Monthly Archives: May 2010

Dictated to Arcturus Why do I vote dressed in a bear suit? The original reason, which still stands, is that I wish to know how well the electoral process checks against impersonation. I wanted to go with my face covered … Continue reading →

Typed into Arcturus (it’s difficult to use speech with URLs – at least till I know better) I have spent an exciting and intense day with Henry Rzepa at Imperial College. For those who don’t know Henry has been an … Continue reading →

Dictated to Arcturus In a few hours this country will have voted for a new government. At least it thinks it will be a new government but in fact the government of the country is unrelated to the former democratic … Continue reading →

Typed to Arcturus There’s an out-of-the ordinary candidate – Old Holborn – standing in Cambridge in the general election, whose face has never been seen. He always wears a mask and no-one knows who he is. It’s legal. Here’s his? … Continue reading →

Dictated to Arcturus Two amusements for chemists We are now at the stage where we can read the full text of a chemical experiment and extract much of the meaning out of it using natural language processing and other techniques. … Continue reading →

Typed into Arcturus Open Access week has been declared: http://openaccessweek.ning.com/ Every can and everyone should. Open Access is spreading inexorably. It’s taken about 15 years at least. Let’s get Open Data accepted as well and in a shorter time J

Typed and scraped into Arcturus In reporting http://election.theyworkforyou.com/quiz/ I’ve confused Democracy Club http://www.democracyclub.org.uk/welcome and MySociety. I arrived at the quiz from links from MySociety (I think) and both organizations are listed as contributing. The formal position is: “This [the quiz] … Continue reading →

Dictated to my machine Arcturus I get too many spams already on this blog perhaps 20 to 50 per day that get past Akismet (without which I would be swamped) and I delete them before reading. However one that caught … Continue reading →

Dictated to my machine Arcturus When I spoke at the ACS symposium in March in San Francisco I was delighted that Cameron Neylon was there because he was able to record my presentation. He has now put it online at … Continue reading →

Dictated to my computer (please report speakos! – the equivalent of typos) I was hoping to get some coding done but I have just discovered another brilliant site from the usual suspects at mysociety.org. It’s called the straight choice and … Continue reading →