Studio
@LarchOye: 0.34 seconds: http://www.google.com.au/search...
- Nick Lothian
I'm not listening to anyone's take on Alpha who isn't a Mathematica user. The rest of you tech journalists can go find something else to hype.
- Mr. Gunn
FD: the problem with WA often taking so long to fully display its results: I'll wager that many users move on to another web page without realizing that they've seen only partial results.
- Sean McBride
If WA still processes results "behind the window" after first showing them to the user without indicating it explicitly, then this is clearly a design error.
- ianf ⌘
hmm... do you always stop thinking after answering a question?
- François Dongier
at least they don't have the deletionist cabal ruining it for everyone.
- Jon
cuil, anyone?
- dario
No, François, but I look extra pensive to indicate more may be coming. Anyway, comparing lifeless computer output to a human answer is taking anthropomorphizing one step too far.
- ianf ⌘
ianf: was joking :)
- François Dongier
Thx, reading this article an thread give me some insights of the usefulness and reach of this tool
- Luis Enrique León
Convention is scary-powerful. We're so used to putting our strings of text into a box and clicking Search that we assume everything with a box and a go button are Google. WolframAlpha seems to be a different beast entirely, and I don't envy the creator(s) in trying to describe what it does. That's not to say it'll catch on if it fails to answer questions, because I believe the majority of people are too lazy to tailor what they ask, to the style that suits the oracle.
- Rick Cogley
Stephen Wolfram himself put it best, I think, in his interview with Leo the other day. He said basically that it's going to take some time for people to get used to the kinds of questions that WolframAlpha is going to be good at answering. And I have to add to that, over time the people on that project will discover and add new data sources to the engine, and come up with new techniques...
more...
- guruvan (Rob Nelson)
That said, I thought this was a poor article, written by someone who really didn't try to understand the project. "Wolfram has discouraged comparisons between his new site and Google, insisting each serves different purposes. But that doesn't make any sense; you'll use both sites to look up stuff you don't know, so it's irresistible to compare the two" Wrong. It's just irresistible to...
more...
- guruvan (Rob Nelson)
Wrong.
- Chris Spizzirri
We noted your cute one-liner, Chris.
- ianf ⌘
Rob: I agree with your conclusion (poor article). The structure of the argument is this: 1. Alpha is an answering engine, not a search engine. 2. Alpha does not answer most of our questions (although answers are on the web). Therefore: Alpha is not a good search engine.
- François Dongier
I'm compiling some queries that work or don't, either way. Please add a couple if you experiment with WolframAlpha. http://friendfeed.com/rickcog...
- Rick Cogley
I agree with Pablo, besides its good to see inventive new services, I will try to get benefit of it instead of comparing to Google. Like I was doing to Google when using Altavista.
- Jacque
I like the new service. I can compute my motgage very easily with it.
- Derek Wei
There is one thing wrong with WA: I dont want to be trained to use a search engine.
- Burcu Dogan
But you've already been trained by your experience to know how to ask Google a question, and get the answers you seek. Why should a different tool be any different? For that matter, don't you need training to use any kind of tool? (even self-training)
- guruvan (Rob Nelson)
Other ways to read this feed:
