• Contacts in the Browser – Firefox addon in pre-alpha that might one day provide a virtual Rolodex for all your online contacts and friends
• When do I sleep? – You can find out when twitter users are least active and infer from that their sleeping patterns. Apparently, I'm most likely to be asleep between 10pm and 6am. Probably ignores daylight saving somehow as I reckon on 11-12pm to 7am most nights. 7.5 hours max.
• Stop ACTA Now! – ACTA is being secretly negotiated by the governments of the US, the EC, Japan, Switzerland, Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, Canada, and Mexico. This isn't just about stamping out illegal downloads and fake Rolex watches, this is about your freedom of speech and your privacy. Join Stop ACTA Now! Spread the word…
• URL shorteners are slowing down the web – Facebook's FB.me is a real sluggard when it comes to opening web pages, goo.gl is fastest and has the bestest uptime. bit.ly takes twice as long as goo.gl but that's pretty average for most of these tools.
• Internet Explorer 9 – For those in organizations locked in with IE6 (because of ignorant/tight-fisted IT policy), the news that a preview of IE9 is now out and is stripped down, rough and ready, and faster will not be welcome news. But, IE9 will not run on XP.
• Google Chrome downloads files before user confirmation – Odd behavior in the latest version of the developer edition of the Google Chrome web browser

Post from: David Bradley's Sciencetext Tech Talk

Sleepy twits, ACTA alarm, developing Chrome

• The truth about internet profiles – On the internet everyone knows you're a dog…and what breed, thanks to Facebook, MySpace, etc
• It’s as if the Hi-Fi nuts never existed – Interesting take, by William Weir, on my recent article about the evolution and de-evolution of hi-fi
• Completely clear Internet Explorer web history – A quick howto on clearing history in your browser, for IE users.
• Get your Office 2010 Upgrade Even if you are Late – Frustrated having bought 2007 only to see 2010 released. Here's a hack to make the switch
• Oscar Win Boosts Hurt Locker’s Piracy Numbers – Not a surprise, really, more people want to see The Hurt Locker following its Oscar wins…
• Foiling an attack on General Relativity – Einstein won't give up so easily, despite dark matter and dark energy attacks
• Odd Windows Crash Alerts – Windows crashes on ATMs, cars, vending machines, kiosks, taxi meters, medical imaging devices, advertising display boards

Post from: David Bradley's Sciencetext Tech Talk

Net profile, hi-fi nuts, and general relativity

• Lessons from Toyota: Has software become too complex? – It's not that automotive software is more complex than a fighter plane (which has 100 times fewer lines of computer code), it's just that it's bloated. Sounds like an inefficient coding issue to me. It's time someone reverse engineered, stripped out the garbage and recompiled it. Maybe then we'd see an end to all this accelerating-braking problems.
• 22.5 and him – 44 chromosomes instead of 46 didn’t cause problems – Apparently, having conjoined chromosomes so that it appeared as if the patient had 44 rather than the usual 46 chromosomes didn't lead to abnormalities or health issues. Quite bizarre.
• Export email addresses of all your Facebook friends – Greasemonkey scripts that scrape Facebook could get you banned. But export to Yahoo! is a legitimate application. Once in Yahoo you can export again to applications you actually use like LinkedIn, GMail, Thunderbird
• Jean Frechet takes on a new role – One of the earliest interviewees of my science writing career takes on a new role at KAUST in Saudi Arabia
• Effectiveness and safety of baclofen in treating alcoholism – Could a 40-year old anti-inflammatory drug (also a GABA agonist)be the treatment of choice for alcoholism and dependency? What's its safety profile like? Would this be like giving methadone to recovering heroin addicts and so bring its own problems?
• cl1p.net – The internet clipboard – Does what it says on the tin, create a URL, paste in what you want, share the URL with your friends. No registration needed for basic functionality. Works like a clipboard between computers on the net.
• Facebook Dashboard Widget – This little Wordpress widget lets you pull in your Facebook feeds into your Wordpress dashboard…now why would you want to do that? Well, perhaps Facebook is banned where you are, but your wordpress domain isn't…you fill in the gaps!

Post from: David Bradley's Sciencetext Tech Talk

Toyota, chromosomes, and greasemonkey

I’ve been a professional science writer and editor since 1989, and have been designing and running websites as part of that since 1996. I’ve seen a lot of novelties come and go on the web. Indeed, the current fashion for online communities is nothing new. Way back when, there were bulletin boards, AOL, CompuServe, the US university freenet sites… Then there were the likes of BioMedNet and ChemWeb for the science community on which I worked back in the late 1990s to early 2000s. The fashion for Facebook and the trend for Twitter really are nothing new. And one sees the same business arguments, tips, and tricks being trotted out by the latest mavens and gurus about how to make the most of them. As if those of us who were there before the dot.com bubble and burst weren’t already trying that, and the generations before selling door to door and building business empires.

