Biweekly links for 08/21/2009

• Avatar
  • First trailer for the new James Cameron film.
• Public Library of Science announces new initiative for sharing influenza research
  • “PLoS is launching PLoS Currents (Beta) — a new and experimental website for the rapid communication of research results and ideas. In response to the recent worldwide H1N1 influenza outbreak, the first PLoS Currents research theme is influenza.

    PLoS Currents: Influenza, which we are launching today, is built on three key components: a small expert research community that PLoS is working with to run the website; Google Knol with new features that allow content to be gathered together in collections after being vetted by expert moderators; and a new, independent database at the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) called Rapid Research Notes, where research targeted for rapid communication, such as the content in PLoS Currents: Influenza will be freely and permanently accessible. To ensure that researchers are properly credited for their work, PLoS Currents content will also be given a unique identifier by the NCBI so that it is citable.”

• Nicholas Carr’s Blog: Close down the schools!
• Cosma Shalizi’s course on Data Mining
  • Lecture notes included. I wish I’d looked at these earlier – the bits I’ve read are very informative.
• LogiLogi: Philosophy beyond the paper
  • Thoughtful and stimulating discussion of how philosophy might benefit from the introduction of new online tools.
• Science magazine and JoVE announce scientific-video partnership
  • “Science, the journal of scientific research, news, and commentary published by The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and JoVE, the scientific video journal, announced that they have entered into a partnership for joint production and publication of scientific videos online. The purpose of the partnership is to enhance scientific articles published in Science through video demonstrations of experimental techniques.

    Under the partnership, which is currently in its pilot phase, Science will select papers suitable for the video enhancement, and will identify author groups willing to help shape the video demonstrations. JoVE will then work with the authors to create the actual demonstrations, using the company’s platform for geographically distributed video-production. According to Stewart Wills, Online Editor at Science, direct, in-article video demonstrations should increase the value of Science research to its main audience, working scientists and students. “

• The definitive, two-part answer to “is data journalism?” | Holovaty.com
  • “It’s a hot topic among journalists right now: Is data journalism? Is it journalism to publish a raw database? Here, at last, is the definitive, two-part answer:

    1. Who cares?

    2. I hope my competitors waste their time arguing about this as long as possible.”

• Sharing with Google Groups
  • Potentially rather handy: you can share stuff on Google with entire groups: “As more and more businesses and organizations “go Google,” we find that many of the features we develop based on feedback from large enterprises end up benefiting all of our users. We recently rolled out improvements to the way Google Groups interacts with several of our applications. Now, sharing calendars, sites and documents with multiple people is easy — instead of adding people one at a time, you can simply share with an entire Google Group.”
• Official Google Research Blog: On the predictability of Search Trends
  • “As we see that many of the search trends are predictable, we are introducing today a new forecasting feature in Insights for Search, along with a new version of the product. The forecasting feature is applied to queries which are identified as predictable (see, for instance, basketball or the trends in the Automotive category) and then shown as an extrapolation of the historical trends and search patterns.”

Click here for all of my del.icio.us bookmarks.