Disqus - Latest Comments for Alethea

Re: A step in the right direction. PLoS makes a move

Alethea — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 03:38:17 -0000

"the chances of marketers trying to game a metric for scholarly publication is low" - but can you say the same for bioinformaticiens? ;-)

Seriously, though, I agree whole-heartedly with your sentiment. But these are the very early years, and I suspect that PLoS' move will only take on full meaning in five or ten more years.

Re: Intellectual lineages: the backbone of scientific social networks

Alethea — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 17:05:51 -0000

We see the exact same thing with the "French school of embryology" whose lineage begins perhaps with Etienne Wolff and continues through the brilliant Nicole Le Douarin and then branches suddenly out into generations of highly successful experimental embryologists around the world. Cf. http://www.ijdb.ehu.es/web/contents.php?vol=49&...
- and of course there are myriad other examples. You are quite right that in real life, this works as a social network - both for finding postdocs and recommendations, and for reagents, and for collaborations.

Re: Moving Online

Alethea — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 06:22:12 -0000

I've been having the same thoughts. What you write about even wiki markup being problematic for some is true. Jean-Claude, I gave wikispaces a look and a definite advantage is the visual editor and ease of image upload. On the other hand, a definite advantage of the OWW platform is automatic entry creation by clicking on a date. What I haven't found in either is a way of retrieving chronologically ordered entries by tag (where I would then specify a "project" in the way JCB does by Experiment), but I know it could be possible. That would be pretty damn useful as we have a lot of different things going on, some of which crosses into two ostensibly separate projects.

GoogleDocs is perfect for what we need, JCB; thanks for putting me onto that. I knew about it but not that it was so easy to link out.

I'm still mulling over my list and priority order of desiderata but overall, I agree with your whole assessment, Eric.

I wanted to ask both of you (if JCB comes back for more) how you back up a wiki? I was wondering if I shouldn't just print out my entries once a month for my administration, who is quite reticent to have us move off paper as they've spent large amounts of money on serially numbered formal lab notebooks with room for countersignatures and the like. But that would stink wrt all the links, and the source is illegible.

Re: Moving Online

Alethea — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 10:29:21 -0000

"I usually make a dump of the backend database onto a hard drive; that’s only for those who are comfortable with a command line, I’m afraid."

Could you point me in the direction of a tutorial? Even if my stuff is on OpenWetWare, I'd like to have a local copy in case they suddenly disappear (eg. if fascists get elected in November and decide to do completely away with free speech in Boston).

Seriously, it's a bit of a problem for me, as my blog is hosted by scienceboard.net which gives me WYSIWYG in exchange for my not having access to the actual database of entries, not being able to modify the look of the blog, not entering tracking codes or anything like that. With some WordPress functionalities nonetheless. Sigh. But Nature Network who kindly seduced me to write a blog with them, gives you about the same flexibility without WordPress, so not even WYSIWYG.

/rant

Re: Moving Online

Alethea — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 10:51:53 -0000

Thanks, JCB!

Re: xkcd: volume 0 is now on sale

Alethea — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 04:05:20 -0000

Yay! I very much want to offer this book as a gift to some folks in the U.S. However, I am running into a problem via Paypal, where even though I enter a U.S. zip code and it predicts a $5 shipping fee per U.S. destination, when I get to the payment area where I can say I don't want it shipped to me in Europe - not yet, anyhow - it still tacks on an International Shipping Rate (sic caps) of $15 and predicts a 5-7 week delay. Can someone give me a hand with this?

Anyhow, great venture, and bravo on donating the profits to a highly worthy cause. We know, you are just building your future market audience, but there are all sorts of other good consequences.

Signed, Happy Scientist. Oh, wait, my name's entered above.

Re: Mini, comments, and let the venom flow

Alethea — Tue, 28 Mar 2006 06:17:40 -0000

Heh - nice to see someone remembers what the verb "flame" means.