Nothing new under the sun, as the man said.

It’s probably a sign of getting older, that one begins to recognize that fashions are cyclical. Today’s novel model is simply yesterday’s innovation re-hashed, and will be tomorrow’s great advance. To coin another cliché, history repeats itself, but if one is to succeed, one has to recognize that it not only repeats itself but that you should learn its lessons rather than making the same mistakes again.

So, in terms of near history, there were invaluable lessons to be learned after the dot.com bubble burst. Those companies that were nothing more than scummy froth floating on the water’s edge were washed away, those that were the tide itself survived and many (you can fill in the names) ride the waves again and again.

Anyway, back to the successful business sells notion. Running a business website, blog, Facebook fan page etc builds on a noble tradition of marketing. But, it is worth understanding that these devices may be fun and informative, but they are also tools. And tools are for doing work. So, take a close look at your online activity, is it using up a disproportionate amount of employees’ and your time for no gain? Is it just shoreline froth or is a business tsunami?

I recently took a long, hard look at my main science communication site – Sciencebase.com – and realized that while it was certainly fun to do and was hopefully informative for readers, it was not quite pulling its weight in terms of “selling” my services as a science writer. A simple addition to the top right of the site changed all that. The addition read: All commissions: contact David Bradley on david.bradley@ sciencebase.com and since adding it, at the beginning of the year several new clients have approached me requesting my words for a fee. It is hard to tell whether they would have recognized the primary purpose of the Sciencebase site otherwise, maybe they would. But, I think the call to arms made a difference as there were more new offers of work since the addition than there had been in the previous year. (Of course, it may all be down to the world recession receding, speaking of tides).

However, I was reading a business research paper by David Smallman, an international business advisor at Pathfinder Team Consulting in Royston, UK, that seems to echo what I’ve been trying to say in this post. The title of his paper is “Without instructions or orders, there is no business” and in it, Smallman suggests that, “it is easy to forget that the first principle of any business is to get a client to buy the firm’s services or products.” He discusses this state of forgetfulness more in the context of legal obligations and regulatory pressures, but I think it applies equally to the countless other distractions mentioned above, the conferences, the websites, the social media.

Wallman suggests that, “the next time you are in a meeting at your place of business ask yourself ‘Does this discussion move the firm any nearer ensuring that the goods, products or services on offer are what the client’s want, when they want them and at the right price?’” Substitute, the word “meeting” in that statement for website, blog, social media program, SEO effort, and you begin to see the paradox. Fundamentally, if you’re running a business, you have to decide whether the peripheral ephemera are helping you close transactions, whether they are letting you ride the wave or whether they’re just more scummy froth.

David Smallman (2010). Without instructions or orders, there is no business Int. J. Liability and Scientific Enquiry, 3 (3), 179-182

Post from: David Bradley's Sciencetext Tech Talk

Are you scummy froth or riding the business waves?

• Rapportive displaces Google Mail ads with contact info – Neat browser add-on that replaces useless GMail ads with useful contact details on a per email basis
• Friday Weird Science: Do Your Balls Hang Low? : Neurotopia – Most men have more than the average number of testicles
• Atheist guilty over cartoons left at Liverpool airport – This is disgraceful. Would he have been criminalised for drawing rude cartoons of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs? Fairy tales just the same. Back door blasphemy laws are no joke. Next they'll be loading up the ducking stools and getting the kindling ready…
• Top Members in Science – Most influential scientific twitter users, do give Sciencebase a thumbs up, currently very close to the top!
• Create your own ‘free’ Slingbox using Skype – Simple howto involves setting your PC's tv tuner card as the video input for Skype. You'll need a second Skype account and remote access to your PC, but that's easy to do and you'll be able to watch your TV tuner output via a Skype window from anywhere you can connect.
• Scientia Pro Publica 22 – Reciprocal Space – Structured and unstructured observations from around the scientific blogosphere
• MS: Be Careful With Those Function Keys – Windows web users shouldn't be tricked into clicking F1 function key when a malicious website prompts them to (applies to IE6!!!, 7, and

