Tidbits, 20 January 2010

I'm a bit late with these! Sorry about that. Bit busy around me just now.

• Data-sharing resolutions/requirements announced recently include: the American Naturalist and allied journals (possibly behind paywall, sorry), and the Linguistics Society of America.
• The calls for open data and data archiving redouble: from mainstream media such as New Scientist, from science bloggers like those at Bench Press, from service providers like Data Dryad.
• I try to stay out of the futurism game (sometimes unsuccessfully), but here are some eScience predictions for you from others.
• Conference reports relevant to our theme: Educause 2009 from DLib Magazine; one of Christina Pikas's reports from Science Online 2010, as well as Dave Munger's report on the same conference.
• More on ORCID by Martin Fenner. I described ORCID to some colleagues recently as "the biggest name-authority-control effort we'll see in our lifetimes," and I do believe that!
• Bethany Nowviskie's Monopolies of Invention is a must-read. Respect—do you speak it?
• Embeded (sic) metadata please, asks "a Hacked Librarian." Honestly, I'm so happy when I have any metadata at all that I don't tend to worry about where it lives. I agree that belt-and-suspenders metadata, internal as well as external, is ideal where possible.
• Data-mining in the real world: retailing.
• Bad data lurks everywhere, notes Jean-Claude Bradley, including in peer-reviewed, supposedly trustworthy chemistry publications! And yet exposing data as it is generated still scares collaborators away, says Pedro Beltrão.
• Data-mining humor, with a serious undercurrent: Ancient Woolworth's sites. The null hypothesis can only be discarded for good cause…

As always, you can email me or tag something "trogool" on del.icio.us to bring it to my attention for a tidbits post.