"Education" via Brandon in Google Reader

Barnes & Noble eReader

2009-07-27T21:32:11Z

With PC, Mac, and iPhone versions and the biggest library around, Barnes & Noble's eReader offers serious competition for Amazon's proprietary Kindle.

Are there too many PhDs?

2009-06-16T21:54:53Z

Ever hear of Douglas Prasher? Probably not. He just missed out on this past year’s Nobel in chemistry. That’s not unusual, as many scientists never even come close to a Nobel. What is unusual, is that Dr. Prasher works at a car dealership, not in a lab. Despite doing the critical research on discovering GFP that became the work for last year’s Nobel Prize, he was unable to find grant money and a job to continue his work.

Prasher’s story is what concerns me with science, engineering, math, and technology. In the U.S., we are constantly hearing about how the country is falling behind in science. We need more scientists to fill all of those jobs we want to create. And the cure to that is to fund more PhD programs! Yet, when you ask graduate students and postdoctoral scholars what their individual experiences are, a science career is a very tough road with low pay and few career prospects. It’s such a tough path that an entire PhD comic strip was born to alleviate the situation with laughter. Why then, is there such a disconnect?

As a friend of mine, who has worked for two decades in both academia and industry, recently put it, “it’s a Ponzi scheme” (name withheld to protect his job). Large corporations and universities need a lot of workers to meet their objectives. While conspiracy theories abound over biopharma lobbying the government for more PhDs with the secret ambition to lower wages, it doesn’t seem too far-fetched. Universities need grad students and postdocs to churn out the papers that bring in grant money for the professors. While that is a well-established tradition going on for more than a century, what is different now is how we are attracting students into science careers. With tuition paid-in-full PhD programs and benefits as a graduate student, many who would normally not enter science are lured in. Reality usually hits after the second year, in which qualification exams to continue in the programs are taken. Only then, do students realize the road that lies ahead is dotted with pit stops leading, not to Nobel glory, but a journeyman career with salaries well below that of their friends who went into business, law, or medicine. With a PhD, a postdoc can expect to start, at most, US $42K a year in academia and $52K in industry.

More over, 45% of all recent doctorates are now taking postdoc positions prior to a faculty appointment. This contrasts with only 31% following the same path 25 years ago (see NSF). And postdoc positions are increasing in length of time as well, and are often followed by a second or even third “tour of duty.” While the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) most recent data shows an average of two years per postdoc across all disciplines, my own anecdotal experience in the life sciences shows that number is closer to four years.

In reality, more PhDs are a good thing, but should something be done to help out recent graduates and what could be done? President Obama has included just a 1.5% increase in the National Institutes of Health (NIH) budget for 2010, which doesn’t even make up for the lost years of keeping up with inflation under the Bush era. Obama has promised to double NIH’s budget within 10 years. Great, but how will that money be spent? The NIH budget doubled from $7.5 billion in 1990 to $15.5 billion in 1999 and has doubled again to $30 billion in 2009, yet the career path to a tenured faculty position has become a tougher pill to swallow. While more money in science is a great thing and should be increased, the data suggests that money alone is not the answer to improving the engineer/scientist quality of life. Specific policy to increase salaries would do this, but the reality of that occurring is thin at best. And as data from the NIH shows in the figure below, despite an ever growing number of PhDs and increased national budgets, there are disproportionally fewer young faculty receiving NIH grants.

This is a fairly dark picture that has just been described. Being somewhat of an optimist, there are some changes beginning to occur that give me hope. As usual, it is a grassroots movement that is taking the lead. In the United States, The National Postdoctoral Association was established in 2003. It has made some major accomplishments in getting the NIH, NSF, and more than 160 universities to adopt new policies. The biotech industry was born in the late 1970s, and despite visions of grand careers in science, it has largely failed to deliver. One could argue that this failure is more related to the biotech industry being a failure itself, since it was billed as the “next computer industry.” Ironically though, biotech is slowly morphing with the computer industry in the form of genomics and computational biology. And the computer industry is starting to meet science in the middle with specific programs from Google, Microsoft, IBM, and others. And of course, Mendeley is a melding of academia with computers and online tools.

Despite calls for promoting alternative careers in graduate school, in the end it is going to be a slow organic movement toward cross-disciplinary careers, perhaps with in silico technology, that improves the life of a PhD. An actionable example of this would be the Singularity University hosted at NASA Ames, which is having its inaugural class this year. The “University” part is a bit of a misnomer, as it is really just a nine-week networking event with an intense lecture schedule. And it is far too early to measure its beneficial impact. However, this may serve as inspiration for real universities to establish more practical PhD programs alongside the critical basic research type of degrees.

