Month: July 2009

• Finding a fair price for free knowledge – New Scientist
• Scope, Completeness, and Accuracy of Drug Information in Wikipedia — Clauson et al. 42 (12): 1814 — The Annals of Pharmacotherapy
  • “OBJECTIVE: To compare the scope, completeness, and accuracy of drug information in Wikipedia with that of a free, online, traditionally edited database (Medscape Drug Reference [MDR]).”
• The Long Now Blog » Blog Archive » What can go into the National Archives?
  • ““… the National Archives’ technology branch is so antiquated that it cannot process some of the most common software programs. Specifically, the study states, the archives “is still unable to accept Microsoft Word documents and PowerPoint slides.”

    I would like to think this is because those formats are proprietary and saving them actually has all kinds of sticky legal and versioning issues… But it does beg the question, if they are not ingesting Powerpoint and Word files, what are they ingesting?”

• Data and References for Longest Published sDNA – synthesis
  • Growth graph for the longest published synthetic DNA: http://bit.ly/5oaEE Doubles roughly once every two years, with some weaving around. Includes references.
• SocialVibe: raise money for charity by advertising on your blog
  • Does anyone have any experience with SocialVibe? “With the SocialVibe widget, bloggers can donate real money to their charities without the need to dip into their own pockets. Instead, the money is generated from brand advertisers that the bloggers self-select as the sponsor (e.g. Showtime, Sprint, Colgate, Kraft Foods, etc.). To be more specific, once bloggers install the SocialVibe sidebar widget on their WordPress blog, money will be earned for charities every time readers engage with the widget (e.g. rating a Showtime video clip). Bloggers can switch their cause and sponsor as often as they like, and receive regular updates from their charity about goal progress and impact.”
• Arxivsorter
  • Interesting: “Arxivsorter uses the network of co-authorship [on the preprint arXiv] to estimate a proximity between people. It then ranks a list of publications using a friends-of-friends algorithm. “
• China bans virtual cash for real-world trade • The Register
• arXiv author identification service
  • Here’s an example of the new identity service used to track authors on the arXiv. Has both a html and RSS version, so you track the feeds of individual authors. Coverage is incomplete – for my account it’s about 2/3 – but authors can claim their papers.
• arXiv.org help – Author Identifiers
  • “It is a long-term goal of arXiv to accurately identify and disambiguate all authors of all articles in arXiv. Such identification would provide accurate results for queries such as “show me all the other papers by the particular John Smith that wrote this paper”, something that can be done only approximately with text-based searches. It would also permit construction of an author-article graph which is useful for relevance assessment and bibliometric analysis.”
• Edge: THE PHYSICS THAT WE KNOW: A Conversation With Gavin Schmidt
  • Very interesting discussion of climate change, from Gavin Schmidt.
• 6 Steps To Refactoring Rails (for Mere Mortals) | Union Station
  • I found several of these useful, even for non-Rails programmers.
• Is P=NP an Ill Posed Problem? « Gödel’s Lost Letter and P=NP
  • Nice post from Richard Lipton, pointing out that the P vs NP question is more subtle than it at first appears.
• Harold Kroto Interview: Competition and Motives in Science
• GM Media Online
  • Issued 2009-07-01: “GM management has noticed the continuing high trading volume in GM’s common stock at prices in excess of $1. GM management continues to remind investors of its strong belief that there will be no value for the common stockholders in the bankruptcy liquidation process, even under the most optimistic of scenarios. Stockholders of a company in chapter 11 generally receive value only if all claims of the company’s secured and unsecured creditors are fully satisfied. In this case, GM management strongly believes all such claims will not be fully satisfied, leading to its conclusion that GM common stock will have no value. “

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