Academic Computing Blog

Call for Papers

Interaction is a fundamental feature of research in the Arts and Humanities. This conference seeks to explore diverse interactions that shape new ars of investigation and provide a fresh look at interdisciplinary practices.

This graduate conference will explore the ways in which an exchange of ideas and methodologies within the Arts and Social Sciences can produce new routes of thinking and activity.

We invite short papers on a range of subjects and interactive or interdisciplinary approaches in all aspects of the Arts and Humanities, Social Sciences, Education, and the creative and performing fields. Examples of questions that might be helpful when thinking about the topic include: What are the new possibilities that result from an interactive environment in research? How do traditional fields or areas interact with the modern world and its culture? How is the issue of cultural identity and a sense of belonging revisited through inter/intra cultural interactions?

Abstracts should be a maximum of 200 words in length, and should be submitted in English with the speaker’s name, institutional affiliation and title of the paper. This is the fifth conference of its kind at the University of Glasgow, and promises to continue the tradition of providing rich social and intellectual interaction within that vibrant city.

Suggested themes include but are not limited to:

• Non-textual forms of communication
• The global and the local
• Postcolonial interaction
• Interactive spaces
• Gendered spaces
• Text and context
• Interpretation/Translation/Adaptation
• Clashes and Convergences
• Identity and the self
• Human-machine interaction
• Interactive art and art on the web
• Humans and environment
• Fact and fiction
• Science and art
• The crowd/The audience/The speaker
• Interfaith dialogue

Please email abstracts to interactions@arts.gla.ac.uk and go to http://www.gla.ac.uk/interactions for further information.

The deadline for abstracts is 1 August 2006.

Please forward this to any interested parties.
Yours Sincerely, the Conference Committee.

The Google Notebook appliance has arrived with not much fanfare – the news competes with Apple’s announcement of the new MacBook, Sony’s announcement of a new pocket Vaio UX, Yahoo’s announcement of a new home page and probably others still to come. The Google announcement is byfar the most interesing one.

Google Notebook is a Firefox (and IE) extention that creates a notepad at the bottom right of the browser. You can “cut and paste” information from the current webpage (text, images, links), insert tags, and store the information on your Google “page.” The notebook can be private or public. Installing the Firefox extentions and then restarting the browser takes you to a startup tutorial page. After that, we’re on.

Although it’s branded “Google Labs”, not “Google Beta”, it feels more like betaware – some of the features are less than idea when compared to popular social network sites – or maybe I should just read the manual :).

[1] Google Notebook, for IE and FireFox, http://www.google.com/notebook

[2] Press release, “Sony delivers world’s first full-function, pocket-sized PC”, San Diego, May 16, 2006. http://news.sel.sony.com/en/press_room/consumer/computer_peripheral/notebooks/release/22130.html

[3] Apple Website, Introducing the all-new MacBook, http://www.apple.com/macbook/macbook.html

Genomics & Proteomics, a web publicatgion of Reed Business Information, has a cover story on the Open Source Bioinformatics community. The lead paragraphs set the tone …

Source: Protein_molecule, Wikipedia, May 10, 2006

Jeff Bizzaro, MSc, launched the Bioinformatics Organization Inc. (BOI: bioinformatics.org), one of the largest organizations in the field of bioinformatics, to support the goals of BOI embraced the ideals of the open-source movement to combat restrictive, if not elitist, working conditions imposed by the cost of scientific progress rendered proprietary. (For this article “open source” is defined as freely available software, data sets, or computing capacity.)

“When I got into this field in 1995,” says Bizzaro, “software as well as biological data were being patented at an alarming rate. Computational tools could run hundreds of thousands of dollars, requiring institutional licenses that only the better-endowed academic institutions could afford.” Out of this frustration and almost a sense of isolation, the idea of shared bioinformatics resources evolved. “I created an environment—an online community where myself and others, those of us who didn’t have a local group—could meet and share information.”

Sited as examples of the open source movement are a variety of projects:

• ALFRED, the Allele Frequency Database, is a resource for gene frequency data on human populations around the world. http://alfred.med.yale.edu/alfred/
• Coffee Genome Project, CoffeeDNA.net
• EGAD, a protein design program, egad.berkeley.edu/software.php
• IntAct, the European Bioinformatics Institute molecular interaction database, www.ebi.ac.uk/intact
• Rosetta@home, a distributed processing model for protein folding, design, and docking calculations (akin to Seti at Home), boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/