- Analyzing mbostock’s queue.js — beautiful walkthrough of a small library, showing the how and why of good coding.
- What Job Would You Hire a Textbook To Do? (Karl Fisch) — notes from a Discovery Education “Beyond the Textbook” event. The issues Karl highlights for textbooks (why digital, etc.) are there for all books as we create this new genre.
- Neutralizing Open Access (Glyn Moody) — the publishers appear to have captured the UK group implementing the UK’s open access policy. At every single step of the way, the RCUK policy has been weakened. From being the best and most progressive in the world, it’s now considerably weaker than policies already in action elsewhere in the world, and hardly represents an increment on their 2006 policy. What’s at stake? Opportunity to do science faster, to provide source access to research for the public, and to redirect back to research the millions of pounds spent on journal subscriptions.
- Turn the Raspberry Pi into a VPN Server (LinuxUser) — One possible scenario for wanting a cheap server that you can leave somewhere is if you have recently moved away from home and would like to be able to easily access all of the devices on the network at home, in a secure manner. This will enable you to send files directly to computers, diagnose problems and other useful things. You’ll also be leaving a powered USB hub connected to the Pi, so that you can tell someone to plug in their flash drive, hard drive etc and put files on it for them. This way, they can simply come and collect it later whenever the transfer has finished.
ENTRIES TAGGED "open access"
Four short links: 2 April 2013
Master Coding, Rethinking Textbooks, Blocking Open Access, VPN from your Pi
Four short links: 7 March 2013
Drug Interactions from Search History, Web Satire, Visible Peer Review, and Rights-based Copyright
- Pharmacovigilance — Signals from The Crowd (PDF) — in the NY Times’ words: Using automated software tools to examine queries by 6 million Internet users taken from Web search logs in 2010, the researchers looked for searches relating to an antidepressant, paroxetine, and a cholestorol lowering drug, pravastatin. They were able to find evidence that the combination of the two drugs caused high blood sugar. (via New York Times)
- The World Wide Web is Moving to AOL — best satire you’ll read this month.
- Review History for Perceptual elements in Penn & Teller’s “Cups and Balls” magic trick — PeerJ makes peer review history available for the articles it publishes. Not only does this build reputation for peer reviewers who want it, but it is also a wonderful insight into how paranoid science must be to defend against mistakes in data interpretation. (The finished paper is fun, too)
- A New Basis for Copyright — NZ’s most technically-literate judge floats an idea for how copyright might be reimagined in a more useful way for the modern age by considering it in terms of human rights. Perhaps there should be consideration of a new copyright model that recognises content user rights against a backdrop of the right to receive and impart information and a truly balanced approach to information and expression that recognises that ideas expressed are building blocks for new ideas. Underpinning this must be a recognition on the part of content owners that the properties of new technologies dictate our responses, our behaviours, our values and our ways of thinking. These should not be seen as a threat but an opportunity. It cannot be a one-way street with traffic heading only in the direction dictated by content owners.
Four short links: 5 March 2013
Video Magnification Code, Copyright MOOC, Open Access Cost-Effectiveness, and SCADA Security (Sucks)
- Eulerian Video Magnification — papers and the MatLab source code for that amazing effect of exaggerating small changes in file. (*This work is patent pending)
- CopyrightX — MOOC on current law of copyright and the ongoing debates concerning how that law should be reformed. Through a combination of pre-recorded lectures, live webcasts, and weekly online seminars, participants in the course will examine and assess the ways in which law seeks to stimulate and regulate creative expression. (via BoingBoing)
- Cost Effectiveness for Open Access Journals — This plot reveals the prestige (Article Influence score) and publication charges for open access journals.
