Technology Blog

We’re slowly unpacking boxes and watching as items are reabsorbed into the house. It’s quite remarkable. Box after box is emptied out, with no noticeable change in the house’s appearances. Items go into closets, drawers, shelves. They sit on dressers, and on top of the stove, and behind the fridge. Packed into the car and into boxes, the detritus of our daily lives looks overwhelming. Unpacked, it soaks into our surroundings and becomes part of the fabric of daily life.

source: a house is like a sponge

Eight consumer groups have joined the Alliance for Taxpayer Access and pledged their support for FRPAA. From today’s announcement:

Eight consumer groups have announced their support for the Federal Research Public Access Act of 2006 (S.2695)….Consumer groups add their voices to those of universities, libraries, researchers, publishers, and patients – together representing thousands of individuals and institutions – that support the bill.

“It’s gratifying to have the support of organizations that represent consumer interests and rights, especially in the realm of information and technology,” said Heather Joseph, Executive Director of SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Research Coalition, an ATA founding member). “We all share a belief in the advancement of science for the public interest.”

The Consumers Union, the non-profit publisher of Consumer Reports, and Consumer Project on Technology (CPTech), are joined by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Essential Action, IP Justice, Public Knowledge, U.S. Public Interest Research Group, and Union for the Public Domain in pledging their support and applauding the Federal Research Public Access Act of 2006.

“Technology has opened the door to the sharing of knowledge,” said Manon Ress of the Consumer Project on Technology. “The Public Access Act constitutes a major step toward using the barrier-free potential of the Internet to provide all stakeholders in the scientific enterprise – including the public – access to critical information.”

The Alliance for Taxpayer Access encourages taxpayers and discrete stakeholders in the scientific process to add their support for this important legislation. Details are online [here].

source: Consumer groups for FRPAA

The new issue of Information Services and Use (vol. 26, no. 1, 2006) is now online. Here are the OA-related articles –only abstracts are free online, at least so far.

• Elliot R. Siegel and nine co-authors, Information Rx: Evaluation of a new informatics tool for physicians, patients, and libraries
• Information and data in e-science: Making seamless access a reality: Proceedings of the International Council for Scientific and Technical Information (ICSTI) public workshop with support of INIST-CNRS and INSERM. February 3, 2006, Ministry of Research, Carre de Sciences, Paris, France [no abstract]
• Bernard Dumouchel and Jeffrey Demaine, Knowledge Discovery in the Digital Library: access tools for mining science
• John R. Helliwell, Peter R. Strickland, and Brian McMahon, The role of quality in providing seamless access to information and data in e-science; the experience gained in crystallography

source: New issue of Information Services and Use

source: Library of Congress lowers expectations for World Digital Library

What Jeff Killed is a blog from Shadow Hills, CA, documenting the murderous antics of Jeff, a large ginger tomcat:

we provide Jeff with food and water; however, this does little to lessen his killer instinct. To humans, Jeff is an exceptionally good-tempered and friendly cat; to rodents and other small animals, he is death itself. It could be that Jeff likes to bring us gifts to repay our hospitality. Perhaps he is simply a hardwired killing machine. All we know for certain is that he hunts down a wide variety of small animals and disembowels, decapitates, and dines on them. Often.

This was passed on by the lovely C, who noted ‘number of kills is about the same, cat for cat’ — indeed, Bubba, our cat, certainly had a similar career in Irvine, CA. However, I notice that as yet, there are no cases where Jeff has left the entrails and decapitated head of a rabbit lying up against the sandals of the neighbour’s 6 year old daughter… that was fun.

Tags:animals bubba cats gore nature pets wildlife

This post was written by Justin, source: What Jeff Killed

source: Public interest v. publisher interest

Australia’s Department of Education, Science and Training (DEST) has announced a $15 million enhancement to six collaborative e-research programs. From today’s press release:

The Australian Government has allocated $15 million under the Systemic Infrastructure Initiative for six highly collaborative proposals as part of its ongoing commitment to strengthen innovation and improve research outcomes.  The proposals will provide Australian scientists with access to research infrastructure that will enhance Australia’s research capabilities….These projects add to the suite of strategic infrastructure investments under the Australian Government’s $8.3 billion Backing Australia’s Ability initiative.

The six participating projects are:

1. Australian Research Enabling Environment (ARCHER)
2. Research Activityflow and Middleware Priorities (RAMP)
3. Australian Research Repositories Online to the World (ARROW) - Stage 2
4. Legal Frameworks for e-Research
5. Australian Partnership for Sustainable Repositories (APSR) - Stage 2
6. Integrated Content Environment for Research and Scholarship (ICE-RS)

source: Australia increases funding for six e-research projects

From a press release issued today by the British Library:

Scientists will be able to access a vast collection of biomedical research at the touch of a button thanks to a major new initiative that aims to promote the free transfer of ideas in a bid to speed up scientific discovery. Based on a model currently used in the United States, UK PubMed Central (UKPMC) will provide free access to an online digital archive of peer-reviewed research papers in the medical and life sciences.

