Nicolas Bertrand › Likes

...and not how you store it - Cameron Neylon

Can anyone point me to the post of neilfs on soundbite and any other references, which might be of interest? Fight information fragmentation ;-) - joergkurtwegner

Thank you to everyone who helped and encouraged on this and offered future support! Among many things, one thing I'm a bit embarrassed about is the lack of details in the "broader impacts" and open science parts of the proposal. Definitely it needs more planning and better writing, and the panelists are going to point that out. Hopefully you all understand that it's a product of spending all my time trying to make the research parts as good as I could. - Steve Koch

Thanks, Bill! - Steve Koch

Given the UI flexibility of the iPhone, why recreate older, less intuitive HP calculator interfaces? - Steve Levin

Older?...yes. Less intuitive? You've obviously never used the HP-12c. It has the best interface around for time value of money (TVM) calculations. Also, if you can't wrap your head around RPN logic, you could always turn that feature off. Best of all, with an app like this I can leave my HP-12c at home. - Edwin Webster

Back in March, I wrote a blog post about my experiences trying to find out a) if ontologies should be licensed, b) if ontologies could be licensed, and c) what sort of license would be appropriate. After all, it isn’t clear what sort of thing an ontology is: is it software, or is it a [...] - Allyson Lister

I wrote previously about the fact that without a high relational density, having a dataset in RDF doesn’t give any practical advantage over having it in its original format. Yet, from a marketing/political point of view, the simple act of “triplifying” a dataset and make it available on the web as linked dataseems to make it appear all more powerful, all more useful and it’s being used a lot as a way to promote the idea that the web of data is finally getting traction. Today, I stumbled upon this page which contains all the datasets made available by data.gov triplified as RDF. The result yields an eyebrowse-raising 5 billion triples, more than the entire LOD effort today. Having tried to import some of that data in Freebase myself, I looked a little deeper to see if I could build on their effort and make my import a little easier… what I found didn’t please me. - Roderic Page

The image is "constructed from 21,625 unique images of yeast spots growing on agar" :) - Simon Cockell

too cool - thanks to conor :) (and darren for pointing it out!) - Allyson Lister

I "Facebooked" it, but my group is a very small one :-) - Slavomira Vladimirova

General approach is that you dob authors into journal and they then apply pressure on your behalf. With the ultimate threat of retracting the paper. But this means it is all done behind closed doors. It may well take some high profile retractions to get movement on this. The only way forward ultimately is to insist on data being made available on publication on a public site (journal/other database) or a clear statements as to why this is not possible and that this is acceptable under journal policy. - Cameron Neylon

I know it must be no fun at all in the middle of that, but the images on the news this morning, and everything I've seen on flickr are simply amazing.. - Daniel Swan

The Flickr coverage is amazing. It wasn't so bad in terms of inconvenience (unless you were flying or catching a ferry), but the event was just very, very weird and fascinating. - Neil Saunders

"Finally, universities and individual disciplines need to undertake a vigorous programme of education and outreach about data. Consider, for example, that most university science students get a reasonably good grounding in statistics. But their studies rarely include anything about information management — a discipline that encompasses the entire life cycle of data, from how they are acquired and stored to how they are organized, retrieved and maintained over time. That needs to change: data management should be woven into every course in science, as one of the foundations of knowledge". - Graham Steel

Also see the replated report, link contained here:- http://www.nature.com/nature... - Graham Steel

A major upgrade to the industry standard UK flood estimation software has been launched. WINFAP-FEH version 3 incorporates recent scientific advances to the Flood Estimation Handbook statistical methods and offers improved functionality and ease of use. - Deena Mobbs

Wow! Amazing story! - Egon Willighagen

Yes actually if you think about it, it's not a very likely scenario.... But a nice story... - Sarah Kendrew

What does this all mean? Well, it seems clear that if people are using Google to find information about an organism, then Wikipedia is more likely than anything else to be the first result they see. It is also interesting that for all the energy (and funds) being expended on biodiversity databases (http://dx.doi.org/10...), ITIS is the only classical biodiversity database that routinely gets found in these searches (albeit in only a quarter of the searches). - Duncan Hull

