An American team believes to describe science activity by web clicks on journal pages.
Over the course of 2007 and 2008, we collected nearly 1 billion user interactions recorded by the scholarly web portals of some of the most significant publishers, aggregators and institutional consortia.
with the conclusion Continue reading Clickstreams
New rumors say about Wolfram alpha
In this respect it is vastly smarter than (and different from) Google. Google simply retrieves documents based on keyword searches. Google doesn’t understand the question or the answer, and doesn’t compute answers based on models of various fields of human knowledge.
…
or those who are more scientifically inclined, Stephen showed me many interesting examples — for example, Wolfram Alpha was able to solve novel numeric sequencing problems, calculus problems, and could answer questions about the human genome too.
I have applied for a test account as I am interested in methods how to deal with genomic and all the other pentabyte of data — we urgently need a paradigm shift as single genome prices will go down to 1000 €. Continue reading A better search engine for science?
It’s a pleasant experience to write something that is being translated afterwards into so many languages afterwards. It is, however, irritating that this dissemination is irrespective of what I (and all second and third hand journalists and translators) understand of this curious world.
I always wondered why it is not possible to scan just a few sentences from a book. As there are some products on the market, I ordered such an IrisPen. It took only 15 minutes to convince me, that this device is largely useless – a cheap plastic pen with a flimpsy contact but rather rigid USB cable.
What I even did not consider that syllabicated words at the end of every line can not be recognized by any OCR. So scanned words will require a lot of editing – while it may be better to invest into a typing course using all your fingers, yea, yea.
Although many journalists have been disappointed from the last MacWorld keynote, there are some good news for scientists who like the clean writing style in Pages as it supports now also MathType and EndNote (so far I am using Lyx with BibTex as Zotero and NeoOffice were a dead end). So I will have to finish my next paper within the 30 day trial period which creates some time pressure, yea, yea.
You need an immediate patch otherwise the system is largely unusuable.
nay, nay.
According to Wikipedia on May 24, 1844 Samuel Morse sent his famous words “What hath God wrought” from the B&O’s Baltimore station to the Capitol Building along the wire – the first email. Continue reading First email or the driving force of science
of science even computer nerds would need just one single word processor Continue reading In a perfect world
Visiting again the British Library Humanities Reading Room last week, I had a major problem securing my laptop as it has no Kensington slot. I haven’t found anything useful for locking it except this free (car-like antitheft)Lockdown application. If you are not too much paranoid – it is a clever solution – and a lot of fun here back in the lab to watch the pictures it takes.
Found some lock brackets here.
Two days ago I heard an interesting by Andreas Beyer about using wiring diagrams as a bioinformatics tool box for simulating complex biological relationships. This is something that can be found also in this recent nat gen review but even more detailed in new work on eQTLs. So far, however, there is not proof that any of these methods behave much better than others in the absence of a gold standard in bioinformatics, yea, yea.
A small luxurious law here in Germany – we may further offer limited documents to limited participants according to Heise news Continue reading Intranet exception
After a long time (to be exact: 27 years of Microsoft and 12 years of Linux use) I decided to switch to a Macbook Air. That may be an aesthetic decision (as buying an A4, a Nomos, a Bose or whatelse) :-) but may be heavily influenced of my obsession for lightweight and durable equipment. Continue reading Alt – Command – Escape
It seems that there are two numbering systems in humans – a general sense of numbers for some quick and dirty estimates and some more genuine computation skills of showing the result of (2327)^2. At least the first capacity seems to be inborn (and an important survival skill). According a recent SZ article (29th Sept 2008) a host of new studies now show that
the two number systems, the bestial and celestial, may be profoundly related, an insight with potentially broad implications for math education
and as I believe – for science in general as most science fields are being dominated by the Fermi problem. Continue reading Basic instinct for math?
For the first time, I found some data about “bench to bedside” transit times. Of 101 promising claims between 1979 and 1983, there have been only 5 clinical interventions in 2003 and only 1 had extensive clinical used; mean lag time 24 years, yea, yea.
Genowatch (paper|website) is doing pretty well by annotating large SNP sets that would require otherwise numerous hours to map their position on genes, biological function and pathways. Continue reading SNP batch annotation of GWAs