Monthly Archives: December 2007

Mystery picture

Posted on December 21, 2007 by pm286

What’s this picture? and why might I be interested in it? (It’s not the whole picture, so I claim fair use – I don’t know who the copyright holder is. And the clipped space hides a fairly vital clue). [UPDATE: … Continue reading →

Posted in fun | Tagged , | 3 Comments

the end of the beginning

Posted on December 21, 2007 by pm286

I got a series of euphoric messages from fellow OA activists rejoicing at the news that Preseident Bush was “certain” to sign the House appropriations bill. I searched for the message in Peter Suber’s blog and found … Congress sends … Continue reading →

Posted in open issues | Tagged , | 2 Comments

Java: labelled break considered harmful

Posted on December 20, 2007 by pm286

Readers of my last post may have thought that Eclipse makes refactoring easy. It does – up to a point. I had started to refactor an 800-line module with deeply nested loops – just a matter of extracting the inner … Continue reading →

Posted in programming for scientists | 1 Comment

Refactoring large modules using Eclipse

Posted on December 20, 2007 by pm286

I have recently had to consider refactoring a piece of Java which had got slightly out of hand – the module was 800 lines long and the if statements so deeply nested that they ran well off the right-hand edge … Continue reading →

Posted in programming for scientists | Tagged | 5 Comments

Mystery Picture

Posted on December 20, 2007 by pm286

Here is a photograph (untouched, not CGI). When I saw it I went wow! (I knew what it was). I’d be interested to know if anyone (a) KNOWS what it is of (b) can estimate the scale (c) has seen … Continue reading →

Posted in fun, semanticWeb | 7 Comments

Open Data: publishers are the problem

Posted on December 18, 2007 by pm286

The Chemspider site and blog have been making rapid and valuable progress towards Open Data. This is particularly laudable for a commercial site where Openness in chemistry is a long way from being a proven business model and is actively … Continue reading →

Posted in chemistry, open issues | 3 Comments

Open Notebook Science and Glueware

Posted on December 18, 2007 by pm286

Cameron laments the difficulty of creating an Open Notebook system when there is a lot of data:   The problem with data… Our laboratory blog system has been doing a reasonable job of handling protocols and simple pieces of analysis … Continue reading →

Posted in open notebook science | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

What sort of repositories do we want?

Posted on December 18, 2007 by pm286

  I had the pleasure of meeting Greg Crane in Phoenix (see below) and last week at our brainstorm on how to fund digital curation. Greg is a remarkable person – a classicist who is compleetely at home creating computer … Continue reading →

Posted in repositories | 6 Comments

Open Access Data, Open Data Commons PDDL and CCZero

Posted on December 17, 2007 by pm286

This is great news. We now have a widely agreed protocol for Open Data, channeled through Science Commons but with great input for several sources including Talis, and the Open Knowledge Foundation. Here is the OKFN report (I also got … Continue reading →

Posted in data, open issues | Tagged | Leave a comment

Deepak Singh: Educating people about data ownership

Posted on December 15, 2007 by pm286

Deepak Singh: Educating people about data ownership I never got to watch the Bubble 2.0 video (I only heard it on net@nite). Before I could get to see it, it got taken down. Wired talks about the reasons behind the … Continue reading →

Posted in open issues | Tagged | 1 Comment