Saturday 29 August 2009

PLoS & Mendeley live on the Web! Science Hour with Leo Laporte & Dr. Kiki

Thanks (again) to FriendFeed,



I was pointed in the general direction of something right up my street. In this case, a blog post from Mendeley alerting readers about Science Hour with Leo Laporte & Dr. Kiki featuring Jason Hoyt from Mendeley and Pete Binfield from PLoS ONE.

As the show went out at 11:00PM UK time on August 27, 2009, Sadly, I missed it in real time, but thanks to the benefits of self archiving, they made the entire show, warts and all, freely available.

This is an excellent free flowing discussion about Open Access, the future of academic publishing, science on the Web, the list goes on. The actual show starts at 05:30 so skip to there if you want to jump straight in....

PLoS & Mendeley live on the Web! Science Hour with Leo Laporte & Dr. Kiki from Graham Steel on Vimeo.

Friday 28 August 2009

FHM - #fail c/o Robert Downey JR




Last Friday, McDawg purchased two packets of sandwiches, a Grande tea, a copy of New Scientist and FHM before alighting the Virgin Express train from Glasgow to Euston, London ahead of Science Online London 2009 and also indeed, the World Gala Premiere of Darwin's Lost Weekend, the latter marking my entry after 20 years of wanting to do so into the land of film-scoring.

Having only bought one previous copy of the "lad's mag" FHM before, I thought I had correctly picked up and purchased the latest edition of the mag. Terrific



Oops. Wrong mag, but a darn fine one actually which was quite appropriate under the circumstances and came into discussion several times during my travels.

Tuesday 25 August 2009

PLoS's HQ in the UK is a house?? Surely some mistake.

McDawg had three scheduled meetings yesterday whilst still in London after attending Science Online London 2009.

For my final meeting, as planned, I took the express train from King's Cross Station to Cambridge and then took a cab to the offices of the Public Library of Science (PLoS).



I was rather perplexed however at what I saw:-


View Larger Map

In the centre of the above street view photo, you will see two blue doors. The one on the left is number 7. PLoS are based at number 7 Portugal Place. According to the Google map of that area that I printed off a week ago, I was indeed standing in Portugal Place:-


View Larger Map

So, I was left thinking that PLoS HQ (UK) is not an office, but instead, a small terraced residential house ???? Confused? I sure as hell was. For a nano-second, I was tempted to ring the bell of number 7 but my brain told me, "there's something not right here".

Placed a short call to PLoS. Essentially, I was extremely close to where I was meant to be, "stay where you are and I'll come out and get you". "I'm wearing a PLoS ONE t-shirt", I said. The above map is slightly misleading in that I was standing in Portugal STREET not Portugal Place.

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Whilst sitting in a meeting room (within PLoS), I couldn't help but notice a stack of colourful, in-print copies of PLoS Journals. I had no idea that PLoS used to publish in paper format several years ago. Interesting.

Very much enjoyed the discussions I had with Ginny Barbour and Theo Bloom. Thank you both kindly for taking the time out to speak with The International Man Of Mystery and Patient Advocate

Before I left, I asked if it would be OK to take a couple of photos inside PLoS HQ (UK). Since there were no objections from PLoS staff......





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Saturday 15 August 2009

Making the Web Work for Science

'Making the Web Work for Science July 28th 2009. A panel discussion on bringing digital tools to the world of science with panelists Stephen Friend, Jimmy Wales and John Wilbanks moderated by Tim O'Reilly'.

Making the Web Work for Science - Full from Jordan Mendelson on Vimeo.



Click here to the original source to view individual Chapters.

Major H/T to Lisa Green for putting this one together.



Summary

Digital technologies have greatly enhanced our ability to communicate and share information, but the scientific community remains largely untouched by these advances.

Why doesn't the web work for science the way it works for culture and for commerce? What will it take to make science digital?

Join the Commonwealth Club of California for a fascinating discussion on the movement to bring digital methods to the world of science.



BIO


Stephen Friend - Dr. Friend is currently a Senior Vice President at Merck & Co., Inc. where he has had scientific leadership of Merck's Basic Cancer Research efforts since September 2002. In 2005, he led the Advanced Technologies and Oncology groups to firmly establish molecular profiling activities throughout Merck's laboratories around the world, as well as to coordinate oncology programs from Basic Research through phase IIA clinical trials. Prior to joining Merck, Dr. Friend was recruited by Dr. Leland Hartwell to join the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center's Seattle Project, an advanced institute for drug discovery. While there Drs. Friend and Hartwell developed a method for examining large patterns of genes that led them to co-found Rosetta Inpharmatics in 2001. Dr. Friend has also held faculty positions at Harvard Medical School from 1987 to 1995 and at Massachusetts General Hospital from 1990 to 1995. He received his B.A. in philosophy, his Ph.D. in biochemistry and his M.D. from Indiana University.

Tim O'Reilly - Tim O'Reilly is the founder and CEO of O'Reilly Media, Inc., thought by many to be the best computer book publisher in the world. O'Reilly Media also publishes online through the O'Reilly Network and hosts conferences on technology topics, including the O'Reilly Open Source Convention, the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, and the Web 2.0 Conference. O'Reilly's blog, the O'Reilly Radar "watches the alpha geeks" to determine emerging technology trends, and serves as a platform for advocacy about issues of importance to the technical community. O'Reilly is on the boards of MySQL, CollabNet, Safari Books Online, Wesabe, and ValuesOfN, and is a partner in O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures.

Jimmy Wales - Jimmy Donal "Jimbo" Wales (born August 7, 1966 in Huntsville, Alabama) is the founder, board member and Chairman Emeritus of the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit corporation that operates the Wikipedia project, and several other wiki projects, including Wiktionary and Wikinews. He is also the co-founder, along with Angela Beesley, of the for-profit company Wikia, Inc.

John Wilbanks - As VP of Science, John Wilbanks runs the Science Commons project at Creative Commons. He came to Creative Commons from a Fellowship at the World Wide Web Consortium in Semantic Web for Life Sciences. Previously, he founded and led to acquisition Incellico, a bioinformatics company that built semantic graph networks for use in pharmaceutical research & development. Previously, John was the first Assistant Director at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School and also worked in US politics as a legislative aide to U.S. Representative Fortney (Pete) Stark. John holds a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy from Tulane University and studied modern letters at the Universite de Paris IV (La Sorbonne). He is a research affiliate at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in the project on Mathematics and Computation. John also serves on the Advisory Boards of the U.S. National Library of Medicine's PubMed Central, the Open Knowledge Foundation, the Open Knowledge Definition, and the International Advisory Board of the Prix Ars Electronica's Digital Communities awards. He also serves on the Board of Directors of the Fedora Commons digital repository organization.

Thursday 6 August 2009

JISC - "Libraries of the Future"



Original Source here.

Don't know about JISC?

JISC Homepage

JISC = (the) Joint Information Systems Committee

McDawg says - "go look around the JISC website, it's brilliant".


H/T Tony Hirst via YouTube via FriendFeed