ChemZoo IS 2.0! AND I am Jester of the Month!

I have been enlightened. ChemZoo IS 2.0, and I’ll explain why….
One of the features of Web 2.0 (WP) is that communities arise by the very fact of being in the Internet

• “Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the internet as platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform.“
• A social phenomenon embracing an approach to generating and distributing Web content itself, characterized by open communication, decentralization of authority, freedom to share and re-use, and “the market as a conversation“

There have been many stories this week at WWW2007 of “Web 2.0” and one theme is that successes are not predictable. Yahoo CEO told us that he still did not understand the success of Google in areas where Yahoo and Microsoft had tried almost identical ventures. The popular Craigslist (a free community listing of classified adverts) received requests from users to charge for adverts to reduce ranking spam – thus generating an unforeseen business model. Many mashups are experiments – and some succeed. So, anything is possible, and Chemspider and this blog have formed an unplanned Web 2.0 community.
I have been appointed Jester to this community:

ChemSpider Announces Program to Recognize Tester of the Month – First Winner: Peter Murray Rust [1]

What is the purpose of this community? In a single word “Grot“. For those who do not know British sitcoms, WP:

Grot was the fictional company founded by Reginald Perrin in the television series The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin.
A last gesture of defiance at the world, Perrin envisaged Grot as a company selling items that were deliberately useless – machines which did nothing, soluble umbrellas, games without instructions and the like. Unexpectedly, the stores became a great success, so in an attempt to sabotage them, Perrin hired many of the former staff of the now-bankrupt company for which he had worked, Sunshine Desserts.

So this is the monkeys’ model – calculating and publishing Grot. We now know that the molecules and properties in the Zoo are intended only for chemoinformatics – not for the real world. (In our own world we are computing materials properties for use by engineers and we have to work hard to get them correct). The chemoinformatics world works within walled gardens. Many papers read like:

• We took N molecules (from a close source because someone owns them),
• calculated non-observable properties (such as Polar Surface Area) – for which their are no clear definitions
• using a closed source program which you (the reader) cannot afford to use
• put the results into our own SVN-NaiveBayes-PLS-Multidimensional program which we are about to sell to a company so can’t let you have
• and got an R-squared or 0.9 (measure of agreement) using a closed commercial stats package
• and published this as a Closed Access publication (without supporting iinfo)

The real joke is that you can get citations and career advancement by doing this. There was even a 1.5 day session at ACS chemoinformatics about how you can obfuscate (sic) your molecules so that no-one knows what you are working with. The monkeys are obfuscating the properties as well.
So the Chemspider model is automatic generation of chemoinformatics papers based on Grot – let’s watch for the first.
Here’s today’s monkey joke:
The monkeys have made a Grot calculator, for converting between quantities with units. Try the following jokes – I am not going to give the punchlines…

• convert 1 cm into kilometers
• convert 1 gm into kilograms

… and note that by acting as Jester and pointing you readers to the monkey site I am increasing their traffic, popularity and business. Unfortunately it’s only for a month, and so I shall be relinquishing my role shortly.
[1] May 12th, 2007 at 4:47 am e[…] In the past few weeks the best feedback that we have received to allow us to either improve our system or review the science behind the predictions has come from Peter Murray-Rust at the University of Cambridge who has provided feedback regarding ChemSpider issues around inorganic and organometallic complexes. His posts have been addressed in comments of two blog postings (1, 2) and we are presently working on comments from his latest post (3). We thank Peter for his feedback to improve ChemSpider. We look forward to his ongoing feedback to help us improve the ChemSpider System and Services. Thanks Peter Stumble it! […]