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 1 Comment

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 No Comments

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 No Comments

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 No Comments

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 No Comments