Curiously, science has always been more of an art than a science, and artists are often exploited. With computers, one can remove artistry, at least somewhat. If there’s one piece of advice for graduate students and postdocs, it would be to inject a bit of computational work into your career. Don’t wait for policy changes to create greater salaries, benefits and more tenured positions. While treading the same arduous path that our predoctoral or postdoctoral advisors tread has become regarded as a rite of passage, it doesn’t need to remain such. The story of one Douglas Prasher losing a Nobel is one too many.

Update – A few others have also started a discussion over on Friendfeed

To learn how Mendeley can help you publish and organize research, go here.

Jason Hoyt, PhD is on Twitter and Mendeley

Simon & Schuster brings 5,000 eBooks to Scribd

2009-06-12T19:00:00Z

Filed under: Internet, Web

Scribd has been providing a quick and easy way to share documents over the web for a while. Now the company is hoping to move into the eBook arena with the Scribd Store, which lets you purchase, read, download or print premium content.

This week publisher Simon & Schuster announced plans to bring 5,000 titles from its eBook library to the Scribd Store. User will also be able to browse through listings for 7,000 other books that aren't available for download.

Scribd lets publishers keep 80% of the revenue from eBook sales, which is significantly higher than the revenue share Amazon gives publishers who make their titles available in the Kindle store.

The Simon & Schuster deal isn't exclusive. The publisher's titles are available in a number of other digital bookstores as well. But the announcement should give the Scribd store a bit of a publicity bump, as well as a solid base of quality content from authors that people may have actually heard of.

Simon & Schuster brings 5,000 eBooks to Scribd originally appeared on Download Squad on Fri, 12 Jun 2009 14:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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College Threatens Students Who Use College Initials In Private Email Addresses

2009-05-12T15:54:00Z

Slashdot alerted us to the bizarre story that Santa Rosa Junior College was supposedly sending out threatening emails to students and staff who used private email accounts that included the initials SRJC (so, for example, using nameSRJC@gmail.com or whatever). Oddly the original article pointed to has been taken down (though, the comments remain...). But, the same newspaper has published another article where the school stands by the policy and says it will continue to crack down on the "misuse" of its name... though it says it won't take anyone to court, despite the threat letter saying "to avoid any future legal action..."

The school officials still don't see why it's a big deal that they're threatening students. However, their reasoning makes very little sense. "The reason for it is so the college doesn't get misrepresented in some way or make it look like the college is endorsing a product or issue," according to Santa Rosa Junior College President Robert Agrella. But that makes no sense. If a student uses an actual address from the university, wouldn't that risk be much greater? In other words, does the college really think that it's a bigger risk for someone to say something that the college does not endorse from nameSRCJ@gmail.com or name@santarosa.edu? Because it seems fine with the latter, but not the former. The whole thing smacks of college administrators who don't understand technology and have way too much free time on their hands.

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More Fake Journals From Elsevier

2009-05-09T16:16:00Z

daemonburrito writes "Last week, we learned about Elsevier publishing a bogus journal for Merck. Now, several librarians say that they have uncovered an entire imprint of 'advertorial' publications. Excerpta Medica, a 'strategic medical communications agency,' is an Elsevier division. Along with the now infamous Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine, it published a number of other 'journals.' Elsevier CEO Michael Hansen now admits that at least six fake journals were published for pharmaceutical companies."

iRex to release color e-reader in 2011?

2009-06-03T19:29:00Z

Remember when iRex single-handedly revolutionized the e-reader industry last fall? Remember "Seeing Is Believing?" We didn't either, until the company reminded us of its continued existence with the announcement that it's developing a new color e-book reader that uses subtractive color mixing to display text and images three times the brightness of existing displays. While this won't be the first color e-ink tech we've laid our eyes on, the promise of print-quality color e-books is certainly tantalizing. Your move, Sony.

[Via SlashGear]

Filed under: Displays, Handhelds

iRex to release color e-reader in 2011? originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 03 Jun 2009 14:29:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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CiteULike and Mendeley collaborate – it’s live!

2009-06-02T17:06:47Z

Roughly three and a half months after our announcement that we would plan to collaborate with CiteULike it’s even better news to announce that the first step is live – Mendeley users can now access their CiteULike data from within Mendeley. As we said in our previous blog post,

Your CiteULike account will show up as a “Document Group” in our Mendeley Desktop software, thus making your CiteULike metadata available to you in a desktop interface – from where you can manage them offline or insert citations and bibliographies into Microsoft Word, for example.

