Category Archives: Tech

Tech

PLoS ONE turns 1

I noticed today the the PLoS ONE blog is celebrating the first birthday of PLoS ONE. It sounds like things have been going pretty well for them since last August:

On 1st August last year, PLoS ONE opened its doors for submission and so we have decided to call today our official birthday.

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Most importantly of all though, in the last year, or, at least, in the months from December 2006, we have published 695 pieces of original research. All of that research is, of course, Open Access and all of that research can be annotated by users, discussed by users and for the last few weeks rated by users.

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This potential for interaction is unprecedented in any other scientific publication and it is being used to an extremely high standard.

You should go read the whole thing. They have three birthday wishes:

Whenever you write about a published paper, be it in a journal or on a blog, always provide a link to the freely available version of the paper if one exists.

Whenever you read a paper in PLoS ONE, always rate it before leaving.

And most importantly….

Whenever you write a scientific paper, always, always, always publish it Open Access.

I finally signed up today to get notices about articles in PLoS Computational Biology and PLoS Medicine. (Where’s PLoS Computational Medicine, hmm?)

PLoS Articles from JHU

I’m doing some research for an interview with a faculty member here at the Institute for Computational Medicine who has published an article in PLoS Computational Biology. Along the way, I found out that the Johns Hopkins University is a member of the PLoS consortium, and there’s even an automated page on their site that shows papers published in PLoS journals by Johns Hopkins authors. My quick manual count was about 75 papers since 2005.

It’s pretty clear that with 75 papers in two years from Johns Hopkins alone, PLoS is off to a great start. This can only mean good things for the future of open access publishing in the sciences.

Google Docs and Spreadsheets as a Personal Wiki

I like having a personal wiki. I keep track of my personal projects, various GTD meta-stuff, and even tracking shared expenses with family and roommates. Originally, I used MoinMoin, a very easy-to-edit but powerful wiki clone written in Python. We’ve been using MoinMoin for several years (at least 3, I think) in our lab. It offers a straightforward syntax, ease of uploading attachments, and easy creation of tables (hard to find in wikis). MoinMoin was working pretty nicely, but its main downfall was that it was difficult to create new MoinMoin webs. Thus, if I wanted to have a wiki for my roommates, a wiki for my wife and I, a personal wiki, a wiki for a project with someone, and so on, I had to go through the tricky process of creating those and making them accessible through the web server.

Enter TWiki. TWiki promised to be a more powerful MoinMoin with the capacity for quickly creating new “webs”, or sub-wikis. TWiki’s syntax was unfortunately obtuse. It was possible to make it compatible with MoinMoin’s syntax, which I did, but I never worked all of the kinks out. Furthermore, it was more difficult to attach items in TWiki, and I found the interface very cluttered compared with MoinMoin. While I intended to make even heavier use of my TWiki than my MoinMoin site, in the end I used it less because it was inconvenient. Oh, and it requires you to log in every time you open a new browser window, which bothered the ever-living hell out of me. I hear they’re changing that in some CVS revision. Whatever.

These things are no longer an issue for me. I’m moving to Google Docs and Spreadsheets. It turns out that you can link from one google doc to another directly, which is the basic function of a wiki. Furthermore, google spreadsheets are (compared to wiki software) fantastically easier to use and more powerful. It’s possible to upload word, excel, openoffice spreadsheet, openoffice writer, text, html, and other files directly to google docs. It’s easy to share a google doc with one person, a few people, or even the entire internet, giving either read or read and write access to various people. Google docs can be grouped in multiple folders (tag-like), seen directly ranked by most-recent-edit in iGoogle, and accessed from pretty much anywhere. You can also download google docs in common file formats. I suspect soon complete offline access will be enabled with Gears a la Reader.

It has only been a week, but so far Google Docs as a wiki service is treating me well. Do you use it?

Warming up to the Foleo

When I first saw the press release for Palm’s new Foleo device, I was underwhelmed. If you read any comments on tech sites discussing the Foleo, you’ll see I’m not the only one. Unfortunately, there’s not a lot of info out about the thing. However, after some digging, I’m getting kind of excited.

You see, I don’t know if you’re familiar with the Seat-back and Laptop Gambit. This is where you open your laptop on an airline seat-back tray, and because there’s so little room, the top of your display has to go under the ledge where the tray table normally stows. Now, if the person in front of you suddenly leans their seat back, it could potentially crush or snap your display in half. Not only that, you’re basically screwed as far as getting work done goes at that point. This is a problem even with my 13″ MacBook.

The Foleo is the perfect size. It’s just as big as it needs to be to accommodate the (supposedly?) full-size keyboard. I still want to know whether it’s possible to check email with it over wifi — the press stuff they’re putting out is obsessively tied to syncing with a Treo. However, I saw something today that got me really excited. this article says you can get to a BASH terminal on the Linux-based Foleo.

This has potential!

Bionic hand goes on the market

The reason I got into electrophysiology was because I was excited about the potential for electronic prosthetics. It seems the first real one has come to market. It’s still primitive in comparison to what I envision — a prosthetic that hooks directly up to nerves and sends and receives signals — but I’m sure that will come in time.

Kudos to these guys for making it happen!

One of the questions that has been asked before, and which this underlines, is, “when will artificial hands become superior to natural ones, and would you voluntarily switch in that scenario?” This sort of concept is explored in the various Ghost in the Shell movies, and the TV series “GITS: Stand-Alone Complex”.