Jul 26
Announcements, Reading, Social Media, Web 2.0
10

RWW on Elsevier’s Prototype: Is This The Scientific Article of the Future?

Looks like Elsevier experiments on how to present scientific papers are starting to get coverage  (on RWW no less)Elsevier1.

The basic novelty here is real time search, but everything is peppered with other webby things like comments and AJAX.

The key features of the concept are here, and one can play with working prototypes. They are asking for feedback. I must say this is head and shoulders over reading a pdf on the screen. As highlights: (1) A figure that contains clickable areas so that it can be used as a navigation mechanism to directly access specific sub-sections of the results and figures, (2) references are clustered by sections of the paper they appeared in, and hot-linked.

However, it’s not clear if this kind of effort is just cosmetic or actually an important change. From the RWW article:

Some parts of the available prototypes are interesting but opinion in the scientific community seems split. Is this ground-breaking stuff or yesterday’s news repackaged by another industry threatened by the web? That depends on who you ask.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Announcements, Reading, Social Media, Web 2.0
Jul 06
Announcements, Blog, e-Science, Social Media, Socializing, Web 2.0
4

Sharing tiny nuggets of wisdom with twitter: use the #AcaProd hashtag

We want anyone to be able to contribute to ap.com. One way to do this is to leave blog posts open (but with a reviewtwitter-logo-large queue). We proposed this method here, but not many people seem to be making use of it.

Maybe writing a blog post is too time consuming, and the barrier of entry is too high. An easy solution is microblogging: services like twitter let you share a tiny bit of something interesting you found (with a link), and anyone following you will receive it.

The thing with microblogging is that it doesn’t take much effort to share. Many people (including me) thought it was silly at first, but now it’s mainstream.

Since twitter provides real-time search you can find what people talk about right now. If you want to monitor a special topic, chances are someone came up with a unique way of identify the topic. A spontaneous way of organizing information outside the ‘follows’ structure emerged: the hashtag. These are terms that start with #, example: #iranelection. We have set up #AcaProd for academicproductivity. If you have an idea, or read something outstanding that you would like to share with us, just tweet about it and add #AcaProd somewhere in the 140 characters. Your tweet then is easily found by anyone interested in the topic. We will display all tweets in our front page too.

I found myself sharing a lot of interesting stuff over twitter, and much more often than through a blog, so I have a good feeling about this.

Of course, you should keep sending ideas/suggestions/complaints using our email, blog@academicproductivity.com

Filed Under: Announcements, Blog, e-Science, Social Media, Socializing, Web 2.0
Jun 30
Announcements, Software, Writing
2

Speed up your writing with an autocompleter: Comfort typing

May, 2007, we had a post on using an autocompleter to improve writing speed/save keystrokes. I recommended intellicomplete, even though it was abandonware even then.

Moving to more modern OSs (I’m running windows server 2008 64-bit), it simply didn’t work anymore. Plus it never worked well with Firefox or thunderbird. Anyway, I’ve found a much better replacement: Comfort type. It was hard to find, because reading the site, it’s not clear that it can do this kind of job. Looks like this feature is just one more for the author… which is quite impressive since it costs $20, half of what intellicomplete costed.

The main advantages over intellicomplete are:

  • Multi-language support. This is killer, you can switch quickly with a shortcut, and as it learns it places words in different dictionaries
  • It works on More OSs and applications.
  • It also gives typewriter-like auditive feedback, which somehow makes me write more. Subconsciously, my body knows that if you don’t get the typing sound, you must be doing something passive. It’s also helpful to let people on the phone with you know when you are typing (so they don’t think an intimidating silence just started)
  • It detects caret on more applications. Not very well on Tunderbird/Frefox, but better than anything else I’ve tried

The problems I can see right now are:

  • It doesn’t complete with tab; only numbers, or enter. Enter can be a bit of a pain. This doesn’t bother me much because my tab finger was getting too much work anyway.
  • Sometimes is not as fast as I’d like. When it completes a word, you can see it going back and retype what you wanted.
  • Sometimes it hangs, but resetting it works.

What is interesting about this application is that it replaces quite a few others. For me, it replaces: Keepass (or any Password Manager) because it has encryption, and Autohotkey (for some basic templates).

Important: it doesn’t work with java applications. Could be a deal breaker. It even works when I use skype.

Filed Under: Announcements, Software, Writing
Dec 11
Announcements
16

Nature (the journal) is pro-cognitive-enhancing drugs

Nature has published a paper that advocates the use of cognitive-enhancing drugs: "Towards responsible use of cognitive-enhancing drugs by the healthy"

The comments on Nature’s opinion forum are varied, but in general people seems to be against:

"How dare they have the audacity to suggest such a thing?! The solution to the increasing “unnaturalness” in human society is not to simply shrug, say “why stop at homes, clothes, etc” as the authors suggest, and start drugging up otherwise healthy adults! "

As a scientist I do not relish my peers or younger colleagues taking such drugs for the extra edge in career success. I do not relish getting “confidential” advice from a tenure review committee member that next time I should try taking a daily dose of “X”.

We have talked about this before, and I thought that seeing such a strong, influential outlet taking positions on it (by publishing a paper; one could argue that the publisher doesn’t really need to share views with what it published, but still) is important enough to post.

Filed Under: Announcements
Nov 24
Announcements, Time management
16

Thinking on what you will do after retirement? Think again!

If you are like most people in the academia, you place a lot of value on security and benefits. You also have great plans for that day when you retire and have time to… well, have a life :) .

Jack Cheng has a superb post on how much you can expect to live and use that free time you have earned:

Picture an average American who decides to stop working at the age of 65. Got it? Now guess how many years he’ll have to enjoy his post-retirement before he passes away.

I’ve asked this to a bunch of friends and coworkers over the last two weeks. I’ve heard answers like “15-20 years” or at the very least, 10 years. But none of those is even close.

The actual answer? 18 months.

Scary. Being a workoholic doesn’t sound that good. Sorry to post this in a productivity blog :)

Filed Under: Announcements, Time management
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