Relevant to my Interests: December to January
Some things from the last two months I really liked but never got around to talking about. I promise to only do round-ups every couple months.
- Video: History of the Internet – ReadWriteWeb
- http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/video_history_of_the_internet.php
- If you’ve ever wondered how the Internet was born, but can’t be bothered reading a whole book on the subject, check out this short animated documentary from Milah Bilgil. Entitled History of the internet, it does a great job explaining time-sharing, file-sharing, arpanet and internet. The video uses a new type of info-graphic called PICOL icons, which will soon be made available for free on picol.org. PICOL stands for Pictorial Communication Language – it’s a project that aims to create “a standard and reduced sign system for electronic communicatio.” PICOL is free to use and open to alter.
- Ptak Science Books: Things that Are Just Simply Wrong: War Gases and Babies; Protective Suits for Children and Babies, 1943
- http://longstreet.typepad.com/thesciencebookstore/2009/01/things-that-are-just-simply-wrong-war-gases-and-babies-protective-suits-for-children-and-babies-1943.html
- Like pornography and art, things that are just plain wrong are instantly recognizable. And this, my dear reader, is a fine example of that thinking. Anti-Gas Protective Helmet for Babies, Manual of Instructions was prepared for the Office of the Director of Civil Air Raid Precautions of Ottawa, Canada, and published in 1943.
- Gallery – Visions of the ice caps before climate change – Image 1 – New Scientist
- http://www.newscientist.com/gallery/dn16381-polar-paintings/
- The first polar paintings were made by explorers with some artistic training. These and many others are on display at the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts, in To the Ends of the Earth: Painting the Polar Landscape.
- Nuclear apocalypse and the Letter of Last Resort. – By Ron Rosenbaum – Slate Magazine
- http://www.slate.com/id/2208219
- In the case of the Letter of Last Resort, the reference turns out to be factual: At this very moment, miles beneath the surface of the ocean, there is a British nuclear submarine carrying powerful ICBMs (nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missiles). In the control room of the sub, the Daily Mail reports, “there is a safe attached to a control room floor. Inside that, there is an inner safe. And inside that sits a letter. It is addressed to the submarine commander and it is from the Prime Minister. In that letter, Gordon Brown conveys the most awesome decision of his political career … and none of us is ever likely to know what he decided.”
- Yochai Benkler on the new open-source economics | Video on TED.com
- http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/yochai_benkler_on_the_new_open_source_economics.html
- Yochai Benkler explains how collaborative projects like Wikipedia and Linux represent the next stage of human organization.
- Philip Zimbardo shows how people become monsters … or heroes | Video on TED.com
- http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/philip_zimbardo_on_the_psychology_of_evil.html
- Philip Zimbardo knows how easy it is for nice people to turn bad. In this talk, he shares insights and graphic unseen photos from the Abu Ghraib trials. Then he talks about the flip side: how easy it is to be a hero, and how we can rise to the challenge.
- English Russia ” Abandoned Russian Polar Nuclear Lighthouses
- http://englishrussia.com/?p=2198
- After reviewing different ideas on how to make them work for a years without service and any external power supply, Soviet engineers decided to implement atomic energy to power up those structures. So, special lightweight small atomic reactors were produced in limited series to be delivered to the Polar Circle lands and to be installed on the lighthouses. Those small reactors could work in the independent mode for years and didn’t require any human interference, so it was very handy in the situation like this. It was a kind of robot-lighthouse which counted itself the time of the year and the length of the daylight, turned on its lights when it was needed and sent radio signals to near by ships to warn them on their journey. It all looks like ran out the sci-fi book pages, but so they were.
- Browse Medicine and Madison Avenue
- http://library.duke.edu/digitalcollections/mma/browse
- A database of over 600 advertisements and historical documents dated between 1911 and 1958, relating to the creation and influence of health-related advertising.
