EN: If you sitting in front of a computer keyboard and mouse usually are the interfaces to communicate with the machine. On mobile phones and PDAs the data input it is more tricky. A recent Google Tech Talk shows a cool solution: Dasher. It is hard to describe the interface, but it feels like browsing through the text you want to enter. It has a probabilistic language model under the hood to make this possible. With this Java applet you can test the concept without installing Dasher locally.
Chinese and other languages with many symbols are supported, too. For disabled people Dasher can be a good solution for communicating.
Although the basic implementation is already some years old, there are new features to add. The video shows how to control it just with head, eyeball or breathing muscles movements. As the Wii seems to inspire cell phone producers to build in senors for motion and rotation the tilting of a handheld device could be used to control Dasher.
Some link I wanted to post already for a while and that fit into that topic: Liquid browsing for displaying and browsing multiparametric data and Octomatics, a very intuitive way of displaying numbers and calculating with them.
2007-04-27
2007-04-25
Wiki paper - an experiment
EN: Kevin Kelly proposed in the article Speculation of the Future of Science wikis as a tool for collaboratively creating scientific articles that will constantly grow. Maybe this is a further step into that direction: As Jean-Claude Bradley announced on Useful Chemistry, he has started an experiment in which he uses an open wiki to write a publication on the Uki reaction. He hopes the way of writing will not hamper the acceptance of the final paper by a publisher.
After my presentation at the Allen Press Emerging Trends in Scholarly Publishing Seminar a seminar participant who is working for a publishing company told me what he sees in wikis: For him not the the collaboration is in the focus, but the version control system. In his company a paper was accepted once but after some month the authors wanted to change/add a little part, which was not possible.
Today these little but interesting pieces that are not worth an own publication might be lost. The usage of wikis for publications could save them. When citing such wiki articles the version is an essential part of the citation.
After my presentation at the Allen Press Emerging Trends in Scholarly Publishing Seminar a seminar participant who is working for a publishing company told me what he sees in wikis: For him not the the collaboration is in the focus, but the version control system. In his company a paper was accepted once but after some month the authors wanted to change/add a little part, which was not possible.
Today these little but interesting pieces that are not worth an own publication might be lost. The usage of wikis for publications could save them. When citing such wiki articles the version is an essential part of the citation.
2007-04-19
Mal langsam, Herr Innenminister
DE: Mann, in letzter Zeit kommt man einfach nicht mehr hinterher mit der Bloggerei, wenn es um Überwachung von Seiten Vater Staat geht. Unser ÜberwachungsInnenminister Schäuble hat montan einen Kreativitätsschub wie ein junger Picasso. Die Jungs von dataloo sind daraufhin ebenfalls kreativ geworden und haben ein Stasi 2.0 Bild zusammengebastelt.
EN: Hmm, no time to explain all this in english. Our current Interior Minister goes crazy and thinks loudly about a lot of surveillance... read more at these english pages to get the background.
(Dank an Michael für den Link!)
EN: Hmm, no time to explain all this in english. Our current Interior Minister goes crazy and thinks loudly about a lot of surveillance... read more at these english pages to get the background.
(Dank an Michael für den Link!)
2007-04-13
Report - Emerging Trends in Scholarly Publishing - Update
EN: Ted Freeman from Allen Press invited me to give a talk (slides) at the 2007 Allen Press Emerging Trends in Scholarly Publishing Seminar in Washington (D.C.). It was a very stimulating meeting and I will try to give a small report on some of the contributions. The foci of the talks might be in some cases different than the points I mention, but the slides of all talks will be online soon so you might can figure them out for yourself.
Our session called With a Little Help From My Friends: Online Scholarship 2.0 was started with an interesting talk by Richard Akerman (he will also blog about the meeting, so maybe we will complement each other). Some of his messages were that if publishers don't give the platform for communities those will be built by the communities themselves. In his opinion open peer review doesn't scale well. He advised the publishers to make more use of semantic web technologies to make it easier for the readers to handle the articles. Josh Greenberg presented Zotero, a Firefox extension that helps to manage research sources. There will soon be (summer of this year) a server set up to share Zotero content with others. Also the API will be improved soon. Josh hopes that in future there will be more meta data added by the content providers so that less reverse engineering has to be done. Dean Giustini showed the impact of Web 2.0 on the medical world and mentioned examples like Ask Dr Wiki. I gave an introduction to wikis and their application is science, after that I discussed the experiences of the First EMBL online PhD Symposium.
The keynote was given by Jaron Lanier who is generally quite skeptical regarding the Web 2.0 paradigms (see e.g. his article Digital Maoism). For me personally it was sometimes hard to follow his line of thought as he jumped a lot and mixed many different, unconventional ideas. I guess that is the way a visionary has to think :). In my opinion the bottom line was that the anonymity of the web brings out the worst in people. The tendency to bad behavior was there before, but the web just enables this more efficiently. So complete open systems might not be the solution for things like peer reviewing. Hmm, I think that there were many other points here that I don't remember properly.
From the session Here, There, and Everywhere: The Great Promise of Research Data Commons I would like to mention John Wilbanks' talk who introduced us to Science Commons. He stressed that delayed data publishing blocks the whole process of science that takes place later in the pipeline and he encouraged publishing data as soon as possible to increase the speed of research. In his opinion scientific literature should also be treated as a scientific data source and should be made available as completely and accessibly as possible. This would increase the power of data mining enormously.
