Monthly Archives: July 2007

Links for 2007 07 07

Links for 2007 07 05

The “nature”al social network for researchers

After reading this article on the Guardian introducing it as the Facebook for professors, postdocs and PhDers in the sciences, I decided to spend some minutes and creating an identity on Nature Network. Here is my profile on Nature Network.The goal is to get people from different institutions and different research fields to talk to one another about the thing they have in common: a love of science. Check the flash quick tour video.
The article quotes Frank Norman saying

One of the nice things is the absence of markers to indicate status. When you read a contribution, you don’t know whether it is from a professor or a student, you just judge it by whether it makes sense.

It is interesting how Guardian stresses this “democratic” aspect of the Web, very wikipedian, very everyone-is-an-expert. It obviously totally resonates with me. In fact, on the other hand of the scope

One lecturer, who does not want to be named, says the scientific community is concerned that Nature Network and other Facebook-style academic communications could be “dangerous” because comments are not peer-reviewed.

Interestingly the more everything we do becomes digital, the more it seems everyone is concerned in measuring it:

Dr Timo Hannay, director of web publishing at Nature Publishing Group, predicts that scientists who post comments, blogs and data from experiments on sites like Nature Network will eventually be allowed to count these as part of their research output. “There should be a way of measuring the impact of a scientist who posts comments on a site like Nature Network. These could be added to their publishing record”.

And Matt Brown adds

Our vision for Nature Network is that every scientist in the world will have a personal profile on the site. Likeminded people and potential collaborators could then be easily found through a tagging system. Ideas can be discussed in the forums. Who knows, many years from now, traditional activities such as writing an academic paper could be peer-reviewed online.

And the article closes with the usual oh-gosh-some-more-content-to-monitor information overload fear:

Some see it another way. “If sites like these can increase awareness of research and provide easier ways to forge collaborative links, that is good,” says Brown. “If they provide more text that needs to be read, digested and responded to, that might not be so good.

By the way, you can check my profile on Nature Network and, if you are in there as well and read this, connect to me, friend me, or do how-they-call-it-on-Nature to me. I’m waiting. Somehow.

UPDATE: I created a group called “Trust Research” on Nature. Join in.

New Fiat 500

The new Fiat 500 is available! It was presented yesterday in Torino. I love this advertisement.

UPDATE Aug 19,2007. In order to make justice to the comments of Martina, I embed a mashup of the fiat ad. This is for the v-day: on September 8, 2007, Italians will say to Italian politicians “Enough is enough”. It will be an interesting day.

I think I’ll embed also a video from the recent history of Italy just as a reminder: April 30, 1993, Friday, 18.00. A mob gathered in largo Febo in front of the hotel Raphael waiting for Craxi. When he exits, people start throwing at him coins and other objects. Craxi was one of the biggest politicians in Italy and one of the biggest thieves in Italy.

Medieval christian politician and failed censorship

UPDATE: the medieve tried to censor Luca Volonte’ in his domain lucavolonte.eu, but Luca Volonte’ is stronger than censorship and reappeared at luca-volonte.com. Once more, let us yell all together: Liberte’, Egalite’, Volonte’.
Luca Volonte’, a narrow minded Italian politician, leader of the Christian Democratic Party, tried to censor the videogame “Operation: Pedopriest” by MolleIndustria. Paradoxically the christians politicians are exploiting a law against pedophilia to ban a satirical game that point the finger to child abuses committed within the clergy. I understand Italy is the last stronghold of the medieval church but they are really passing the mark. Anyway the videogame is now available on many sites and even on Luca Volonte’ site. Liberte’, Egalite’, Volonte’.

Another randomly generated paper accepted in a Journal

Scigen is a program that generates random Computer Science research papers, including graphs, figures, and citations.
According to Scigen blog, the randomly generated article “Cooperative, Compact Algorithms for Randomized Algorithms” by Rohollah Mosallahnezhad of the Iran Institute of Technology was accepted for publication in the Applied Mathematics and Computation journal. You can check by yourself on the publisher site which admits it was accepted and now removed. What is even more sad is that the reviewer provided many corrections to be resolved without realizing that the paper was just 8 pages of randomly generated text, figures, graphs and citations. How depressing is that, eh?
You can generate a paper and check previous random papers accepted in conferences. But for even more fun, be sure not to miss the randomly generated presentation these crazy folks gave during one of these bogus conferences. They presented slides which they were never seen before, which incidentally I think it is a great exercise for a presenter, if you can make it over presenting slides that have no meaning and you have never seen before, nothing can stop you. And I really love the guy dressed up as Einstein with fake mustaches.