As Roderic says in the post it would be valuable if WP linked out to EOL and if a trail of people following those links looking for more detailed and "scientific" information could be demonstrated (and if it can't then EOL is certainly in trouble as a central resource) - Cameron Neylon

Federated authentication systems such as Shibboleth and OpenID exist to solve identity management problems but they both suffer from similar usability problems when users login and logout. - Duncan Hull

Not to mention the issue of OpenID providers who won't accept from other providers. - Neil Saunders

See also the related Web Services & Digital Identity track at http://xmlsummerschool.com/curricu... - Duncan Hull

nice to see you still have a passion for looking on the bright side of life... - Frank

Maybe you're just better suited to the North. Wearing wet weather gear 9 mo/year is a small price to pay. - Helen Parkinson from email

Change your perspective: instead of trying to sell yourself, try to help people. Write publicly and give presentations. Follow-up when you offer help. Make it easy for people to find you. - Daniel Lemire

"One plugin to rule them all". Great generic DokuWiki plugin that makes a lot of tiny special plugins obsolete. - Andreas Gohr from Bookmarklet

Find out how many of your followers are junk and block - Neil Saunders

very nice tool - Nicolas Bertrand

"we have built a mobile phone-mounted light microscope and demonstrated its potential for clinical use by imaging P. falciparum-infected and sickle red blood cells in brightfield and M. tuberculosis-infected sputum samples in fluorescence with LED excitation. In all cases resolution exceeded that necessary to detect blood cell and microorganism morphology, and with the tuberculosis... more... - Daniel Mietchen

45+ Excellent Code Snippet Resources and Repositories from the diverse 'Smashing Magazine'. Good to see Stackoverflow at the top of the list! - Daniel Swan

We’re at this crossroads where it really doesn’t matter which OpenID provider you use — because while it might save you the hassle of creating yet another password — there’s little else that you can do with an OpenID beyond that. And, if you’ve already got more than one OpenID, not much exists to help you decide which OpenID provider you should use (many people tell me: “I hate OpenID! I’ve got like 15 OpenIDs and I never know which one to use!”). So on the one hand, we’ve done a poor job of building out the value of using an OpenID, and on the other, have failed to explain what it means to have an OpenID (or several) or how to go about deciding which one to use and why (hat tip to OpenID Explained for taking a crack at it). Meanwhile, there’s a tension between the convenience of having one reusable and durable identity against the desire to express many aspects of one’s identity with many separate IDs, resulting in complex user interfaces. - Duncan Hull

I relate to this! I seem to have various OpenIDs without really trying. Then I used one of them on Twitterfeed to put an RSS feed into my Twitter account. I thought I knew which ID it was but I am now unable to uncouple the feed! I don't know if my problem is OpenID, Twitterfeed, or my poor memory. - Frank Norman

@Frank I put it down to immature technology and user error too :-) - Duncan Hull

Jay, after more then a year of using a Twitter, with only aim mindcasting and conversation, I don't see any advantage of this tool compare to blogging and FF - Alexey from iPhone

I agree with Jay and Greg, ideas like sciencepond.com are great and make me feel like it is a must to attract more analytical people that can connect the dots on making interesting contributions. - Ben Friedle

Sounds good for a start: "Typically, projects will be 6 - 12 months in length and involve up to 24 person months of effort. Funding will be made under EPSRC terms and conditions, i.e. 80% of total project cost under fEC. The closing date for this call is 14/8/09 with funding decisions being made by mid September and projects starting from October 2009. All projects must be completed by the end of November 2010." - Daniel Mietchen

If they indeed open source everything, the question only will be how to best merge the functionalities to have a tool that serves scientists best. I personally don't care what this tool will be called in the end. blog3 surely provides way more scientifically valuable functionality than Wave, but conversely, Wave has a lot of functionality I wouldn't want to miss for using blog3, if that makes any sense. - Björn Brembs