Science Library Pad

Retrevo - searching for reviews

I know the search engine experts out there can probably list dozens of similar sites, but I liked the execution of this one: Retrevo.

If you search Google, you get a flat information space, which you have to narrow with keywords.  I like Google a lot for bringing relevant results to the top - but if it doesn't know why you're searching, of course it has problems.  In particular, if you search for just a particular part number, it will often list page after page of sites selling that item, with very few links to reviews or blog postings.

Retrevo specifically separates its results out into "Reviews & Articles", "Forums & Blogs", and "Shopping".  Nicely done.  Of course, the fact it ranks me first doesn't hurt...

http://www.retrevo.com/s/dpl700?sub.x=0&sub.y=0&sub=Search

Rainbows End free online - Nippon 2007 Hugo science fiction nominee

There's a lot to like about Vernor Vinge's visionary novel Rainbows End.  I reviewed it in August of 2006 (I could have sworn it wasn't that long ago, time flies).

It's now available in its entirety, free online.

via Boing Boing

A nice year-end present.

As I mentioned in the title, it is a nominee for the Nippon 2007 Hugos.

If you get a taste of it and decide to buy it, here are my Amazon USA and Canada affiliate links:

   

Open Access: it's the law

The Director of the National Institutes of Health shall require that all investigators funded by the NIH submit or have submitted for them to the National Library of Medicine's PubMed Central an electronic version of their final, peer-reviewed manuscripts upon acceptance for publication to be made publicly available no later than 12 months after the official date of publication: Provided, That the NIH shall implement the public access policy in a manner consistent with copyright law.

signed into law on Wednesday December 26, 2007

Based on my understanding of the US political system, this involves the bill's hand being shaken and possibly streamers and balloons

Widely reported.  I'm sure there will be lots, and lots of coverage over on Open Access News.

meta: year end

I liked this posting of mine from this year:

all Linnaeus, all the time

I will also finish up some dangling draft and unposted items.

Thanks for reading.

Merry Christmas

the central public library is a key civic space

I find myself in an unusual position: I'm usually the one advocating for distributed, virtual everything.  But not in the case of a central public library.  While I agree with Ken Gray that there should be library branches everywhere - why not an Internet kiosk with book pickup and dropoff at your local coffee shop? - I do think that a central public library plays a key role in the public space of the city.

Some councillors have been musing about spending $200 million for a monumental main library branch. If the city were flush with cash, that would be a worthwhile project. But one wonders if there isn't a less-expensive and more-effective way of getting the library and the Internet to residents.

When I enter the Rosemount branch, which is in a neighbourhood with some economic and social difficulties, I see about eight computers almost always occupied (often by children) near the entrance. That's a way of getting the Internet in the hands of people without the means to own their own computer.

Rather than spend $200 million on a huge downtown library, perhaps the library board should be looking at something smaller, more effective and more extensive.

Instead, let's extend the reach of the library system by creating small storefront kiosks with a banks of computers so that clients can access the Internet and the virtual library. The branches could continue with their traditional stacks and maintain their very useful function of being places where you can pick up your materials ordered from the virtual library.

Ottawa Citizen - Ken Gray . Taking libraries to the street - December 21, 2007

If Ottawa had a fantastic downtown, I might even be inclined to agree, but let's face it, Ottawa has a dismal downtown with limited public space.  A bunch of hideous glass towers.  A brutalist National Arts Centre.  An expensive condo next to a grand old hotel.  (Plus which, people are so used to private space that they have forgotten the concept of a hotel lobby as a public space.)  A giant mall.  A former train station that is now a closed government conference centre.

Out of this a great civic life of public spaces one does not make.  Even if they do manage to do the Chamber Festival hall and the new Conference Centre, it still will make a minimal addition to the available public space.  Finished skating with the kids on the canal?  Where do you go?

Done properly, an inviting central public library is an engine for citizen engagement and enjoyment, a reminder of the common benefits we get for our tax dollars.  The city spends hundreds of millions of dollars per year on roads for the private convenience of suburbanities.  You want to know where your public library is?  Your grand municipal buildings?  Our great public works?  They're all around you... in flat black strips of multi-million dollar asphalt.  Two hundred million dollars?  Ok let's say conservatively a road costs $5 million per km.  That "monumental" expense for a library?  Same cost as 40km of road.  Crazy!  Oh wait, in 2007 alone, the city of Ottawa built 200km of road.

