Disqus - Latest Comments for MrGunn

Re: Searching scientific literature in the 21st century

MrGunn — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 16:34:21 -0000

As most readers are probably already aware, Mendeley just announced a call for proposals to work with their academic literature data API.

Re: Chargers NFL Draft Preview with Jim Laslavic

MrGunn — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 17:53:58 -0000

Trade down for the 32nd pick. 32 seems to be a lucky number ;-)

Re: Pro-Animal-Testing Rally Tomorrow in Los Angeles - ScienceInsider

MrGunn — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 16:53:44 -0000

As DrugMonkey notes, the scientists who are actually doing the work know there's not currently any way around animal experiments for many types of research. For example, I needed to study the interaction between cells in the bone marrow and a bone tumor. Because I didn't want to hassle of dealing with animals and also because research review boards require it, I looked long and hard for an alternative way to study the phenomenon, but eventually got as far as I could with culture models. I wrote up my attempts to find an alternative way of doing the research in my report to the review board. There's simply no way to model a bone marrow environment in a tumor bearing animal in a culture dish, and then to examine the effect of a drug requires different routes of administration, none of which can be done in vitro.

Believe me, I wouldn't have done the animal research if there was any way I could have gotten around it, and pretty much everyone else felt the same way. It's costly, time consuming, and inconvenient, but I was able to do research that uncovered a new treatment path for an incurable cancer. Was that a justifiable reason?

Re: BioStor gets PDFs with XMP metadata - bibliographies made easy with Mendeley and Papers

MrGunn — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 15:18:18 -0000

Glad you got it working, Roderic, and thanks for providing this valuable service.

Re: The Seven Needs of Real-Time Curators

MrGunn — Sun, 28 Mar 2010 19:34:40 -0000

I think what Mark is trying to say is that Wave is both a protocol and a client. The crappy UI was just one of many possible clients, as the twitter homepage is just one of many possible clients (and certainly not the best).

Re: The Seven Needs of Real-Time Curators

MrGunn — Sun, 28 Mar 2010 19:24:58 -0000

Well that's all nice and curmudgeonly and everything, but unfortunately, playing the contrarian here doesn't make you look smart. It makes you look like the guy claiming computers will make us look dumb because we won't learn how to use a slide rule.

I'll get off your lawn now and go continue wasting colossal amounts of time and attention doing what I do for a living.

Re: The Truth About the Average Twitter User [STATS]

MrGunn — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 15:28:41 -0000

If someone hasn't tweeted once, is it really fair to call them a twitter user? Perhaps they're just lurking/monitoring conversations?

I'd recommend someone at Mashable talk to someone who understands stats before even trying to interpret this info, because I think you're really missing the point.

Re: Conan Pledges to Change One Woman’s Life… on Twitter

MrGunn — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 14:01:56 -0000

Time to start counting the number of times a brand is mentioned in her tweets.

/ihate

Re: TextMarks Makes Sending Mass Text Messages Easy

MrGunn — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 13:54:53 -0000

When I hear "X turns Y into a powerful marketing tool." I instantly know I want nothing to do with X and that Y is shortly to become useless and overrun with spam.

I mean, have we learned nothing from email? Do we really want to make it easy to send mass text messages?

Re: Scanning mentions of the library - Twitter, Google alerts & more

MrGunn — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 13:13:29 -0000

In my experience searching for things I know I tweeted, or for every tweet in a discussion from the day before, I've always found holes in the returned results. I think the answer is that you just can't trust tweet search results to be complete.

Re: Scanning mentions of the library - Twitter, Google alerts & more

MrGunn — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 15:48:52 -0000

I find that the twitter search index lacks stuff I know should be there often, so I don't really trust it to be complete.

Re: “Friendfeeds for Science” pt II – Design ideas for a research focussed aggregator

MrGunn — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 00:22:58 -0000

I like the idea of separating authorship and curation, that's really useful. I like making it easy for a non-user to join and already have some information and reputation populated for them, but I'm a little worried that it would make people uneasy to hear that a reputation metric about them is being put together without their input, and it might make them feel almost blackmailed into joining, just to have some input. I know this is basically how Google site rankings work, but making it more explicit would need to be done carefully. Sites like Spokeo have people skittish about this kind of thing. Perhaps hide their a nonuser's status on the site from search engines until they claim their profile?

Re: Twitter to Open Firehose to Developers

MrGunn — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 20:26:59 -0000

Yea! No more missing tweets in third-party apps!

Re: Powering the Dubai Overshoot

MrGunn — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 19:19:50 -0000

gregorylent is either a really, really smart guy or someone who drops little aphorisms into random conversations to seem smart. I tried for some time to draw him out on friendfeed to see if there was substance behind his cute little saying, but all I got back was "you scientists think you're so smart" static. Eventually he went away.

Re: Powering the Dubai Overshoot

MrGunn — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 23:10:06 -0000

Good old gregorylent. Nice to know you can be counted on to say something vaguely meaningful whenever it's called for. How's that guru shtick working out for you?

Re: Aggregating sources for academic research in a web 2.0 world

MrGunn — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 13:21:54 -0000

The recommendation features on Mendeley are coming. This will allow you to find interesting things based on what other people you know are reading. Finding interesting things based on _how_ other people are finding them is a interesting new idea, though!

Re: Aggregating sources for academic research in a web 2.0 world

MrGunn — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 03:01:05 -0000

So the idea would be to enable more citing of different sources, such as web pages and data feed, rather than just papers? It's a useful infrastructure move.