science 2.0
pontiff | June 7, 2010One interesting thing about quantum computing is that because it is a very new field, a large amount of the research in the field is on the arXiv (interestingly the worst users have historically been computer scientists.) Back in 2006 whenever I would sit around BSing about the arXiv with other quantum computing people, the idea of improvements that would bring the arXiv more up to date would come up. After hearing repeatedly about such ideas, in January 2007, I got fed up of hearing about these ideas and so I sat down and wrote scirate.com, a Digg-like front end for the arXiv. Okay well…
pontiff | June 7, 2010Rob sends me information about an interesting new position at the Perimeter Institute (more info here): The Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics (PI) is looking for a Scientific IT specialist -- a creative individual with experience in both scientific research and information technology (IT). This is a new, hybrid, research/IT position within the Institute, dedicated to helping PI's scientific staff make effective use of IT resources. It has two clear missions. First, to directly assist researchers in using known, available IT tools to do their research. Second, to uncover or…
cpikas | March 10, 2010This was originally posted 1/9/2009 on my old blog.
Due to popular demand (well 3 requests :) ), this is a commentary and additional information for my conference paper and presentation: Pikas, C. K. (2008). Detecting Communities in Science Blogs. Paper presented at eScience '08. IEEE Fourth International Conference on eScience, 2008. Indianapolis. 95-102. doi:10.1109/eScience.2008.30 (available in IEEE Xplore to institutional subscribers) [also self-archived - free!- here]
The presentation is embedded in another blog post, and is available online at SlideShare. The video of me talking…
cpikas | March 9, 2010Sometimes you have to just let go and release something to the wild. I have mentioned on a few occasions a qualitative study I did prior to the network study. To be honest, I think I actually did it in the Fall of 2007 ?! I thought (and was encouraged to believe) that I could get a journal article from it, but at this point, I've moved on. With the recent publication of another article on science blogs, I thought that this needed to be out there. Plus, it's really not fair to the participants who gave me their time.
After re-reading this just now, I don't think it's bad, but the title is…
pontiff | February 4, 2010Anyone tried out MoboMath?MoboMath lets you work with math on a computer exactly as you learned it -- by writing it. MoboMath translates your handwritten math input into a formatted layout that can be used in Microsoft Word, Maple, and many other popular applications.
Instead of struggling with keyboard and palette input, you can create and edit math expressions for technical documents, calculations, presentations, and web pages in your own handwriting. It's fast, simple, and intuitive.
Using a tablet PC or an external tablet, just write your expressions as you normally would with your tablet…
pontiff | October 23, 2009Via the arXiv api newsgroup comes the rumor that soon, perhaps, the arXiv will be available for full download sometime in the future:or a full copy of (or particular subsets of) PDF for arXiv papers, we are in the process of setting up a service in the Cloud, which will offer the option for bulk download. I'll let you know when that
becomes available.
Cool! All of physics since recorded arXiv time on my hard drive :)
pontiff | July 29, 2009Since it seems that the "arXiv on your hard drive" is dead I've been thinking a bit about if there is a better way to achieve the goal of distributing archives of the arXiv.
One thing I liked about the "arXiv on your hard drive" was that it used BitTorrent. This could alleviate some of the bandwidth pain associated with distributing the arXiv widely. But of course, one of the problems with using Torrents to distribute the arXiv is that, well, the arXiv changes daily! One solution to this is to update the torrent periodically, but in these go-go times this seems wrong. It seems to me that…
pontiff | July 16, 2009A fellow quantum computing researcher of mine recently joined FriendFeed. Along with another researcher we got involved in a discussion about a paper concerning a certain recent claimed "disproof of Bell's theorem." (arXiv:0904.4259. What it means to "disprove a theorem" like Bell's theorem is, however a subject for another comment section on a different blog.) But, and here is the interesting thing, this colleague then made a trip to China. And FriendFeed, apparently, is blocked by the great firewall of China, so he had to email us his comments to continue the conversation. Which got me…
pontiff | July 16, 2009A friend sent me a link to Detextify2:What is this?
Anyone who works with LaTeX knows how time-consuming it can be to find a symbol in symbols-a4.pdf that you just can't memorize. Detexify is an attempt to simplify this search.
How does it work?
Just draw the symbol you are looking for into the square area above and look what happens!
My symbol isn't found!
The symbol may not be trained enough or it is not yet in the list of supported symbols. In the first case you can do the training yourself. In the second case just drop me a line (danishkirel[[[at]]]gmail.com)!
