Category Archives: Science

Science

Cite – U – Like — The revolution hits academia

Today, my heart skipped a beat. In seraching for other blogs on cardiac electrophysiology, I came upon a service called Cite-U-Like.

This is huge. HUGE. This is Del.icio.us for scientific papers. You can watch tags like, “electrophysiology” or “defibrillation.” You can watch authors. You can watch journals. You can add articles just by clicking a little “Add to Cite-U-Like” bookmarklet when you’re looking at the PubMed citation. It all has RSS feeds built in. You can import and export in EndNote and BibTeX formats. I imported our huge lab bibtex file, and the author/editor page is a who’s who of people that our lab has cited since… ever. Those we cite more are displayed in a larger font.

This is the human filter for the techno-literary deluge that is composed of all of the articles published every week in academic journals. In less than a year, I predict it will no longer be necessary to watch tables-of-contents as I do now with the major cardiac electrophysiology journals. It won’t be necessary to pore over so many abstracts, trying to figure out which papers to spend your valuable time reading. The community at large will do this collectively, resulting in less work for everyone. Those people most familiar with a particular lab, author, or subtopic will note the paper’s arrival, bookmark / read / tag it, and alert the rest of the world, or at least the part watching the subject on Cite-U-Like.

I’ve been wishing for something like this for a good six months or more. I can’t believe it already existed.

I’m planning on spending a significant portion of the rest of today figuring out how to use this thing to it’s ultimate ability. Well, what are you waiting for? Go tag your articles!

I’m an INTJ

I know that many people don’t trust the Briggs-Meyers classifications. However, Amanda recently sent me a link to a quick B-M classification quiz and I took it. I thought that I was INTJ from previous tests I’ve taken and I was correct.

What I wasn’t ready for was reading the explanation of INTJ from another page she sent me. It’s like I’ve fulfilled a prophecy since last time I read about it.

Test here, explanations, and specifically the INTJ description of which I spoke.

ADDENDUM 2005-10-22 @ 12:08 CDT : It occurred to me when discussing this with Amanda that the whole Hurricane Katrina debacle brought out a lot of the stuff in that INTJ description, stuff that I’d never had to confront directly before.

Working in the Rudy Lab

Hello from the lab of Dr.Yoram Rudy at Wash U. I’m using a spare desk they had available here. It’s nice to have a stationary, quasi-permanent place to work once more. I’ve been taking care of home GTD (Getting Things Done, for the uninitiated) stuff after breakfast and then heading in once I’m done with all of that. This usually has me here by 09:30 or 10:30 so far. I expect now that I’m on this routine I should get a bit better about that and typically be here by 09:00.

They’ve let me use this desktop machine that was at the desk, but it’s running (blech) Windows XP. Luckily, I was able to set up a VNC desktop on my server (brocktice.com) and I just switch it to fullscreen. I’m really glad I just upgraded the server a few weeks ago. This would have been painful the way it ran before.

The updates have been somewhat infrequent of late, so I’m renewing my focus on keeping you all posted about the fantastically interesting saga that is my life.