On this Christ­mas day, my favorite source of infor­ma­tion on dig­i­tal pho­tog­ra­phy cel­e­brates its tenth anniver­sary! DPRe­view is not only pri­mary source of pho­tograhic invor­ma­tion but also global com­mu­nity and net­work of peo­ple pas­sion­ate about pho­tog­ra­phy. My sin­cere con­grat­u­la­tions to Phil, Simon and whole DPre­view team for their ded­i­ca­tion and hard work!

Amaz­ing, last ten years were like his­tor­i­cal epoch for the dig­i­tal pho­tog­ra­phy field. In 1998 I just dreamed about dig­i­tal cam­era. In these early days, 0.4 megapixel Ricoh RDC-2 with a 20 minute bat­tery life cost about $1500. Please also note, its remov­able LCD screen.
Afford­able 2.5 megapixel Minolta RDC-3000 dig­i­tal SLR was around $6000! Con­tinue reading →

25th December, 2008 View Comments

Tra­di­tion­ally, at the end of the year Sci­ence and Nature come up with kind of top sci­ence break­throughs of 2008. These two lists cor­re­spond to the two dif­fer­ent approaches. Sci­ence mag­a­zine judges pure sci­en­tific mean­ing, while Nature also count broader impacts like news, and future impli­ca­tions. Per­son­ally, I share Nature’s view on the most impor­tant sci­en­tific dis­cov­er­ies, as they have broader influ­ence not only on sci­ence but also on life in general.

Broad impact means more cor­re­spond­ing hed­lines and larger traf­fic to the news sources. The Large Hadron Col­lider (LHC) is defi­nately top celebrity of the year! This is clearly vis­i­ble just by look­ing onto Google Trends graph in com­par­i­son with whole stem cell research (Sci­ence mag­a­zine break­through), Nobel prizes and Paris Hilton :) Con­tinue reading →

22nd December, 2008 Comments Off

It’s easy to find the lat­est in sci­en­tific pub­li­ca­tions by going to a search engine, such as Web of Knowl­edge or PubMed, that spe­cial­izes in the rel­e­vant lit­er­a­ture. But, if you’re look­ing for some­thing in gen­eral you’re likely to turn to a search engine. These usu­ally will return a Wikipedia page within the top 10 hits. In increas­ing num­bers, sci­en­tists are rea­son­ing that, if peo­ple are going to look at the Wikipedia page any­way, the sci­en­tific com­mu­nity should prob­a­bly ensure that the infor­ma­tion there is good. In the lat­est man­i­fes­ta­tion of this trend, a RNA biol­ogy jour­nal that spe­cial­izes in RNA research is requir­ing any authors that sub­mit a spe­cific type of paper also pre­pare an addi­tional doc­u­ment for peer review: a Wikipedia page sum­ma­riz­ing the paper!

The first exam­ples of this pro­gram in action are already online. The jour­nal is host­ing an open access paper that describes a fam­ily of RNA mol­e­cules found in nema­tode worms; a cor­re­spond­ing Wikipedia page is already in place.

19th December, 2008 Comments Off

His­toric storm just pulled away all across the South­east US. The storm pro­duced early sea­son and record-setting snow across parts of Texas, Louisiana and Mis­sis­sippi. By noon today, metro Jack­son and much of the state is cov­ered in a blan­ket of snow 10 5 cm thick. Up to 20 cm of snow fell north­east of McComb, Mis­sis­sippi. In fact, Mis­sis­sippi hasn’t recorded snow­fall on Decem­ber 11 since at least the 1800s accord­ing to US National Weather Ser­vice.

Ice cov­ered park­ing lot. Con­tinue reading →

11th December, 2008 Comments Off

Are you still strug­gling to orga­nize your arti­cle col­lec­tion man­u­ally? The recent PLoS Com­pu­ta­tional Biol­ogy arti­cle reviews sev­eral next gen­er­a­tion web bib­li­o­graphic tools and com­pare them. Authors empha­size sev­eral issues with cur­rent tools and pos­si­ble ways how to over­come them. Do you use any men­tioned desk­top or web–based tools? Why?

Many sci­en­tists now man­age the bulk of their bib­li­o­graphic infor­ma­tion elec­tron­i­cally, thereby orga­niz­ing their pub­li­ca­tions and cita­tion mate­r­ial from dig­i­tal libraries. How­ever, a library has been described as “thought in cold stor­age,” and unfor­tu­nately many dig­i­tal libraries can be cold, imper­sonal, iso­lated, and inac­ces­si­ble places. In this Review, we dis­cuss the cur­rent chilly state of dig­i­tal libraries for the com­pu­ta­tional biol­o­gist, includ­ing PubMed, IEEE Xplore, the ACM dig­i­tal library, ISI Web of Knowl­edge, Sco­pus, Cite­seer, arXiv, DBLP, and Google Scholar. We illus­trate the cur­rent process of using these libraries with a typ­i­cal work­flow, and high­light prob­lems with man­ag­ing data and meta­data using URIs. We then exam­ine a range of new appli­ca­tions such as Zotero, Mende­ley, Meken­tosj Papers, MyNCBI, CiteU­Like, Con­notea, and HubMed that exploit the Web to make these dig­i­tal libraries more per­sonal, socia­ble, inte­grated, and acces­si­ble places. We con­clude with how these appli­ca­tions may begin to help achieve a dig­i­tal defrost, and dis­cuss some of the issues that will help or hin­der this in terms of mak­ing libraries on the Web warmer places in the future, becom­ing resources that are con­sid­er­ably more use­ful to both humans and machines.

Dun­can Hull, Steve R. Pet­tifer, Dou­glas B. Kell (2008). Defrost­ing the Dig­i­tal Library: Bib­li­o­graphic Tools for the Next Gen­er­a­tion Web PLoS Com­pu­ta­tional Biol­ogy, 4 (10) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1000204

21st November, 2008 Comments Off