Biweekly links for 02/02/2009

• Parallel Scripting with Python
• Habitat Chronicles: You can’t tell people anything
  • |We all spend a lot of our time talking to bosses or investors or marketing people or press or friends or other developers. I’m totally convinced that a new idea or a new plan or a new technique is never really understood when you just explain it. People will often think they understand, and they’ll say they understand, but then their actions show that it just ain’t so.”
• Useful Chemistry: The ChemSpider Journal and ChemMantis
  • “The ChemSpider Journal of Chemistry is about to go live. This is not just another chemistry journal. Not only does it boast the option of an open peer-review in addition to Open Access, but it takes us tantalizing closer to the promise of Web3.0: the semantic web. This is achieved by a sophisticated mark-up system generated by ChemMantis. The automatic identification of molecules is impressive enough. But it also marks up functional groups, reactions, spectral data and even biological entities.”
• Overcoming Bias: Academic Ideals
  • “I suspect most who support and affiliate with academia only care a little about academia’s aspiring to intellectual virtue, and little would change if we had more obvious image-reality contradictions. But I’d like to be wrong. Or are we somehow better off under hypocrisy? “
• Cell – New Science, New Features, New Advisors
  • “One issue in particular that we at Cell will be focusing on in 2009 is redefining what constitutes a publishable unit in the age of electronic journals and how we can best present the information content of a scientific article online. The vision in our crystal ball is still blurred, but some key elements are beginning to take shape. The scientific article of the future will no longer be tied to the constraints of a printing press and will take advantage of all the opportunities afforded by the web to introduce a hierarchical rather than linear structure, increased graphical representations, and embedded multimedia. Inherent in our thinking about the scientific article of the future is the need to address the current unchecked growth in the amount of supplemental and supporting material and to identify constructive, well-defined guidelines for what is reasonably and appropriately included in a unit of scientific advance.”
• Big data: shoot first, ask questions later « What You’re Doing Is Rather Desperate
  • “We used to ask questions, then generate the data. Now we generate the data, then think of the questions. “

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