Partially Attended

Scholia is an amazing interface into scholarly information held inside id WikiData. It includes information about authors, articles and a very large chunk of the citation graph. You can see an article pate here: https://tools.wmflabs.org/scholia/work/Q24595162. The tool extracts topic information on articles, shows cites and citing articles (and how many citations each of these articles has) https://tools.wmflabs.org/scholia/ ... (more)

This is a great example of “web science for good”. The researchers looked at online signals to predict the spread of flu. This is a preprint, I hope the code for this kind of work makes it out. How might we then best link this preprint to that code? https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/05/04/314591 ... (more)

A lot of people are taking about “blockchain for science” and “blockchain for publishing”, but I’m skeptical. Some of the people taking about this are really smart, so I could be wrong. If we think of scholarly publishing as being like the connective tissue of science, and we accept that this idea is gaining purchase within our community that we have to realise that we are looking at a case of ... (more)

So if your last author is female the quality of the science is statistically better. I don’t know exactly what to make of this. We also have to understand a bit about the role of last authorship. In life sciences this is usually the corresponding author. I would not be surprised (given the study looks over a 40 year period) that what we are seeing is that women just produce more carful better science, but are being restricted from first authorship positions because of bias. ... (more)

This post shows how to execute compiled commands in your IPython environments. That can allow you to, for example, pull in FORTRAN or C++ code to get speed on computationally heavy lines of code. https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/756192/ebada7ecad32f3ad/ ... (more)

This is a great overview of how a not for profit open source technology company built a working business providing publishing tools. It speaks to how bad the landscape for publishing tools on the web is. Their product was originally created on kickstarter, and I remember when it launched, and being impressed with it back then. They have now pivoted away from trying to server small content individuals and are making money serving needs in the enterprise. ... (more)

Thoughtworks have created a tool to allow you to build your own “Digital Radar”. The one linked to here was put together a few years ago by people at the BMJ to look at the technology landscape in STM publishing (There are some really interesting things in there in some interesting locations). <a href=https://radar.thoughtworks.com/?sheetId=https%3A%2F%2Fdocs.google.com%2Fspreadsheets%2Fd%2F1zQPRcn76XHKxex7ytdmTKC9nXMPPK0Tv0-hMlSY6xVU%2Fpubhtml>https://radar.thoughtworks.com/?sheetId=https%3A%2F%2Fdocs.google.com%2Fspreadsheets%2Fd%2F1zQPRcn76XHKxex7ytdmTKC9nXMPPK0Tv0-hMlSY6xVU%2Fpubhtml ... (more)

Some major players are getting together to trial decentralised data sharing using the Dat protocol - https://datproject.org. Dat for me is one of the dark horses of the infrastructure landscape. It has great power, some amazing developers, has already created some great value, and is still not known by many people yet. Also, this is not blockchain based, and yet manages to be decentralised. Those of you who know me will know why that pleases me. ... (more)

Open knowledge maps show the relationship between different papers, based on a keyword search. They have been gong for some time now (originally built on top of Mendeley data). I ran into them again this week as we start to think about how to visualise the relationship between different aspects of research. The one linked to here is for social science and here is one for “computational social science”: https://openknowledgemaps.org/map/70627a849484345cdfd04c914de0a2e2. Their news pages shows that the project and team are still active, which is great. ... (more)

I’ve been working with lean value tree as a framework for some time now, but there are few online resources about this. The linked presentation does a great job of giving an overview of the tool. In particular I like how they call out the need to describe the promise of value to the customer, something that we could definitely do more of. Another presentation on the same topic is this one: https://www. ... (more)