Previously:
August 25, 2007  America, land of the grand library

trip intersection service Dopplr out of beta, open for signups

Dopplr is a site where you enter your planned trips, with dates and locations, and then share those trips with (selected) others in the Dopplr social network.  The site will then inform you when you have trips that overlap with your contacts.  It's good e.g. if you tend to circulate around conferences, and would like to know who else is going to be in the same city when you are (or who lives in a city you're going to visit).

They just opened out of beta to the public at LeWeb3, on December 11, 2007:

Enabling coincidence, and spreading quickly

Dopplr lets you share your future travel plans with a group of trusted fellow travellers whom you have chosen. It also reminds you of friends and colleagues who live in the cities you’re planning to visit. For example, Dopplr might tell you that three of your trusted friends and colleagues will be in Amsterdam when you are planning to be there.

In recent months Dopplr has become an essential tool for users around the globe. Many joined the service after invitations from friends and colleagues.

Dopplr launches at LeWeb3 in Paris

I've found it useful, of course the more travel you do and the more people you're willing to share with, the more you will get out of it.

Code4Lib Journal 1

The first issue of the Code4Lib Journal is up.
There is an article about the NCSU CatalogWS API - Beyond OPAC 2.0: Library Catalog as Versatile Discovery Platform.

I think it's great to have a library journal that can focus on more technical topics.

Previously:
November 06, 2007  NCSU CatalogWS API - DLF Fall Forum 2007

Preston Manning on federal science policy in Canada

Preston Manning shot some pretty forceful bullet points at the state of science policy in Canada.
Globe and Mail - Just how did we let this happen? - December 17, 2007
The article is unfortunately not available in full online, so here's a sampling:

Why is the construction of new [medical isotope] reactors, slated to replace the 50-year-old NRU reactor, 10 years behind schedule and way over budget? Why does no one appear to have warned federal politicians about this looming crisis until it was too late?

   As a former federal politician with an interest in science policy, let me suggest some answers:

   * because this country has no federal science department or ministry dedicated exclusively to the development and management of publicly funded science and technology or to the proper allocation of the federal government's multibillion-dollar science, technology and innovation budget. Industry Canada, as well as Parliament's standing committee on industry, science, and technology have a vast array of responsibilities, of which oversight for science policies and agencies is only one, and these responsibilities do not include oversight of Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd. (AECL);

   * because in this country you can count on the fingers of one hand the number of members of Parliament and provincial legislators with scientific or engineering training sufficient to enable them to ask relevant scientific questions in Question Period or in committee;

   * because our Parliament has no "Scientist-General" (an officer of Parliament like the Auditor-General) or "Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology" (as in Great Britain) to provide members with access to needed scientific expertise, including that required to adjudicate between conflicting scientific opinions;

   * because this country has yet to figure out a funding formula for publicly funded science projects that insures long-term viability.

   * because we, the Canadian public, often fail to appreciate the critical role that science and technology play in undergirding our economy and ensuring our quality of life, and therefore do not insist on a higher level of scientific literacy and competence from our media, legislators, or political leaders.

It is interesting that Mr. Manning didn't mention either the National Science Advisor or the Council of Canadian Academies, or the newly struck advisory committee whose name I can never remember... ah yes, the STIC - Science, Technology and Innovation Council.  I guess his focus is more on advice to all of Parliament, whereas the current structures tend to be more for advising the sitting government only.

I sometimes wonder if I'm the only one who actually has attempted to unravel this byzantine advisory structure.

There has been a ridiculously long chain of advisory groups, including the Science Council of Canada and the Council of Science and Technology Advisors.  I'm not sure exactly what is accomplished by repeatedly dissolving and reinventing these groups.

Previously:
February 21, 2006  help me understand the Canadian national science advisory structure

because every child dreams of a toy PDA

Dear Santa,

My daddy has a magic computer he carries around that he loves so much he spends more time with it than me.  I want a special portable keyboard friend to love too.  Please bring me a PDA Sketch Pad from the dollar store.

Yours truly,

Timmy the CrackBerry Orphan

Behold!

Its functionless buttons and empty plastic shell will echo the emptiness in your heart!

The Agenda on copyright in Canada: Dec 14, 2007

TVO's The Agenda will have a segment "To Copy or Not to Copy, Right?" on December 14, 2007.

