Academic Productivity

If you are interested in scientific blogging and collaborative tools for research and happen to be in the UK this summer, here’s an event not to be missed:

Science Online London 2009 will explore the latest trends in science online. How is the Web affecting the work of researchers, science communicators, journalists, librarians, educators, students? What can you do to make the best use of the growing number of online tools?

The event is cohosted by Mendeley and Nature Network. More information available here:

• www.scienceonlinelondon.org
• twitter.com/soloconf

It should be no surprise that many of us love Zotero, especially since they added support for reference sharing and synchronization.

I am probably the only exception in the AP team. As a longstanding MacTeX user, I keep my references organised with BibDesk, one of the sweetest pieces of (open source) software ever written for TeX users working on Mac OS. When hunting for references, I use CiteULike as a fast and effective solution to bookmark and tag papers. My workflow usually starts with an exploratory phase based on CiteULike. As soon as I have read a paper and need to cite it, I export its reference from CiteULike into BibDesk, filing the PDFs with the help of the autofile functionality in BibDesk. So far I have been quite happy with this workflow even if it involves a little bit of fiddling to correctly import references into my local library.

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Interdisciplines.org is hosting an electronic conference (sponsored by the Liquid Publications project) on the impact of Web 2.0 technologies on the format of a scientific paper and, more generally, on their effect on knowledge production practices in the scientific community.

It currently features three target articles open to online discussion:

1. What Science can learn from Google? by WIRED editor-in-chief Chris Anderson
2. Peer-to-peer review by MediaCommons founder Kathleen Fitzpatrick
3. Back to Basics: How Technology and the Open Source Movement Can Save Science by philosopher and IP expert David Koepsell

Being pathologically nitpicky about details, I tend to refactor my personal homepage very often. To do this, in the past I used to go through tedious FTP sessions or to hack my changes through the shell.

Since I started to work with wikis I realised how effective a wiki engine can be to invisibly power a website. In this post I’d like to share some tips on how I do this.

As I contribute to the development of the open source wiki engine I refer to in the following examples, this is obviously my software of choice (hint). There is however a range of excellent free software you can use to this aim (provided they have good ACL support and allow you to easily modify the look and feel of the output via CSS, as I’ll show later).
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Luis von Ahn (the father of human computation and creator of smart ideas such as reCAPTCHA) has a provocative post in which he contrasts research with the practice of writing academic papers. Spending time writing papers, he argues, fosters redundancy, produces an imbalance between original research and communication effort, and crystallizes research output.
Even worse, it creates spam:

Given the number of people working in computer science and the fact that publishing papers is considered the goal of our work, there is an insane number of papers written every year, the vast majority of which contribute very little (or not at all) to our collective knowledge. This is basically spam. In fact, for many papers (including some of my own), the actual idea of the paper could be stated in one paragraph, but somehow people manage to write 10 pages of it.

The solution, he suggests, is a mix of soft peer review and liquid publication: (more…)

Google is going to release in the coming hours what looks like a revolutionary new entry in the browser arena: Google Chrome. The GUI design and engineering effort behind Google Chrome looks impressive. What is more, Chrome is going to be released under an open source license.

In spite of the sugary rhetoric (“it’s in our interest to make the internet better”– yeah, thanks Google), is this going to be the ultimate Firefox killer? And how will this affect the landscape of open source development altogether?

Precisely two years ago, Shane posted our first mission statement. Simple and ambitious as it was, that post pretty much sums up why we are still here.

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As an ultimate LaTeX addicted, I hate to admit that there is nothing in the TeX universe comparable to the amazingly simple and intuitive revision tracking system that Microsoft implemented in Word. OpenOffice apparently has an equally powerful version control system built in its Writer.

Those of you who ever ventured into the territories of TeX-based collaborative writing certainly know how painful it can be to keep track of changes among several authors in TeX. TeX sources are raw text, so if you need proper diffing or revision tracking you will probably have to resort to some revision control system (such as Subversion or Git). Revision tracking via RCS, however, can be a nightmare to set up and learn to use fluently if you’re not already familiar with some basic notions of software revision control.

After an ugly lot of email exchanged with coauthors to let each other know who was doing what with a manuscript, I decided to search the Web for an answer.

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(Conference announcement via Gerry McKiernan)

Science in the 21st Century: Science, Society, and Information Technology

Waterloo, Ontario, Sep 8-12, 2008.

Times are changing. In the earlier days, we used to go to the library, today we search and archive our papers online. We have collaborations per email, hold telephone seminars, organize virtual networks, write blogs, and make our seminars available on the internet. Without any doubt, these technological developments influence the way science is done, and they also redefine our relation to the society we live in. Information exchange and management, the scientific community, and the society as a whole can be thought of as a triangle of relationships, the mutual interactions in which are becoming increasingly important.

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Following up on Jose’s musings on good and bad keywords for a productivity blog, I came across an interesting tool to visualize the evolution over time of aggregated social bookmarking tags for popular websites. It is actually a pretty old project called Cloudalicious created a few years ago by Terrell Russell (of ClaimID fame).

If you are a web metrics maniac like yours truly, you won’t resist plugging this tool into your favourite websites, so here’s the graph I generated for AcademicProductivity.com:


(source)

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