Monthly Archives: March 2014

I love Milvus milvus. (The image from the Wikipedia article CC-BY-SA)) A beautiful bird – extinct in UK in England (sic) when I grew up – we travelled to a remote part of Wales in the hope of seeing them. … Continue reading →

I’m casting around for significant questions that could best be answered by content-mining the current and historical scientific literature. It’s rather like an astronomer saying: “we’ve built a better telescope; now, what shall we point it at?”. We’re developing a … Continue reading →

The University of Glasgow has summarily dismissed my request for information on publisher licences /pmr/2014/03/04/my-foi-request-to-the-university-of-glasgow-has-left-me-speechless-they-do-not-know-anything-about-publishers-or-the-licences-they-sign/. Response from the Twittersphere has been incredulous. Prof. Charles Oppenheim – and expert in UK libraries opined “makes no sense” and advised “you have to appeal”. … Continue reading →

I have have sent out ca 10 FOI requests to UK Russell Group Universities (see this blog). IMO these are reasonable requests, given the imminent change in statutory instrument on Copyright. [My questions are appended at the bottom – I … Continue reading →

In my last technical post I mentioned that we were trying to recognize the character “A”. Not too difficult for a sighted European human. Hard for Eeyore. Hard for AMI our document reading program. It’s taken a bit longer than … Continue reading →

We are developing software to read scientific documents automatically. One problem is that many of the characters are in pixel form and we have recognise them. This is called Optical Character Recognition or OCR. As with all problems I look … Continue reading →

The OKFest in Berlin has just been announced http://2014.okfestival.org/blog/. It will be fantastic. How do I know? Because it’s being created by fantastic people and because OKFest in Helsinki was fantastic. And I love the theme. It echoes my own … Continue reading →

In the previous post I introduced the need to extract data from plots – I continue with the details of how to do it. (Again, please stay with this even if you aren’t a scientist or geek – the principles … Continue reading →

NOTE. This plot contains Science. But I hope that everyone can understand the message – you don’t have to be a molecular biologist. Sp please keep reading – it’s important to you… People frequently ask me what is the use … Continue reading →