- Benjamin Wallace on the price of happiness | Video on TED.com
- http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/benjamin_wallace_on_the_price_of_happiness.html
- Can happiness be bought? To find out, author Benjamin Wallace sampled the world’s most expensive products, including a bottle of 1947 Chateau Cheval Blanc, 8 ounces of Kobe beef and the fabled (notorious) Kopi Luwak coffee. His critique may surprise you.
- Vancouver Aquarium – Beluga Cam
- http://www.vanaqua.org/belugacam/index.html
The Mysterious Diamond Eye Imp: An Optical Illusions from Early American Advertising
From Duke University’s Emergence of Advertising in America archive comes this beautiful advertisement for Diamond Dyes, published sometime between 1853 and 1920. The ad uses the negative afterimage optical illusion, which is a common sight in most first year psychology textbooks, although usually in a much more boring way. This image is actually kind of frightening.
,The Mysterious Diamond Eye Imp
Diamond Dyes
A Few of My Favorite Things: Research Tools
As I begin work on the theoretical side of my undergraduate thesis I find myself spending allot of time trying to keep track and organize the reams of sources and notes I’m quickly accumulating. And while I use some pretty specific and archaic tools when it comes to organizing and analyzing my actual data I figured I would share some of the more general tools I use, focusing specifically on open-source and cross-platform tools that could be used to any kind of research.
Browsing: Firefox
Not only is Firefox a superb and innovative browser (while also being both open source and cross-platform) but it’s extensive collection of add-ons make it an excellent platform for researchers and data hoarders. Many of the following tools are add-ons for Firefox and many, many other tools exist.
- Download Firefox: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/
- Find Firefox Add-on: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/
Collection and Annotation: Scrapbook
Scrapbook is a Firefox add-on that lets you to save, organize, and annotate snapshots of websites locally. Typically I use scrapbook to save and annotate journal articles that are available in HTML format (i.e. that you can view in your browser) as well as regular web pages, but scrapbook is also useful when I want to archive pages that change frequently or that I want to access off-line.
Annotating a saved page in Scrapbook
- Scrapbook homepage: http://amb.vis.ne.jp/mozilla/scrapbook/
- Download Scrapbook Firefox Add-on: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/427
PDF Annotation: Foxit Reader
While Scrapbook is great when your working with regular web pages, many journals only provide articles as a PDF files and this is when Foxit Reader comes to the rescue. Foxit is a lightweight PDF reader that includes annotation tools that let you markup and take notes directly in PDF files. While Foxit is commercial software, it is so fantastic that it is well worth the cost if your like me and spend allot of time working with PDF files. While it doesn’t come in a native Linux flavor it runs just fine under both Wine and Crossover.
Foxit Reader in Action
- Download Foxit: http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/rd_intro.php
On-line Bibliographic Management: Citeulike and Connotea
Bibliographic management is a real pain and I have yet to find a tool I truly love. Refworks is probably the best on-line citation management tool I have used but I hesitate to lock myself into any tool that I will have to pay for once I am finished university.
Two free alternatives are Citeulike (sponsored by Springer) and Connotea (Sponsored by the Nature Publishing Group) which both offer citation collection and sharing. In my experience, unfortunately, neither service does a flawless job of detecting citation information and so you are frequently forced to manually enter your bibliographic information (oh the horror). Worse, for some inexplicable reason (probably legal) neither service allows references to be exported in finished bibliographic formats like Chicago or APA. Instead, references are exported in different desktop reference management formats (like Endnote or BibTex) which you then presumably use to prepare your finished bibliography.
Still, I think these services have their place, especially if already have desktop bibliographic software and want an easy way to collect and share citations while surfing the internets. Both services allow you to use your universities OpenURL service and make use of DOI links which makes them particularily handy for those with full-text access through their work or school.