Follow these steps to activate the integration of CiteULike with Mendeley:

On your settings page, scroll to the bottom and enter your CiteULike username. Then click OK, and allow any pop-up blocking messages displayed by your browser — if any.
You will be taken to an activation message on CiteULike’s site — confirm this action.
This will take you to your Edit Profile page with a check-box displayed next to Enable Mendeley. You will find this at the bottom of the form, highlighted. Click Update Profile to save this.
You will now see your CiteULike profile page. Don’t worry if you don’t see any confirmation — this is normal. The synchronization is now set up successfully.

You can enable, or disable, Mendeley synchronization by going to your Edit Profile page on CiteULike, and checking, or unchecking, the check-box labelled Enable Mendeley. If you don’t login to Mendeley once every 30 days, this sync will be disabled. You can re-enable it by re-checking this box.

This is obviously just a first step – together with the guys at CiteULike we are now working on a two-way synchronization. Our reference manager Mendeley Desktop now already offers a wide selection of import/export options (plus a Web Importer to grab citations off the web), and if you have any additional suggestions or comments, have your say on our feedback page.

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Google Docs adds support for Word and Excel 2007 documents

2009-06-01T21:10:00Z

Filed under: Office, Google

Google now lets users import .docx or .xlsx files into Google Docs. In other words, next time someone sends you a document created in Word 2007 you don't need to convert it into a format that your aging copy of Microsoft Word 2000 can handle. You can just load it up in Google Docs and read or edit the document online.

This brings the complete list of file formats supported by Google Docs to DOC, DOCX, HTML, TXT, RTF, XLS, XLSX, ODS, CSV, TSV, TSB, PPT, and PPS.

Of course, Zoho Docs has supported Office 2007 files since last year. Zoho Docs also lets you export files in those formats, while Google Docs will only let you import Office 2007 files.

Google Docs adds support for Word and Excel 2007 documents originally appeared on Download Squad on Mon, 01 Jun 2009 16:10:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Google to sell eBooks by year's end

2009-06-01T15:00:00Z

Filed under: Internet, Google

Google is reportedly planning to begin selling eBooks by the end of 2009. What's interesting is that Google won't be selling books in an old fashioned, downloadable format like PDF. Instead, the New York Times reports that readers would purchase books that could be read online.

You'd have offline access through "cached versions" in your browser. In other words, it looks like you'll be able to read eBooks in a browser and save them using Google Gears, which all sounds a lot more awkward and inconvenient than simply downloading a book that you can read on your smartphone, PDA, computer, or eBook reader. Google is trying to make this sound like a good thing, since you'll be able to access the site from any device with a web browser and internet access, but I'd rather have offline access and the ability to save my books to a hard drive or backup media.

Google also wants to differentiate itself from Amazon, which sets its own prices, by allowing publishers to set prices for digital editions of their books.

[via paidContent]

Google to sell eBooks by year's end originally appeared on Download Squad on Mon, 01 Jun 2009 10:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Afterglow Allows You To Draw On Your PowerPoint Presentation With a Laser Pointer [Lasers]

2009-05-01T17:50:00Z

Afterglow uses a USB camera to track the motion of a laser dot—effectively turning it into a drawing tool or a mouse. Now that is something every boardroom needs.

At the heart of the system is their special software that can automatically compensate for geometric distortion and track the movement of the pointer even when the USB camera is placed away from the projector. Getting set up appears to be as simple as plugging in the camera, and since the pointer can be used as a mouse, you won't need to use the laptop or a separate remote to control the presentation.

At $1,980, the Afterglow system certainly isn't cheap, but if giving dynamic presentations is core to your business I would figure that would be a small price to pay. [Afterglow via Gadgeteer via OhGizmo]

Plastic Logic: great for New Years gift

2009-05-30T20:45:00Z

Search Wolfram Alpha from the Firefox Search Box [Downloads]

2009-05-18T20:00:00Z

Firefox only (Win/Mac/Linux): So you've taken a look through Wolfram Alpha's impressive computational knowledge engine and find yourself using it constantly? Save time with a Firefox search plugin to make it easier to search.

The Clickable Resources web site created a search plug-in so you can easily use the built-in search box for your knowledge-gathering addiction—combine that with the previously mentioned Context Search extension and you've got a right-click, quick-and-easy information collecting setup.