It should be interesting to hear their discussion, given the recent Canadian copyright hullabaloo.

i need that stat: Flickr adds stats, Google Analytics updates

Flickr has added stats for Pro Accounts with pretty charts and whatnot, you have to activate it though.

Google Analytics has also updated their stats charting abilities.  You'll have to update the JavaScript they provide (on your pages) in order to get the increased capabilities.

Great, more statscrack for hit addicts.

What do you mean, I have to wait until tomorrow for my Flickrstats to be processed?  I need my fix now...

Whew, nevermind, trembling madness averted:

In addition to hit stats, Flickr also provides a nice breakdown of photo attributes (tagged/not tagged, geocoded/not geocoded, etc.) - it doesn't show photo vs. screenshot through, which would be a useful one.

Since the new stats provide time-based analysis (including down to the individual photo level - just click on  "Photo stats" on a photo's page), it will be a lot easier to get a sense of the changing popularity of your photos - just the raw numbers tended to distort things, as you may get photos that are popular for a couple days and then never clicked on again.

It occurs to me another interesting breakdown would be to see where your Creative Commons photos have been linked / blogged from (and where your fully copyrighted, no public rights photos have been posted, if you're into laying on the smackdown).  As well it would be interesting to be able to see whether CC-licensed photos get more traffic on average than no rights ones.

Rogers: All Your Internet Are Belong To Us

Search engine giant Google Inc. says it's "concerned" about efforts by Rogers Communications Inc. to insert branded corporate messages into third-party websites, a move critics say is a case of a Internet service provider overstepping its boundaries.

Toronto-based Rogers confirmed yesterday that it has spent the past few weeks testing a new technology that allows it to post Web-based notices to its Internet subscribers when they are approaching their monthly data limits.

The messages carry Rogers' name and logo and appear in the body of Web pages in place of original content, not as a pop-up window. One such notice, posted online, showed the Rogers content occupying the top third of Google's normally sparse search page.

The search giant was not impressed with the makeover.

"We are concerned about these reports," Google said in an emailed statement to the Toronto Star.

"As a general principle, we believe that maintaining the Internet as a neutral platform means that carriers shouldn't be able to interfere with Web content without users' permission," the Google statement said. "We are in the process of contacting the relevant parties to bring this to a quick resolution."

Some bloggers noted the Rogers notice on Google's search page seemed more like free advertising than a customer-service bulletin, since it suggested the user "upgrade to another level of service which provides higher usage limits and speeds by visiting rogers.com."

Critics say Rogers' move, though perhaps well-intentioned, could set a dangerous precedent that says it's okay for the companies that pipe the Internet into people's homes and offices to exercise control over their subscribers activity online.

"It's a very slippery slope," said Philippa Lawson, the executive director of the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic.

Toronto Star - Google decries Rogers-branded website messages - December 12, 2007

You can see a screenshot on Lauren Weinstein's Blog.

TV Shows finally come to iTunes Canada

So you can buy South Park or... well, South Park.  Ok that's a bit of an exaggeration, the networks they currently list are CBC, Comedy Central, CTV and the NHL.  There are only one or two shows from each; there are a total of 14 different shows up, with at most two or three seasons of each show.

(Check out the trailer -- with rude bits of course - for "Make Love, Not Warcraft".)

Here's what the interface looks like:

Individual shows are C$2, entire seasons depend on the show, South Park is C$24, the Hills season 3 is C$36.  It's a bit apples to oranges but the Hills season 2 DVDs are C$43 discounted at Amazon.ca

What rights will you have to content?  Well Apple has its own ideas, but ultimately it will depend on Canadian copyright legislation.  Currently the court interpretation of Canadian rights is pretty good, so of course, some organisations think that must be stopped.

It would be nice if we could get away from this idea of geographically negotiated content rights too - it is ridiculous that it takes months or years for content that is available in iTunes USA to become available in iTunes Canada, if it ever does.  As it is, you can see that there are no US networks on iTunes Canada.  In fact the whole concept of "US network" doesn't make much sense in the Internet world.

CiteULike academic article bookmarking

I had a chance to look at the academic bookmarking service CiteULike.org and speak with the team working on it.  (Disclaimer: Kevin Emamy of CiteULike contacted me to set up this presentation.)

Kevin and Richard Cameron walked me through the site and gave me a sense of their philosophy about it.