- Results of SANS SCADA Survey 2013 (PDF) — Unfortunately, at this time they seem unable to monitor the PLCs, terminal units and connections to field equipment due to lack of native security in the control systems themselves. (via InfoSecIsland)
Four short links: 28 February 2013
Equity of Access, Smartphone Rare Earths, Nanoquadrocopter, and Macmillan Expands in Open Science
- Myth of the Free Internet (The Atlantic) — equity of access is an important issue, but this good point is marred by hanging it off the problematic (beer? speech? downloads?) “free”. I’m on the council of InternetNZ whose mission is to protect and promote the open and uncaptureable Internet. (A concept so good we had to make up a word for it)
- Periodic Table of the SmartPhone (PDF, big) — from Scientific American article on Rare Earth Minerals in the Smartphone comes a link to this neat infographic showing where rare earth elements are used in the iPhone. (via Om Malik)
- CrazyFlie Nano Preorders — 19g, 9cm x 9cm, 20min charge time for 7m flight time on this nano-quadrocopter. (via Wired)
- Changing Scientific Publishing (The Economist) — Nature buys an alternative journal publisher (30 titles in 14 scientific fields), which comes with an 80k-member social network for scientists. Macmillan are a clever bunch. (O’Reilly runs Science Foo Camp with Macmillan’s Digital Sciences and Google)
White House moves to increase public access to scientific research online
More federally funded research and data will be made freely available to the public online.
Today, the White House responded to a We The People e-petition that asked for free online access to taxpayer-funded research.
As part of the response, John Holdren, the director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, released a memorandum today directing agencies with “more…
Four short links: 22 October 2012
JSON Tool, Technology Arts, Pentesting Kit, and Open Access Week
- jq — command-line tool for JSON data.
- GAFFTA — Gray Area Foundation For The Arts. Non-profit running workshops and building projects around technology-driven arts. (via Roger Dennis)
- Power Pwn — looks like a power strip, is actually chock-full of pen-testing tools, WiFi, bluetooth, and GSM. Beautifully evil. (via Jim Stogdill)
- Open Access Week — this week is Open Access week, raising awareness of the value of ubiquitous access to scientific publishing. (via Fabiana Kubke)
Mining the astronomical literature
A clever data project shows the promise of open and freely accessible academic literature.
There is a huge debate right now about making academic literature freely accessible and moving toward open access. But what would be possible if people stopped talking about it and just dug in and got on with it?
NASA’s Astrophysics Data System (ADS), hosted by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory…
The risks and rewards of a health data commons
John Wilbanks on health data donation, contextual privacy, and open networks.
As I wrote earlier this year in an ebook on data for the public good, while the idea of data as a currency is still in its infancy, it’s important to think about where the future is taking us and our personal data.
If the Obama administration’s smart disclosure initiatives gather steam, more citizens will be able…
Four short links: 30 May 2012
CC-Licensed Museum, Bye Bye API, Socket Server, and Free Taxpayer-Funded Research NOW!
- Wide Open Future of the Art Museum (TED) — text of an interview with curator at the Walters Art Museum about CC-licensing content: reasons for it, value to society, value to the institution. What I say in a very abbreviated form in my talk is that people go to the Louvre because they’ve seen the Mona Lisa; the reason people might not be going to an institution is because they don’t know what’s in your institution. (via Carl Malamud)
- Twitter Resiles From API-Driven Site (Twitter) — performance was the reason to return to server-assembled pages, vs their previous “client makes API calls and assembles the page itself”.
- Stripe Einhorn — language-independent shared socket manager. Einhorn makes it easy to have multiple instances of an application server listen on the same port. You can also seamlessly restart your workers without dropping any requests. Einhorn requires minimal application-level support, making it easy to use with an existing project.
- Petition the Whitehouse For Access to Taxpayer-Funded Research (Whitehouse) — We believe in the power of the Internet to foster innovation, research, and education. Requiring the published results of taxpayer-funded research to be posted on the Internet in human and machine readable form would provide access to patients and caregivers, students and their teachers, researchers, entrepreneurs, and other taxpayers who paid for the research. Expanding access would speed the research process and increase the return on our investment in scientific research. Sign this and spread the word: it’s time to end the insanity of hiding away research to protect a handful of publishers’ eighteenth century business models.
Publishing News: Tor sets content free
A major publisher drops DRM, Harvard opens up, and a Reuters blogger sparks a news-for-sale debate.
Macmillan's imprints under publisher Tom Doherty Associates will be DRM-free come July, Harvard opens access to its data and research, and Felix Salmon suggests the NYT sell its scoops to hedge funds.
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