Partially Attended

I’ve just rolled out google apps for your domain for eLife. At about the same time google rolled out gdrive. We were having difficulty figuring out how to share documents across the domain without having to invite people individually to the document. The document sharing options provide the ability to make documents findable by other members of the domain, but when we tried to search for these documents, we were not finding them. ... (more)

Last week an interesting discussion on the cost of copy editing popped up over on Stephen Curry’s blog. In addition the comment thread at the recent Science editorial seems to make this post somewhat timely. I used to manage the copy editing of a good portion of physical science related content from Springer from 2002 – 2005. I’m also currently in the process of setting up a new online-only journal. ... (more)

XMP XMP is the extensible metadata platform from Adobe. It can be used to embed structured metadata into a file. I think it’s most common usage is for storing image metadata in image files, but it also has a use in embedding metadata in PDF files. Adobe provide an SDK that you can use to start coding applications for working with XMP. They provide a guide for developers, and I’ve posted a copy so you can have a quick look if you are interested, without downloading the full SDK. ... (more)

I watched a little of the q&a at CERN this week. One question stood out. A journalist, who didn’t want to be named, asked the panel a question along the following lines: “what were the panel’s favourite and least favourite metaphor for the Higgs boson, and what were their thoughts on the god-particle expression.” He pointed out that given such a complex story many who will b e explaining it to the general public will need to reach for metaphor, and when it comes to the god particle term, as much as some may not like it, it has to be recognised that it has entered public consciousness. ... (more)

As i write these words my son is a little under a day old. Everything changes, that’s what they tell you, all the friends who have started down this journey before us, our relatives, elders. There are emotions unlocked inside me, an almost physical new presence, sometimes quiescent, sometimes flooding over me, triggered by the banal miracles - the sound of a breath, a gurgle, just the telling of the story of the birth. ... (more)

So this morning I had a scan with a consultant and he has diagnosed me with Dupuytren’s Contracture. I’ve been a climber since the summer of 1990, nearly 22 years now. It’s been amazing, I’ve gotten into some pretty special situations, and I’ve gotten pretty fit. There is some evidence that there is a higher incedence of Dupuytren’s Contracture amongst climbers. There is a great write up about a climbers experience of this condition on ukclimbing. ... (more)

The upcoming altmetrics meeting, and a submitted abstract by Kelli Barr prompted me to note down some of my own thoughts on peer review and altmetrics. I would love to make it over to the meeting, but with just a few days now before my first child is born, it ain’t gonna happen. I’ve not read Kelly’s paper, but after reading the abstract my take home message from it would be something along the lines of “don’t replace peer review with altmetrics because you will just replace one bias with another, and at least with peer review the bias is contained within the academic community” ... (more)

Last year I was asked to contribute to a special issue on the evolution of peer review. I got quite excited about doing this, but then realised that I really didn’t have the time to write a paper. I’m not a practicing academic, I build products, and while at Mendeley I really had far too much on my plate to find the time to write up a paper. However the topic does interest me, and I am a strong believer that web scale technologies can help with the scientific communication process though a large number of avenues. ... (more)

This is a quick and dirty guide to getting started with fish, the command line tool for fulidinfo. I did it by setting up a virtualenv, as I find it a lot easier to manage python dependancies that way. Setup a virtualenv: % mkvirtual env fi Open the virtual env session: % workon fi Install httplib2: % pip install httplib2 Install readline: % pip install readline Get fish, you can either get it from github and install from source, last time I checked that was: ... (more)

This is the only book that Wittgenstein published in his lifetime. At the onset of the first world war Wittgenstein enlisted in the Austrian army. He was captured and served out the end of the war in a POW camp. It was here that the manuscript for the Tractatus was completed (footnote, I can’t recall where I read this, either in an encyclopaedia entry on Wittgenstein, or in Wittgenstein’s Poker, either way perhaps someone can otherwise confirm this statement? ... (more)