Post from: David Bradley's Sciencetext Tech Talk

Rapportive, balls, and criminal cartoons

• Petition to establish "hella-" as the SI prefix for 10^27 – kilo, mega, milli, nano, yotta, yocto…hella?
• WinBootInfo – Does your Windows machine take an age to boot up? This utility will let you reveal the culprit. You can then use AutoRuns or a similar app to disable or tweat startups.
• Google Person Finder for Chile Earthquake – Google has sadly been forced to create yet another person finder, this time in the wake of the devastating Chile earthquake
• MRI on the ball – Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) can be used to evaluate the staging, or progression, of testicular cancer, and so reduce the need for surgical intervention for some men.
• Bloom Box revolution? – The Bloom Box is not revolutionary…fuel cells were invited by 19th Century scientists. It might help us get greener but not at almost $1m a unit…$1000 perhaps…
• One for the chemists – Applications of Olefin Metathesis Catalysts – Applications of olefin metathesis catalysts, lecture series, Honeywell Nobel Interactive Studio. Hat tip to Simon Frantz
• Hiding the honeypots – Is it possible to hide honeypot traps from botnet drones? Probably not. Yet another security blanket torn to shreds.
• So…does chiropractic work or is it all bogus? – The GCC’s ‘independent’ review of the effectiveness of chiropractic weighs up the evidence and suggests that spinal manipulation may have some positive effects on certain types of back pain but not asthma, PMS or infantile cholic.
• An emotion detector for baby – Just round the corner, a baby monitor that can tell what your baby is feeling based on a mathematical analysis of its crying. Next step – iPhone app that sends you a text message when you're child is in pain
• English libel law is an ass – In light of the BCA vs Singh libel case, is it any wonder Brits refer to the law as an ass, let's hope the judges prove us wrong and show us the old donkey's bettter side: strong, stubborn, resilient, intelligent!

Post from: David Bradley's Sciencetext Tech Talk

Hella Chile Windows

Only problem I have with Foxit is that it doesn’t always leave spaces between words when one copies from a PDF to paste into Word or an email, for instance, which is a real pain. On those occasions I usually end up having to send the PDF as an attachment to my Google Mail address and then open it as a Google document in the email online. It works, but that’s a long-winded approach.

Creating PDFs is another matter. Word 2007 does it inline and win2pdf lets you add a virtual printer to your Windows machine that lets you distill any document, page, image into a PDF. There are lots of solutions out there.

New on the scene is Nuance PDF, which solves various problems. If you want to convert a PDF file to Word, Excel, RTF or WordPerfect, it can do that for you “in the cloud”. NuancePDF.com lets you turn PDF files into fully formatted Word and Excel files.

Have you tried it? How does it compare to the conventional tools and to Google conversion within GMail/Docs?

Other posts on PDF

• Nuance’s bold PDF reader goes free (download.cnet.com)
• Nuance PDF Reader Can Convert Files Accurately (labnol.org)
• Extracting content from PDF files (macworld.com)
• How to edit Pdf files free without Adobe Acrobat (techmadly.com)
• Sumatra 1.0 is a Blazing Fast Replacement for Adobe Reader [Downloads] (lifehacker.com)
• Rogue PDFs Behind 80% of Exploits In Q4 ‘09 (it.slashdot.org)

Post from: David Bradley's Sciencetext Tech Talk

PDF conversion

• Paracetamol protects against kidney failure after muscle injury – Could paracetamol (acetaminophen) be used to save lives after serious injury or over-intensive exercise by protecting the kidneys from toxic free radicals release by muscles into the blood following trauma? Might be especially useful after crushing injuries following earthquake and other natural disaster.
• Speak to the eerie silence! – Send a message into the ether (Penguin Books competition)
• Naps Can Seriously Improve All-Day Learning Abilities – Get some daytime kip, learn better
• Just what is chemical philosophy? – Elemental discoveries and the philosophy of chemistry a review of the work of Eric Scerri
• How to Go Google-Free on the Web – Is it time to terminate Google? It probably know more about you than the government, do you really want it to rule your life?
• Blogging food – Why do so many bloggers insist on displaying pictures of the food they’ve eaten at restaurants even when they’re not food blogs? Seems to be a common phenomenon on a lot of techie sites. It just gives me indigestion.
• ShadyURL – Don’t shorten your URLs…make them shady looking instead
• Truly random numbers – A new flip-flop approach to generating random numbers is almost 20 times more effective than previous approaches. Could be used to improve climate change and economic models as well as boosting internet security.
• ZeuS: ‘A Virus Known as Botnet’ – By Zeus, nothing new under the sun when it comes to zombie botnet computers…despite the media scaremongering.
• Twitter Chats – Twitter chats are hashtag linked regular discussions on given topics, more than 100 of them including #hcsmeu

Post from: David Bradley's Sciencetext Tech Talk

Tech talk links

Wikipedia is a user-produced online encyclopedia and, since its inception in 2001, has grown to be one of the main resources for finding factual information on the Internet.

