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