The Wellcome Trust, as part of a nine-strong group of UK research funders, announced that the contract to run UKPMC has been awarded to a partnership between the British Library, The University of Manchester and the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI)….

UKPMC will ensure that the digital archive of published articles resulting from research paid for by any of the funding consortium will be freely available, fully searchable and extensively linked to other online resources….

In the initial stages of the UKPMC programme, the British Library will lead on setting up the service, developing the process for handling author submissions and marketing the resource to the research community.

The University of Manchester will host the service – on servers based at MIMAS (Manchester Information and Associated Services) – and will support the process of engaging with higher-education users.

EBI, which is part of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), will contribute its biomedical domain knowledge and state-of-the-art text-mining tools to integrate the research literature with the underlying bioinformatics databases….

UK PubMed Central will provide an enhanced way of accessing published research, preserving it for prosperity and making it richly searchable in ways that are not currently available.

The first phase of the implementation will involve mirroring the American PubMed Central database. The partners will then establish the technical infrastructure of the service, including the facility for ingesting articles, and will also begin to engage more widely with the user communities. Launch of the service is scheduled for January 2007.

The UKPMC Funders Group consists of: Arthritis Research Campaign, The Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, The British Heart Foundation, Cancer Research UK, The Association of Medical Research Charities, The Chief Scientist Office of the Scottish Executive Health Department, the Department of Health, The Joint Information Systems Committee, the Medical Research Council and the Wellcome Trust.

Comments.

1. This contract clears the way for nine UK funding agencies to provide OA (through different internal policies) to the research they fund. That’s big step forward.
2. Note that just last week the ALPSP urged the British Library not to involve itself with UKPMC. Also note that two of the eight Research Councils (the BBSRC and the MRC) are members of the UKPMC Funders Group.

Update. JISC has issued a press release (August 1) on its own role as one of the nine funders of UKPMC.

source: Contract to run UKPMC announced

source: Rollyo for 25 UK repositories

Luis Ibáñez, Rick Avila, and Stephen Aylward, Open Source and Open Science: How it is Changing the Medical Imaging Community, in Biomedical Imaging: Macro to Nano, 2006: 3rd IEEE International Symposium, IEEE, April 6, 2006, pp. 690-693. (Thanks to Ahmed Hindawi.) Not even an abstract of the version published in the volume of conference proceedings is free online, at least so far, but here’s the abstract of the version presented at the conference:

The Open Science movement advances the idea that the results of scientific research must be made available as public resource. Limiting access to scientific information hinders innovation, complicates validation, and wastes valuable socio-economic resources. Open Science is an efficient way of overcoming the nearsightedness of the contemporary obsession with intellectual property. The practice of Open Science is based on three pillars: Open Access, Open Data, and Open Source. Given that the practice of medical image research pertains to a field that affects the health condition of the public, it is of paramount importance to introduce the concepts of Open Science in domains such as animal research, drug discovery, clinical trials, computer assisted diagnosis and computer assisted treatment.

From the body of the paper:

Open Source, Open Access and Open Data make possible to
restore the openness that must characterize the endeavor of
scientific research but that unfortunately has been lost in the
ambitious quest for ownership of intellectual property. This
openness brings both ethical and technical advantages to the
practice of scientific research, which is of foremost
importance in the domain of medical imaging, where public
funds are commonly invested with the purpose of improving
the health care delivered to the population.

source: Three pillars of open science

source: More on OA podcasts of lectures

source: For the provosts: beyond the open letter to institutional policies

Textensor has announced the first beta release of Notate. Excerpt:

Notate is a web-based tool for annotating and tagging words and phrases within documents. It creates a searchable index of all the annotations you make and displays the annotations against the text they refer to when you revisit a site. Annotations can be kept private or can be shared within a group such as a lab or journal club….

The idea for Notate grew out of the problem that although the
scientific literature is increasingly available online, it
is almost completely unindexed and only minimally
tagged. Reference citations take you to the top of a paper that may
be many pages long, instead of the actual place where the
quoted statement is made. We ought to be able to do better
than this given the potential of modern web browsers
to offer a more interactive experience, and let people
make more use from the huge volume of papers and other documents on the web.

The annotation system changes this by allowing tagging
and annotation of single words
and phrases within on-line material. Every annotated term
is indexed and cross referenced with any tags that are
attached.