If you got rid of the Firefox search box to save some space or make it look more like Google Chrome, you can still use the art of keyword bookmarking to search the site—just right-click on the search box and use "Add a keyword for this search".

Hit the link for the search plugin, or check out our first look at Wolfram Alpha's impressive computational engine for some great examples of exactly what it can do.

WolframAlpha Search Plugin [Clickable Resources]

Scribd Store: YouTube for Documents Becomes iTunes for Documents

2009-05-18T08:34:42Z

Online document sharing site Scribd has launched Scribd Store; a marketplace where publishers can sell original written works. This move comes at a time when ebook piracy is said to be at its peak (Scribd, as one of the biggest document sharing sites out there, is often mentioned in these reports), and is therefore a welcome move both for Scribd, which is trying to clean up its name, and for publishers such as Lonely Planet, O’Reilly Media, Berrett-Koehler and others, which partnered with Scribd for the Store launch.

The Store works as follows: prices range from $1 to $5,000 (for a China market research report) or more, and Scribd keeps 20% of revenue to itself, while 80% goes to the publisher. Scribd also offers automated pricing, setting a price tag based on the prices of similar items in the Scribd Store. The pricing is very flexible; as a publisher, you can set a price on individual chapters, exact selection of pages, or you can serialize your book for one dollar per chapter. Scribd aims for a multi-platform approach; the users will be able to read the documents they’ve bought on the Kindle, iPhone (coming soon) and other gadgets.

There’s an ugly word that needs to be mentioned here, too: DRM. Scribd Store lets publishers choose whether they want to manage their digital rights (which translates as: cripple the user’s digital rights) by adding DRM to PDF or ePub documents, or even setting them to be viewable only on Scribd. Unfortunately, when it comes to ebooks, pirated material is absolutely identical to the original (often not the case when we talk about music and movies), and therefore many scared authors and publishers will probably decide to use DRM on their works. Hopefully, they’ll realize that it’s better to tie the content that can be easily duplicated (which, contrary to the popular belief, also has positive connotations: it spreads the word about it and increases its value compared to DRMed, closed content) to other types of content that adds value to it, than to cripple it with DRM.

There’s another very interesting aspect of Scribd’s store: the works added to the store are also automatically added to Scribd’s existing Copyright Management System (CMS). This means that if you add a document to the Store, you can be sure that Scribd will take care to remove and pirated copies of it from the free sharing part of the site. It’s a neat little carrot and stick combination that might prove to be crucial in driving publishers and authors to participate in the Store.

Unfortunately, if you’re not in the United States, all of this does not apply to you, at least yet, but Scribd promises to launch the Store internationally at a later date.

Tags: eBook, scribd, Store

3 Wolfram Alpha Add-ons to Smarten Up Your Firefox

2009-05-21T13:03:26Z

Have you already fallen in love with the computational knowledge engine, better known as Wolfram Alpha? If you have, chances are you’ve been looking for easier ways to use this powerful tool, and for Firefox users, the best place to start is the add-ons repository.

As it usually goes with high-profile new services such as Wolfram Alpha, Firefox add-on developers have quickly caught on, and there are already three quite useful WA-related add-ons in Mozilla’s database.

Wolfram Alpha for Firefox

First, there’s the simple plugin that adds Wolfram Alpha to the list of search engines in Firefox. Even if you don’t plan on using Wolfram Alpha on a daily basis, it’s a good one to have because it makes it readily available without having to visit the actual site.

SlimSearch 0.2.0

SlimSearch is a great, simple search plugin that lets you select text on any webpage and instantly send it to a large number of search engines. The latest version includes support for Wolfram Alpha, too.

Wolfram Alpha Google 0.3

Finally, the most interesting WA-related plugin is aimed at those users who really love the service; so much, they want to merge it with Google. The plugin (beware, it’s experimental, and we have heard reports about it messing things up in Firefox) adds Wolfram Alpha results next to Google’s results. Therefore, whenever you search for something in Google, you get the best of both worlds. This plugin is also ideal for comparing the results between these two engines.

More Wolfram Alpha resources from Mashable:

- Top 10 Wolfram Alpha Easter Eggs

- 10 Even Better Wolfram Alpha Easter Eggs

Reviews: Firefox, Google

Tags: add-ons, Firefox, wolfram alpha

Analyst Predicts Netbook-Fighting Apple Tablet

2009-05-21T16:59:36Z

The notion of an Apple tablet selling for $500-$700 is as ludricous as it is unbelievable. But that’s exactly what Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster is claiming we can expect from the Cupertino team by this time next year. As you can probably tell, I’m having massive doubts about this.