Wikipedia is free, web-based, collaborative, and multilingual. Its name is a portmanteau of the words wiki (a technology for creating collaborative websites, from the Hawaiian word wiki, meaning “quick”) and encyclopedia. The site’s 14 million articles (3.1 million in English) have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world, and almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the site.

Unfortunately, Wikipedia has not turned out to be the perfect alternative to traditional sources of facts. It is often criticized for inaccuracies, bias and vandalism of high-profile pages. In an effort to address such problems, the site’s owners are testing new rules that still allow contributors to write what they want, but require an experienced and registered site volunteer to verify any edits a user may make. Flagged revisions of specific prominent pages, such as those of politicians, including President Obama, and celebrities such as Michael Jackson and Britney Spears are then published only if verified by a trusted member of the Wikipedia community. A new tool can reveal flagged pages. Ultimately, the aim is to extend the rules to the Wikipedia pages for every living person.

Sharman Lichtenstein and Craig Parker of the School of Information Systems, at Deakin University, Burwood, Australia suggest that this approach will not result in any significant improvement to the “information quality” on Wikipedia.

First, they say, it will only address the issue of vandalism and, if successful, only on a small selection of English Wikipedia articles selected by non-experts who are not esteemed experts. It may become more useful if it is applied to all Wikipedia content as in the case of the German Wikipedia, however we cannot see this happening in North America which favors free speech and appears to favor unrestricted content except in extreme cases.

Secondly, it will not address the information quality issues which are caused by having non-traditional (lay) experts editing content. The information quality of Wikipedia will still depend entirely on the knowledge and expertise of the volunteer “trusted” editors and administrators who oversee the flagging. There will be no change in this regard and therefore little improvement in information quality. This is an aspect of which the researchers are particularly critical in their paper.

Thirdly, the Wikipedia policy changes will not address the information quality problems arising due to inexperienced editors (including administrators and trusted editors) who rely upon published sources that contain incorrect information. The existing editorial policies in the English Wikipedia means that these false published sources would still be viewed as more credible than the unpublished expertise of traditional experts. Traditional experts can refute the published sources based on their expertise.

Finally, the new approach does not address the issue of incomplete articles, unless the flagging approach is used across all content Wikipedia and adopts a policy to ensure that the completeness of articles is verified before they are made public.

The recent Wikipedia changes, and proposed changes currently being trialed, do not alter the key problems facing Wikipedia, other than in addressing vandalism.

Lichtenstein and Parker suggest that a flagging system must be adopted for all pages in the English Wikipedia. This system would require all article content to be verified and signed off by a recognized traditional expert, as in the traditional peer review process. This would essentially validate Wikipedia in an equivalent way to conventional published encyclopedias.

“A rigorous, rather than evolutionary, approach to the development of new policies and guidelines is required,” the researchers conclude. “The policies and guidelines should align more closely with conventional encyclopedia publication policies.”

Related research paper from Lichtenstein and Parker in which they focus on additional aspects of Wikipedia:

Lichtenstein, S., & Parker, C. (2009). Wikipedia model for collective intelligence: a review of information quality International Journal of Knowledge and Learning, 5 (3/4) DOI: 10.1504/IJKL.2009.031199

Post from: David Bradley's Sciencetext Tech Talk

How to fix Wikipedia

• Aardvark – Aardvark is a Q&A service akin to the old 90s question and answer expert sites and a bit like Yahoo answers but with social network connectivity. It just got bought by Google for a mere $50m
• Swan on Sigma DC 18-200mm 1:3.5-6.3 – Swan shot with Sigma lens
• What The Internet Knows About You – Find out what anyone can find out about you through your browser history, and no, No Script and disabling java don't make a difference. There is a solution, however!
• Thoughts on the periodic table – Periodic thinking
• Rootkit May Be Culprit in Recent Windows Crashes – There are indications that the system crashes and the dreaded blue screen of death (BSoD) that many Microsoft Windows users reported suffering after installing this week’s batch of security updates may be caused at least in part by malware infestations on the affected machines.
• Zusammen – A blog about Chemistry, the Web, and Collaboration from Metamolecular – A blog about chemistry, the web, and collaboration from metamolecular
• ScienceDirect – Materials Today : Gen F Scientists – Scientists using social media and lots of social media sites for scientists
• Critical Security Update for Adobe Flash Player – Adobe has been forced to release yet another security patch for Flash player. So irritating.
• Blog Like a Cartoonist – Six Stunning Secrets to Help You Break Through Bloggers Block –
• WARNING: Google Buzz Has A Huge Privacy Flaw – If you don't want all and sundry knowing exactly who you follow then follow the instructions to quickly hide that info.

Post from: David Bradley's Sciencetext Tech Talk

Bookmarks for February 11th through February 18th