Category Archives: Tech

Tech

Finding related articles graphically

When doing a literature search, it’s a good idea to start from a few articles and then (if they are along the lines of what you are looking for) use their references and articles that reference them to expand the search.

One handy way of doing that is with the HubMed Graph Browser. You get to it by finding an article (like mine here) and then selecting the “Graph” link next to “Related” in the line of options at the bottom.

Once you load the TouchGraph, you can see the related articles, change the depth of relationships graphed, zoom in and out, and so on. It can be a nice alternative to the normal related articles list, graphically showing distance and relation.

PubCasts and SciVee

Have you noticed that everything is named in CamelCase these days? Anyway…

I’ve had a couple of conversations with Dr. Rachel Karchin here at the ICM regarding Open Access scientific publishing, and PLoS specifically. Last week, she forwarded an email to me regarding PubCasts on SciVee. (Example here.)

A “PubCast” is basically the same thing as a “SlideCast“. (Have you noticed that everything is named with “Cast” at the end lately, all spawned from the term “Broadcast” and made popular by “PodCast”?) Let’s start with a SlideCast. The idea with a SlideCast is that presentations are not composed merely of speaking or merely of slides. Many people make their presentations in such a way that the slides stand on their own, but these are typically awful presentations. They’re just slide-formatted outline notes. A good presentation requires the visuals and spoken commentary. In a SlideCast, slides with their various animations and transitions are shown with an audio narration by the presenter. PubCasts go one step further and actually include video of the presenter speaking along with the slides. They also preferably include the paper. I think the video is probably not necessary, unless it’s video of the person presenting in front of the actual slides, but that requires green screening or extremely high quality video (for the slides to be readable), both not worth the hassle.

On the whole, I think PubCasts are an excellent idea. A proper scientific presentation should get the audience engaged by getting them emotionally involved, making them see why they should be interested, while a paper gives all of the gory details. In this way, you get both together. How often do you have the paper handy to follow along when watching a scientific presentation? In my experience, pretty much never. People usually present the stuff they’re working on, not the stuff they’ve published (background excepted).

Unfortunately, I don’t have any true Open Access papers yet. My paper that’s supposed to come out next month will not be Open Access, as the fee from the publisher for it was outrageous, and I couldn’t really justify it to my advisor. Nonetheless, I already have a slide deck put together for the paper, and have presented it, so in the near future I’m planning to do a SlideCast of it and post it here on the blog.

Skipping voicemail greetings

I just moved from Sprint to T-Mobile (more on that later). One thing I always liked about sprint voicemail, since my immediate family all uses sprint, is that it has the option to skip the greeting by pressing 1.

It always kind of annoyed me when leaving a voicemail for Amanda that I couldn’t skip her gretting. Thanks to this post, which I should have looked up before, I now know that I can press # to skip the greeting. I added a note at the end of my new voicemail greeting so that people who regularly call me will figure it out. Sprint adds this information to the end of your greeting automatically.

Using Google Notebook as a Lab Notebook

I love Moleskine notebooks, first of all. I have used them as lab notebooks for the last 2-3 years, and they are excellent all around. However, they suffer from the main drawbacks of hard copy anything:

  1. They only exist in one place at a time.
  2. They are not searchable in any modern sense of the word.
  3. Sometimes I can’t read my own writing [not a drawback for everyone].

Before Moleskines I kept my logs on our lab wiki, but that was a bit cumbersome.

Enter Google Notebook. I’ve written about other reasons to use Google Notebook before, and around the time I made that post I started using it as a lab notebook as well, but I wanted to give it a trial run for a couple of months before posting about it.

A couple of months have passed, and here I am. I’ve settled on the following format:

  1. One notebook per month: Each month, I create a new dedicated monthly notebook.
  2. Old notebooks are moved to Google Docs: It is possible to export a notebook directly to Google Docs. This is a more appropriate place for a long-term, large collection of documents, and it keeps the Notebook uncluttered.
  3. One entry per day: I started off with each logged item in its own entry. This became cumbersome. Now, I use one entry per day, with timestamps throughout the entry whenever a new item is added.

In contrast to the Moleskine, or other paper journals, this one is present everywhere that I have internet access, and is completely searchable with Google juice. I’ll post on it again after another few months’ use if I have any further insights or enlightening experiences.

PHPMyGTD “bug free” (ha!)

My pet project is coming along well. Tonight I made a bunch of UI improvements, and eliminated every single bug from my to-fix list.

There are still some more UI things that really should be fixed (like chiding the user for incorrect date input rather than simply adding an item with no due date), but I think I’ll probably have a beta release to post as a downloadable package on SourceForge soon.

Along with that will come a document page showing and explaining the UI.