Although its origins are in the drive to make better use of on-line
scientific literature, the system works equally well for many
other forms of content used in web-based research.
The ability to tag notes and add replies in-situ can help cut down
on the use of email for group discussions.

source: Annotation tool for OA scholarship

PhysOrg.com reports that a University of Leicester psychologist has produced the first ever ‘world map of happiness’ by performing a meta-analysis of over 100 different studies covering 80,000 subjects worldwide. The study also correlated the data to other indicators, with the top three being (in order): health, wealth and education.

Some other interesting findings:

• 4 of the 5 Scandinavian countries are in the top 10, and the fifth, Norway, is in the top 20.
• Islands seem to do very well - 9 of the top 20 are island nations.
• After decades of political unrest, Ireland was a surprise (to me, at least) at #11.
• Asia overall didn’t score well, with China #82, Japan #90 and India #125.
• The countries with the largest populations tended to do badly (China #82, India #125 and Russia #167 out of 178 countries), with the exception of the U.S. at #23.

The question this begs is whether this will just make those of us in the happy countries even more self-assured that “our way is the right way”, or if it will perhaps motivate us to try to do something about the situation in the rest of the world (besides evangelizing “our way” to them).

This post was written by Scott Allen, source: The Happy Map

Wow, it feels good to be home. Warmly welcomed by neighbors, kids having a great time with friends, takeout food from our favorite Indian restaurant en route to our table.

The house feels small and a bit shabby compared to where we’ve been living, but it won’t be hard to spruce it up, and I’d rather have it than all the mini-mansions in Seattle. Walking down the warm sidewalk to visit with neighbors, watching the evening thunderstorm approach, listening to Lane laughing and hanging out with his buds…it’s all good.

source: home sweet home

We pulled into our driveway a little after 1pm, and found a neighbor and two of Lane’s friends waiting for us on the front porch.

It’s good to be home!

Time Warner says it could be ten days before our local phone, cable, and broadband are installed…eek! The phone’s not a big deal, since they seem to have put in a new tower near here—we’re finally getting decent signals on our cell phones. And while Gerald and the boys will miss the TV, I never watch, so that’s not an issue. But ten days without network access? Eeek!

Happily, I’ve got the EVDO card. And it appears that we’re picking up a faint but usable open wifi network from one of our neighbors. Hurrah for ubiquitous wireless!

Now the unpacking and settling in begins. A lot of work, but more fun (and rewarding) than the packing and moving out.

source: cross-country trip day 11: home at last!

Mike Carroll, The Publishers’ “Private Market” Canard, Carrollogos, July 28, 2006. Excerpt:
In response to the Provosts’ Open Letter supporting a legislative requirement for open access to federally-funded research articles, Alan Adler, vice president for legal and government affairs of the Association of American Publishers, said “what the university community is excited about is the prospect

source: More on FRPAA

Columbia University is making good progress in filling its institutional repository. From yesterday’s announcement:
The Center on Japanese Economy and Business (CJEB) at Columbia Business School has become the first academic group within the University to contribute electronic versions of its publications to DigitalCommons@Columbia, the new University Libraries-sponsored “institutional

source: Columbia is filling its IR

We made it past Toledo today and were still feeling fine, so we decided to push on past Cleveland…meaning we’ll be home early tomorrow! (Gerald and I were considering just heading all the way home tonight, but Lane vetoed that idea.)

So we’re spending the night in a Fairfield Inn just east of Cleveland, and we’ll try to get an early start tomorrow morning. Woohoo! Almost home!

source: cross-country trip day 10: madison, wi to willoughby, oh

On Thursday, August 3, I’ll be doing a web seminar entitled The Virtual Handshake: 10 Simple Steps to Radically Improve Your Business Network Online. The event is being put on by ExecuNet, a network of $100K+ executives for executive jobs and career development, but is open to the public.

This 90-minute, web-based program will show you how to leverage online communities and social software tools to enhance your professional reputation and establish new business relationships. You’ll discover how to:

• Develop a network-building strategy that complements your business objectives,
• Tame your Inbox,
• Start a blog that gets results,
• Convert your online relationships into professional relationships,
• Focus your efforts for maximum results,
• And much, much more.

The program will be targeted at senior executives, with an emphasis on achieving maximum ROI for minimal time invested, and how to position yourself as an industry leader without becoming “too famous”.

The cost of the seminar for guests (i.e., non-Execunet-members) is $79.95, which includes a copy of The Virtual Handshake: Opening Doors and Closing Deals Online.

Or get more information at ExecuNet.

This post was written by Scott Allen, source: The Virtual Handshake Webinar at Execunet August 3