Even if the new device will only be a 7”-10” device, there’s no way Apple will be selling it at that price point. Let’s first consider the price of an unsubsidized iPhone 3G. At $700 for the 16GB version, the iPhone will either have to dramatically decrease in price or the tablet’s price must be significantly higher. I think the latter is more likely. Let’s now consider the price points of “designer” netbooks. HP’s Mini 1000 Vivienne Tam edition costs $700. The Vivienne doesn’t even come with a touchscreen at that price. Apple’s simplistically elegant design is what sets it apart from other computers and is as much a selling point as is their OS (hence justification for the high price point compared to its “lesser” Windows-based competitors). Add a touch screen to that and you can only imagine what will happen to the price. Third, if we look at the current crop of MIDs out there, we see that a fully functional and capable MID will run north of $700 – by a lot. Considering MIDs are essentially netbooks with a resistive touchscreen in place of a keyboard, it does seem quite far-fetched that Apple will be bringing a 7-10” tablet to market at that price. Speaking of which, can you imagine how much more Apple will charge to include a capacitive touchscreen in the 10” size? To date, there aren’t many ( if any)10” capacitive touch screens out there, so for Apple to make essentially a custom sized capacitive touchscreen will skyrocket costs. Finally, the new tablet is expected to be running a hybrid OS that combines touch functionality of the iPhone while maximizing usability of standard OS X. This is a recipe for more R&D on the OS side, which should drive up the cost of the device.

Moving on to the device itself and the hardware within, Apple has resisted the move towards the netbook space due to Apple not wanting to have its name on what it perceives as a sub-par and “cheap” product. With that in mind, how likely is it that Apple will be using the Intel Atom processor that is so widely available now? If they do, they go back on their assurance that Apple doesn’t make “junky” products. So what will they use then? There’s the upcoming Intel Pineview, but that chip will probably be in the next generation of netbooks as well. If they move up to Intel’s CULV (Celeron) processor, performance won’t be up to Apple snuff. And if they were to stuff Intel’s ULV Centrino processor in there to keep up with what users have come to expect from Apple products, the price will skyrocket. In order to keep the aura of quality from Apple products, high end components must be included. SSDs will probably be used in place of traditional platters, and we already know how much of a premium this alone adds. This is a classic case of “you can’t have your cake and eat it, too.”

Don’t get me wrong, I think Apple making an in-house tablet would be great for the market in general and for tableteers in particular. With Apple’s traditionally ingenious marketing, the tabletscape will finally get the recognition it deserves. With Windows 7 coming soon and touch-based devices gaining more popularity, having Apple jump in the game will legitimize the whole segment for a much broader market. I’d love for Apple to come out with a tablet in the 10” range for around $700. It will definitely push the MID market forward and possibly help the MID market realize its potential. Unfortunately, Apple analysts and prognosticators don’t have a very solid track record when it comes to tablets. I’ve waited now for 2 long years to see something come out of Cupertino only to be disappointed time and time again. In light of the current economy, chances are slim to none that a new, ground-breaking, market-redefining product will come from Apple within the next year.

The only way I see Apple releasing a $700 tablet is if the device comes subsidized by the wireless industry. I predict the new device will have a price point closer to that of the standard MacBook line. With the advent of WWAN connectivity in netbooks, Apple can really jump on the bandwagon here to drive prices down. Much like how they did with the iPhone 3G, a partnership with wireless carriers can dramatically cut the price for consumers while still maintaining a healthy profit margin on the product. With all of this in mind, I don’t think Apples tablet (if it ever comes out) will ever be a “netbook fighter” but rather would occupy a new niche in the mobile computing world.

BYU Prof. Says University Classrooms Will Be "Irrelevant" By 2020

2009-04-21T17:12:00Z

dragoncortez writes "According to this Deseret News article, University classrooms will be obsolete by 2020. BYU professor David Wiley envisions a world where students listen to lectures on iPods, and those lectures are also available online to everyone anywhere for free. Course materials are shared between universities, science labs are virtual, and digital textbooks are free. He says, 'Higher education doesn't reflect the life that students are living ... today's colleges are typically tethered, isolated, generic, and closed.' In the world according to Wiley, universities would still make money, because they have a marketable commodity: to get college credits and a diploma, you'd have to be a paying customer. Wiley helped start Flat World Knowledge, which creates peer-reviewed textbooks that can be downloaded for free, or bought as paperbacks for $30."

