I just wanted to share some work coming out of the Prakash lab in Stanford. Manu Prakash is a young engineer and research scientist who has taken a very different approach to how to think about the tools we use to do science. He has focussed on building very cheap tools that can be used by anyone in the world. One of the first tools that his lab created was the foldscope - a microscope built from paper, and a small piece of plastic - that can be produced very cheaply and given out to people across the world (https://indiabioscience. ... (more)

https://www.cypress.io/ ... (more)

https://sentry.io/welcome/ ... (more)

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 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)

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)

This is a tool for visualising EC funded projects listed in OpenAire using the infrastructure of Open Knowledge maps. For digging into projects that you know, I think this has some value, but I’d like to see some global overview of where funding is flowing. https://openknowledgemaps.org/viper/ ... (more)

paper about an open source tool for studying neuroscience images developed by Anisha Keshavan, and others. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053811917302707 ... (more)

a nice description of IIF from the guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/may/28/the-guardian-view-on-digitising-culture-make-manuscripts-more-illuminating ... (more)

Last week the eLife innovation sprint happened in Cambridge. It was done in collaboration with the Mozilla global sprint. I was able to participate for some of the event, and I’ll write up a bit more about the project I worked on later. There is a slide deck that summarises all of the projects from the two days: Slides of outputs from the sprint: eLifeSprint2018_introductions_people&projects - Google Slides. Briefly, this was hands down one of the most productive two-day sprints that I’ve ever been involved in. ... (more)

Last Saturday at Science Online London I gave a quick tutorial on YQL, and how it might be used to mash up scientific data sets. Below I list some of the sample queries that I was playing with. Before you get started with the console have a look through the documentation. I got a lot of milage out of the part about filters and joins. The blog post by Paul Hogan on using YQL for library maships was also very helpful. ... (more)

A few weeks ago I was a beer festival in Munich, and I was talking tosomeone who was working on something, hey it was a beer festival, but then Ihad an idea about the type of interface that might be really useful fordoing search. We now search for images using text, so somewhere someone hasto build the text to image representation of the images in their database.Arguably this is one area where tagging has made an enormous improvement,ala flickr, but it seems to me that if you could make an interface thatwould allow a user to either draw or assemble a rough draft of the imagethey were searching for then this might offer a powerful and complimentaryapproach. ... (more)

ARM microcontroler dev guy. hard to use these processors, whanted to make something like this availableto normal peoplewant internet bluetooth connected devices so they built something he just plugged in a microcontoler with a wireless sensorhis machine things that it's a flash drive he dregged over a binarythe device started blinking, this is the hello world of hardware hacking,cool what can you do now? well cool stuff obviously! ... (more)

what's cool about microformats web? is it the stickers?the t-shirtsthe community process urlb.at/2f personal information disastertravel airlines don't talk to railroads microformats say, what problem does it solve? perhaps there is no problem at all what problem does blogging solve?Twitter for christ's sake? no one knows what they do until they are popular e.g. yahoo pipes is not practical yetit is a user experience nightmareand it doesn't have a clear defined purpose ... (more)

I find that having a cool trip planned every now and again is key forkeeping me motivated. I've been doing a lot of job and country hopping overthe past 10 years, and this has had a signifigant detrimental impact on theamount of climbing that I could do, but hey, I'm doing a job that I love,and those are the rolls we choose to take. One thing that has kept me motivated to get of my arse and actually try abit harder when I am down in the gym is having a few cool trips planned inthe year. ... (more)

A friend of mine set up her own business a few years ago, at the same timeas having a baby. It was really tough for Ais for the first couple of years,but it is looking like things are really working out for her now. She wasrecently featured on TV in Ireland, and she has posted a link to the clipfrom her blog. For a really inspirational view on managing business withchildcare have a loot at the vid: ... (more)

I am at Bar Camp Cambridge, We have had the three word introductions and are just running through themorning talks now. It's pretty cool. The coffee is good, and cookies are great. Let's see how the day goes. ... (more)

Laura JamesAlert Me.Com might get too corporate. trying to do the internet of things, internet access to small devicesthey are implimetning today, and will be shipping later this year.comes from R&D, but working in a shipping they are going to ship a home security system, but they are actuallybuilding a platofrmthat can connect anything that does not require full audio and video using a mesh network that connect to a hub using a 'zigby'output can be things like a lamp that has a color dependant state ... (more)

I've written up the short answers to some questions that you might have if this is the first time to use a mac, read through this and if you followthe suggestions you should have the hang to the system pretty quickly. If it turns out you don't like it, then at least you will have made an informeddecision! -- Where is the right mouse button? This is the biggest obvious first difference. ... (more)