The third session We Can Work It Out: Peer Review, Dynamic Documents and the Wisdom of Crowds was a panel discussion chaired by Irv Rockwood with Jaron Lanier, Chris Surridge and David Baldwin. On one side David defended the classical peer review process, on the other side Chris, managing editor of PloS ONE, tried to sell the advantages of the open peer review approach.One point he especially mentioned that I wasn't aware of before: reviewing articles consumes a lot of researcher's time. As many journals are very proud of their rejection rate, a lot of man power is wasted when scientists submit the same paper from the top down through the prestige hierarchy of journals. If journals would somehow exchange the comments of referees quite some labor could be saved. But this is not the case.
This was just a quick overview of the impression I got. I am a little bit jet lagged so maybe I will improve this posting later or will post separately about some of the points. As mentioned, keep an eye on Richard's blog as he will report about the meeting, too. If anybody thinks I got something wrong please post a comment.
Update: As Chris Surridge noticed the talk slides and videos of some parts of the seminar are online now.
Our session called With a Little Help From My Friends: Online Scholarship 2.0 was started with an interesting talk by Richard Akerman (he will also blog about the meeting, so maybe we will complement each other). Some of his messages were that if publishers don't give the platform for communities those will be built by the communities themselves. In his opinion open peer review doesn't scale well. He advised the publishers to make more use of semantic web technologies to make it easier for the readers to handle the articles. Josh Greenberg presented Zotero, a Firefox extension that helps to manage research sources. There will soon be (summer of this year) a server set up to share Zotero content with others. Also the API will be improved soon. Josh hopes that in future there will be more meta data added by the content providers so that less reverse engineering has to be done. Dean Giustini showed the impact of Web 2.0 on the medical world and mentioned examples like Ask Dr Wiki. I gave an introduction to wikis and their application is science, after that I discussed the experiences of the First EMBL online PhD Symposium.
The keynote was given by Jaron Lanier who is generally quite skeptical regarding the Web 2.0 paradigms (see e.g. his article Digital Maoism). For me personally it was sometimes hard to follow his line of thought as he jumped a lot and mixed many different, unconventional ideas. I guess that is the way a visionary has to think :). In my opinion the bottom line was that the anonymity of the web brings out the worst in people. The tendency to bad behavior was there before, but the web just enables this more efficiently. So complete open systems might not be the solution for things like peer reviewing. Hmm, I think that there were many other points here that I don't remember properly.
From the session Here, There, and Everywhere: The Great Promise of Research Data Commons I would like to mention John Wilbanks' talk who introduced us to Science Commons. He stressed that delayed data publishing blocks the whole process of science that takes place later in the pipeline and he encouraged publishing data as soon as possible to increase the speed of research. In his opinion scientific literature should also be treated as a scientific data source and should be made available as completely and accessibly as possible. This would increase the power of data mining enormously.
The third session We Can Work It Out: Peer Review, Dynamic Documents and the Wisdom of Crowds was a panel discussion chaired by Irv Rockwood with Jaron Lanier, Chris Surridge and David Baldwin. On one side David defended the classical peer review process, on the other side Chris, managing editor of PloS ONE, tried to sell the advantages of the open peer review approach.One point he especially mentioned that I wasn't aware of before: reviewing articles consumes a lot of researcher's time. As many journals are very proud of their rejection rate, a lot of man power is wasted when scientists submit the same paper from the top down through the prestige hierarchy of journals. If journals would somehow exchange the comments of referees quite some labor could be saved. But this is not the case.
This was just a quick overview of the impression I got. I am a little bit jet lagged so maybe I will improve this posting later or will post separately about some of the points. As mentioned, keep an eye on Richard's blog as he will report about the meeting, too. If anybody thinks I got something wrong please post a comment.
Update: As Chris Surridge noticed the talk slides and videos of some parts of the seminar are online now.
2007-04-04
Lack of water
EN: The lack of water is already a major problem in certain areas of the world and as the world's population and living standards increase, the situation will aggravate. An interview in the ZEIT (german) with the CEO and president of the advisory board of Nestlé Peter Brabeck-Letmathe gives more insight into that topic. Brabeck-Letmathe explains that water should be considered as a fossil resource and why it does not make sense in many parts of the world to produce biofuels. The reason for this is that the crops necessary to produce biofuels require the water (and other resources) that would otherwise be used to grow food crops. It is mentioned that agriculture consumes 93% of all fresh water used and that one vegetable calorie needs around 50 liters in production while one animal calorie needs 500 liters. Brabeck-Letmathe proposes less wasteful technologies, genetic engineering and higher water prices to improve the situation.
I assume a reduced consumption of animal products and the industrial usage of organisms that naturally uses less water would also help. Algae like Spirulina might be candidates as they require less water than common crops. If you have a better/newer/contradicting source please let me know. More proposals?
I assume a reduced consumption of animal products and the industrial usage of organisms that naturally uses less water would also help. Algae like Spirulina might be candidates as they require less water than common crops. If you have a better/newer/contradicting source please let me know. More proposals?
2007-04-03
R.i.P Paul Watzlawick
EN: Paul Watzlawick, mostly famous for his communication theories (e.g. one cannot not communicate), died at the 31st of March, 2007. I enjoyed reading some of his books (The Pursuit of Unhappiness is highly recommended) as he had a wonderful, humorous way of communicating his thoughts.
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