Basically the site started three years ago, you can find some info in their FAQ

Richard Cameron wrote CiteULike in November 2004 and ran the service privately. In December 2006 Richard teamed up with Chris Hall, Kevin Emamy and James Caddy to set up Oversity Ltd. to further develop and support CiteULike.

They're getting to a volume of use (1.5 million records posted) where they can start to look at extracting some of the "wisdom of crowds" and that sort of recommendation analysis will be one of their upcoming directions.  They already provide anonymised data for download, which I think is an admirable demonstration of information sharing.

They use "plugins" to extract metadata from websites, there are currently 45 plugins, these are parsers that run on the CiteULike site itself to parse the information.  As the plugins developer documentation states

Remember that CiteULike doesn't store actual URLs to articles - it tries to store the raw information required to manufacture a link. The reason behind this is that publishers can be quite brutal and insane sometimes about changing the URL structure on their sites. Sometimes (as in the case of Nature), they'll just break existing links to articles without telling anyone. In these situations, it's vital that CiteULike can dynamically produce the new style of URL so that the existing articles from that publisher in the system can still be accessed.

This is a very wise choice.  There are some sites that have links to post articles to CiteULike, e.g. Science magazine has "Post to CiteULike" in its Article Tools for individual articles.

Although I didn't mention it, I wonder if COINS or something similar could address metadata parsing issues.  Right now we have multiple sites with multiple different parsing approaches, and that is always inelegant to me, wearing my architecture hat.

SIDEBAR: Connotea has (I think) parsers written in Perl.  Zotero has an architecture called translators.  2collab has a very small number of parsers.  END SIDEBAR

You can create groups, they can either be fully public, or completely private.  There are various possible combinations of rights for joining as well as the option to restrict new group users.  Once you are a member of a group, you will get a check box in your "Post To" section when you create a new bookmark.

One thing that I find a bit confusing about CiteULike is its system of rating bookmarks by their reading priority.  Even more confusingly this is displayed as a number of stars, which makes it look like it is an article rating, when it is actually about article reading.  They said because of the very specific and narrow nature of domain and individual research, they don't believe it would be meaningful to have rankings.

That being said, there are group "Recommended" lists, these are constructed by aggregating the reading priorities assigned to articles posted to the group.

A nice and smart thing that they are doing is to put rel=nofollow on all their links, which reduces the attractiveness to spammers.  Spammers are something that all social networking sites need a strategy for, particularly ones that are link-centric.

There are some pages with Google Ads, but when I discussed their business model, it sounded to me that they were looking at something similar to LibraryThing for Libraries - providing aggregrated data to third parties for a fee - I can imagine something like the ability for article-centric sites to display "this article has been tagged X, Y, Z on CiteULike", but that is more me speculating than anything specific that they said.

I shared some of my thoughts about APIs and hopefully this will be an area for further discussion.

In doing the some searches as part of writing this posting, I found there is an interesting audio interview with Richard Cameron as part of the Talking with Talis podcast series.

Sci Foo Lives On: Nature's web experiments

Some screenshots from the Sci Foo Lives On session about Nature Network, Connotea, Precedings, and Dissect Medicine.  Berci took notes.

Aerial view (after everyone left):

Turning to view the audience:

Ian presenting about Connotea:

Presentation on Nature Precedings:

Presentation on Dissect Medicine:

Nature Climate Change series in Second Life

Tues 4th Dec 2007, 6pm GMT, 10am PST, SLT [1 PM Eastern]
Tara LaForce, Imperial College, on her research into carbon capture and storage

Thurs 6th Dec 2007, 6pm GMT, 10am SLT, PST [1 PM Eastern]
Professor Euan Nisbet, Royal Holloway, London on why it's so important to monitor the climate properly, and the many ways in which we've been doing it wrong.

Tues 11th Dec 2007, 6pm GMT, 10am PST, SLT [1 PM Eastern] POSTPONED
Dr Simon Buckle, Director of Policy at the Grantham Institute for Climate Change

Thur 13th Dec 2007, 5pm GMT, 9am PST, SLT [12 PM noon Eastern] POSTPONED
George Monbiot, Guardian Columnist and author of Heat: How we can stop the planet burning

See http://network.nature.com/blogs/user/joannascott for more information and a SLurl to the Second Nature location.

There was an interesting and season-appropriate podcast on Christmas Commercialism and Ethical Travel last year featuring an interview with Monbiot, but I can't locate the file any more.