I like this. How can I help…
pontiff | July 16, 2009Via @mattleiffer, viXra.org:In part viXra.org is a parody of arXiv.org to highlight Cornell University's unacceptable censorship policy. It is also an experiment to see what kind of scientific work is being excluded by the arXiv. But most of all it is a serious and permanent e-print archive for scientific work. Unlike arXiv.org tt [sic] is truly open to scientists from all walks of life.
Maybe I should submit one of my papers with all of the text reversed (yeah, yeah, it would still be incomprehensible.)
pontiff | July 8, 2009The arXiv is a game changer for how large portions of physics (and increasingly other fields) are done. Paul Ginsparg won a MacArthur award for his vision and stewardship of the arXiv (something other institutions might want to note when they decide that someone trying to change how science is done isn't really doing work that will impact them.) So...Given: The arXiv is great. But there is something that's always bothered me a bit about the arXiv: transparency.
(Note: those of you who wish to complain about the fact that you can't get endorsed on the arXiv, this article is not for you.…
pontiff | July 8, 2009Has the arXiv been hacked or is it offline? When I connect to arxiv.org it shoots me to mirror sites which haven't been updated since Oct 08. Via @MartinQuantum. Also nanoscale views reports the arXiv down.
Since this is a blog we can easily spread rumors by including a link to an article today about cyberattacks going on right now possibly originating from North Korea.
Update 9:03 am PST: At lanl.arxiv.org you can now get papers greater than October 2008 by searching, but the "recents" and "new" isn't working. Also the RSS feed seems to only have yesterdays posts. A comment on Secret…
pontiff | June 10, 2009The astro/physics blogosphere is all atwitter about papers the Nature embargo policy (See Julianne If a paper is submitted to nature does it still make a sound, the cat herder Hear a paper, see a paper, speak no paper, and he of less than certain principles Unhealthy obsessions of academia. He of uncertain principles loses the catchy title contest :) )
In this discussion, the uncertain principal brings up an interesting effect for arXiv postings:There's an obsession in science with the order of publication that I don't think is really healthy, and I think it's only gotten worse. At the…
pontiff | May 28, 2009Recently I've been thinking it might be fun to set up some sort online weekly colloquia in quantum computing. Fun? Well, okay maybe that's not quite the right word. But it would be an interesting experiment. So I went out looking for good live webinar/videoconferencing software and well...I was a bit disappointed. Sure there are a lot of videoconference companies out there...which almost all have limited version for use for free. But these limited versions almost all seem to restrict to only a few participants. Anyone know of some software which might be appropriate for attempting to…
pontiff | May 27, 2009One of the more interesting "problems" in Science 2.0 is the lack of commenting on online articles. In particular some journals now allow one to post comments about papers published in the journal. As this friendfeed conversation asks:Why people do not comment online articles? What is wrong with the online commenting system[s]? I think this is one of the central issues in Science 2.0.
Or as Carl Zimmer commented on comments appearing at PLOS One a few years back:What I find striking, however, is how quiet it is over at PLOS One. Check out a few for yourself. My search turned up a lot of…
pontiff | May 19, 2009Okay, well not quite a music video(!), but my coauthor Steve Flammia has done a videoabstract for our paper (on quantiki at http://www.quantiki.org/video_abstracts/09050901):
pontiff | May 14, 2009If only there had been open access, maybe it wouldn't be called Moore's law:I didn't go to Midland after all, but went instead to the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University, which has roughly the same relationship to Johns Hopkins that JPL has to Caltech, and where I could continue to do basic research in areas related to what I had done before. But I found myself calculating the cost per word in the articles we published and wondering if the taxpayers were really getting their money's worth at $5 per word. Just as I was starting to worry about the taxpayers, the group I was…
pontiff | May 13, 2009Martin Plenio writes in with a link to a new site he created with Daniel Burgarth Videoabstracts (Joe got an email too):I am writing to you to bring to your attention some new tool that we (Daniel Burgarth and myself) have developed that has the aim of making science papers just a little more accessible. Its called Videoabstracts and consists of 'homemade' videos in which an author of the paper explains the key point of the paper in front of a whiteboard. The videos should not be longer than 5 minutes to force people to get to the point efficiently. We feel that these 5 minutes clarify the…
pontiff | May 9, 2009A nice read for the weekend: Michael Nielsen on Doing science in the open in Physics World.
pontiff | March 16, 2009This weekend I got a chance to play around with ScribTex which is a tool for collaborating on LaTeX. In my short test drive, I will say it's one of the better solutions to this problem that I've seen.
(Of course the one thing that is a pain with all of these systems is the lack of good editors. There is a certain handicap that you get by working in a browser input box and not into a full fledged editor (a similar setup to scibtex that I use in MediaWiki has this same problem.) I'm not sure how solvable this problem is. Has anyone seen, for example, a javascript solution which allows…