I am a microbiologist and molecular biologist turned tenured biotech faculty turned bioinformatics scientist turned entrepreneur. My passion is developing instructional materials for 21st century biology (
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or maybe seminars on parade?
They're calling them PubCasts, but I don't think I'll be watching them in a pub.
Seriously, SciVee is kind of cute, and has lots of potential down the road, and even has a few unintentional moments of humor right now, but....
It's a bit distracting. I can't watch these without imagining that the speakers are standing on tiptoe, desperately trying to peak their heads above the large bits of text that appear mysteriously on the screen and can't be removed.
Considering the technical glitch, it's just a bit ironic that many of the movies are from the PLoS journal of Computational Biology. Somehow I would have thought that someone would have tested these on Firefox before the launch.
Or maybe computational biologists just need more practice using software.
Comments
Actually it's still alpha :).
Those pictures are hilarious. I get reminded of the ASCII art of a person peering out from behind a wall. I am still waiting for the first Craig Venter video in super close up.
Posted by: Deepak | August 22, 2007 9:53 AM
It is so easy to remove the text tboxes - see the menu on the left? Click on something there, almost anything, and they will go away. Click again, and the text box is back. Toggle as you wish.
Posted by: coturnix | August 22, 2007 10:21 PM
Sorry, B. That's not what happens with FireFox on Mac OS X. I clicked all over the page and those boxes refused to disappear.
I tried on Safari 3, too, but SciVee crashed my browser.
Posted by: Sandra Porter | August 22, 2007 11:19 PM
Ditto for Firefox on XP. It's cool, but I was hoping for a few on the level that I could show to my eighth graders at appropriate times. A little dry and advanced for middle school.
Posted by: Matt | August 23, 2007 6:21 PM
Matt:
You need to have your eight graders take a look at this!
These are movies of flies and lobsters duking it out and these are movies of plants moving.
And here are some really cool movies, made by the Harry Potter animators, of things that might go on inside of cells and during PCR.
Posted by: Sandra Porter | August 23, 2007 6:29 PM
On a more serious note, it's good to see video becoming more accepted in the sciences. For a bunch of folk who are supposed to be on the forefront, we are a bunch of luddites as a community. And very uncomfortable being on camera. Perhaps by connecting video to publications, it will make it easier for people to come out of their shell. It will be interesting to see what formats are explored as well. Calls for a blog post.
Posted by: Deepak | August 24, 2007 1:10 PM