Connotea
Citeulike
- Citeulike – http://www.citeulike.org
- Citeulike FAQ: http://www.citeulike.org/faq/faq.adp
- Connotea – http://www.connotea.org
- Connotea Guide – http://www.connotea.org/guide
Collection, Annotation, and Bibiliographic Management: Zotero
Zotero is a Firefox add-on that combines data collection and organization (like Scrapbook), with annotation tools (including highlighting and note taking) and bibliographic management (including publication-ready export) in one tool. Zotero lives completely in your browser — so everything is local and accessable whereever you are — while a new version currently in beta-testing will allow syncing and sharing through an on-line portal similar to Connotea and Citeulike.
Zotero in Action
- Learn about and get Zotero: http://www.zotero.org/
Quick Bookmarking: Delicious
Delicious is the one research tool I could not imagine living without. A on-line replacement for in-browser bookmarks, delicious lets you store, share, and search your bookmarks through a web portal. Delicious uses tags instead of folders for organization, which works far more efficiently when you have thousands of bookmarks that do not fall neatly into a single category. Even more impressive, Delicious has resisted the usual feature creep and visual bling that mares so many other web 2.0 services, remaining remarkably simple and stable for years. To see an example check out my Delicious bookmarks here and my tag list here.
Delicious Bookmarks
Bookmakring a website with the official Delicious Firefox Add-on
- Sign up for a Delicious account: http://delicious.com/
- Get the official Delicious Firefox Add-on: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3615
Backing up your data: Dropbox
While not really a research tool Dropbox is the tool that lets me sleep soundly at night when I finally step away from the computer. While losing your precious data is a nightmare for any confirmed data-hoarder it is a real terror for anyone in the middle of a large, data intensive project.
Regularly backing up your data is one of those chores everyone knows they should do and almost nobody does regularily. The problem is that while backing up your data in the same location — or even worse, the same drive — as the original is essentially useless, off-site backup requires dragging around an external drive, reducing the likelihood that you do so regularly.
One solution to this problem is on-line backup services which use your Internet connection to transfer data on-line where it is safe and available from anywhere. Many different of these services exist and most offer basic accounts with a limited amount storage space (generally around 2GB) for free. My favorite of these services is Dropbox, which is simple to set-up and runs seamlessly in the background, incrementally backing up your data as you work.
Dropbox does this by creating a directory inside you home folder and anything that is placed inside this directory gets automatically backed up to Drobox’s servers whenever it changes. In Linux this means that I can simply place a link to my existing research directories inside the Dropbox directory so I do not even need to change the location of any of my files (I know you can do the same with Windows, usually by right-clicking the file in explorer and creating a link, and I am sure OS X has similar functionality).
One caveat is that you should always have more than one backup solution in place, especially with these new on-line services that could potentially go out of business. For me this means a weekly DVD snapshots of my data to supplement my Dropbox account. Consider yourself warned.
- Sign up for Dropbox: http://www.getdropbox.com/
- Dropbox Tour: http://www.getdropbox.com/tour#1
Hodgepodge: How to electricute yourself, where the machine of big science go when the science stops and a woodcraft fMRI puzzle
From Bre Pettis via Make Magazine come these wonderful diagrams illustrating the dangers of electrocution in typically glorious Weimar fashion. From the book Elektroschutz in 132 Bildern By Stefan Jellinek. I like to think of these as filling a need to acculturate people to the dangers of electricity, and based on these images, I would guess electricity was pretty dangerous technology at the time.
This is one of the most normal diagrams in the collection.
One of the stranger ones.
A brief article and slideshow from New Scientist (Where do science supermachines go when they die?) on what happens to all of physics pretty toys when the atom smashers shut down.
An obsolete copper radiofrequency cavity from the Large Electron Positron collider now lies in the garden at CERN.
Finally, Neil Fraser, a Google engineer, applied 9 MRI scans to 60 1-inch wood blocks to create this simply amazing puzzle that can be re-arranged to display different cross-sections of the brain. Via Infostetics.
Neuroscience + Woodwork = Awesomeness
