Academic Computing Blog

San Francisco: ALTHOUGH today’s solar eclipse will not be visible in North America, science fans will get a chance to see it online. The Exploratorium science museum will transmit a live Webcast of the event from Turkey to http://www.exploratorium.edu.

Webcasting special events is an increasingly common practice for science museums that are trying to nurture online visitors, but it has been a longstanding activity at the Exploratorium. Since 1996, the museum has covered science events online, including six eclipses and scientific expeditions to Antarctica and the rain forests of Belize. Webcasts are so common for the Exploratorium, which regularly produces science-themed presentations and even game shows, that it has a broadcasting studio on its exhibition floor, complete with a podium, backdrops and stage lighting.

Archive: Total Solar Eclipse: Live from Turkey in 2006, The Exploratorium, March 29, 2006. http://www.exploratorium.edu/eclipse/2006/index.html

From: Tim, Gnatek, Taking the Rough-and-Tumble Approach to Science. The New York Times,
March 29, 2006. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/29/arts/artsspecial/29sanfran.html
[free registration required, article expires in 2 weeks]

Re: Eprints, Dspace, or Espace?

Question:

I need to compare and choose a suitable software for a repository. I have decided to discuss ARNO, CDSware, DSpace, Eprints, and Fedora. Could you briefly discuss each one in terms of suitability for a university?

Answer:

The answer is very simple: It doesn’t matter! The only thing that matters is that it should not be “ESpace” (Empty-Space); in other words, there has to be a policy that ensures that the university archives are filled with the intended content.

All the main OAI-compliant archive-creating softwares are functionally equivalent, because after all, what they do is quite simple: They make sure that all deposited papers have the same metadata tags, the obvious ones: author-name, article-title, date, journal-name, etc., so that they are interoperable as well as harvestable by OAI service providers.

The article then goes on to provide anice background on ARNO, CDSware, DSpace, Eprints, and Fedora.

Article URL: http://listserver.sigmaxi.org/sc/wa.exe?A2=ind04&L=american-scientist-open-access-forum&F=l&S=&P=87449

For more information about the Open Access Initiative, see http://www.openarchives.org/

Google Scholar uses the popular Google search engine to enable searches for scholarly materials such as peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from broad areas of research. It includes a variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the web. Some Google Scholar search results include links to full-text; some offer only citations.

Google Scholar Local Links allows a user to specify a “local library preference,” and then, if Google Scholar finds a local link, it flags that citation as available locally.

Quinn Norton, Coding Tool Is a Text Adventure, Wired News, 02:00 AM Mar, 15, 2006 EST.
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,70413-0.html

You’re in a maze of twisty subroutines, all alike.

Now, thanks to a new software-collaboration tool, you and your intrepid party of fellow hackers can navigate your labyrinth of code and slay its dastardly bugs, all in a dungeonlike world similar to an old-school text adventure.

Called playsh, the new tool is a collaborative programming environment based on the multi-user domains, or MUDs, so popular online in the early 1990s.

Trying to do things in playsh is most similar to games like Zork from the 1970s. To go north, you type north. To examine an object, you type look. There are no graphics, just descriptions.

But instead of ducking grues and collecting zorkmids, you’re interacting with whatever program code you’re working on, as well as the data and hardware devices that it uses. “It treats the web and APIs as just more objects and places, and is a platform for writing and sharing your own code to manipulate those objects and places,” says developer Matt Webb, who unveiled the tool at last week’s O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego.

Craig Mundie, Science as a Web Service. XML can supercharge research, Technology Review, March/April 2006.
http://www.technologyreview.com/InfoTech/wtr_16461,258,p1.html

Although my roots before joining Microsoft were in supercomputing, I believe that “extreme computing” and adding gigaflops (billions of floating-point operations per second) are no longer the optimal solutions to most scientific and technical problems. Today, scientists and engineers can buy or build 10-gigaflop desktop computers for around $5,000, and within the next several years, we will see similar supercomputing power at the chip level.

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Continues at http://www.technologyreview.com/InfoTech/wtr_16461,258,p1.html>