Wolfram|Alpha has potential, but I can't see scientists using it for a while yet

2009-05-18T14:11:44Z

Wolfram|Alpha should have launched officially by the time you read this, though it has been live since Friday evening. The execution is slick. The different result visualizations are a great idea. It's loaded up with cool widgets and APIs. Most of the time the servers don't fall over (despite some glaring security holes). To quote FriendFeeder Iddo Friedberg it's "a free, somewhat simple interface to Mathematica". Free for personal, non-commercial use, anyway. If you've got any questions about the GDP of Singapore then wolframalpha.com is the place to go.

I think that it's a very interesting project and that it's important to bear in mind that as the homepage says:

Today's Wolfram|Alpha is the first step in an ambitious, long-term project to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable by anyone

(emphasis mine)

WA certainly has lots of potential but was anybody who used it over the weekend not left mildly let down? You'd have thought that we'd all have learned not to believe interweb hype after the Powerset and Cuil launches but even if you took all the pre-launch media guff with a liberal sprinkling of salt it was hard not to expect much from Alpha. A breathless Andrew Johnson suggested that it was "the biggest internet revolution for a generation" in The Independent: "Wolfram Alpha has the potential to become one of the biggest names on the planet".

Personally I was disappointed because I'd been expecting the wrong thing. I'd assumed that WA was akin to Cyc, which is a computational engine that takes a large manually curated database of "common sense" facts and relations and uses it to infer new knowledge. For example: searching photos for "someone at risk for skin cancer" might return a photo captioned "girl reclining on a beach". Reclining at the beach implies suntanning and suntanning implies a risk of skin cancer.

A few years back a Paul Allen venture called Project Halo took the engine behind Cyc and taught it facts and rules from chemistry textbooks; it took a lot of time and money but the resulting system had a good go at answering college level chemistry exam questions.

It turns out that WA doesn't do anything like this. One of the most interesting posts about the system that I've read comes from Doug Lenat who perhaps not coincidentally is the founder of Cyc. Lenat was impressed by WA but notes that it's a different beast altogether:

It does not have an ontology, so what it knows about, say, GDP, or population, or stock price, is no more nor less than the equations that involve that term"... [it's] able to report the number of cattle in Chicago but not (even a lower bound on) the number of mammals because it doesn't know taxonomy and reason that way

If a connection isn't represented by a manually curated equation it isn't represented at all. Apparently the Mathematica theorem prover is currently turned off as it's too computationally expensive.

One example of this is: "How old was Obama when Mitterrand was elected president of France?" It can tell you demographic information about Obama, if you ask, and it can tell you information about Mitterrand (including his ruleStartDate), but doesn't make or execute the plan to calculate a person's age on a certain date given his birth date, which is what is being asked for in this query.

It might seem harsh to criticize WA for not being what people (OK, I) wanted it to be but bear in mind that Wolfram's About and FAQ pages suggest that WA is an amazing leap forward that brings "expert level knowledge" to everybody and "implements every known model, method, and algorithm" - it's not like they were managing expectations particularly well.

Even if the computational inference part is lacking the system is still potentially useful as a well presented structured data almanac - but I'm not convinced that it's a winner for life sciences data.

Wolfram|Alpha for genetics questions

If I search for "DISC1" I get back information about the human gene (genetics coverage in WA is lacking, despite Stephen Wolfram using a sequence search in the video demo. Only the human genome is available). It tells me the transcripts, reference sequence, the coordinates of DISC1, protein functions and a list of nearby genes.

That data is useless without proper citations, though. What genome assembly release are the gene coordinates on? Are the "nearby genes" nearby on the same assembly, or do they come from a different source? Who and what predicted the transcripts, and what data did they use? Were the protein functions confirmed by work in the lab or just predicted by algorithm (if so, what's the confidence score)?

The "sources" link at the bottom provides a bunch of high level papers describing different genome databases but doesn't specifically match these to elements of data on the page: furthermore there's a disclaimer suggesting that actually the data could be from somewhere else entirely that isn't listed. Not much help.

What happens with contradictory data? The GDP of North Korea varies depending on who I ask. How does WA - or rather whoever curates that data for WA - decide which version of the answer to show?

I'm also worried about how current the data is. Lenat mentions that:

In a small number of cases, he also connects via API to third party information, but mostly for realtime data such as a current stock price or current temperature. Rather than connecting to and relying on the current or future Semantic Web, Alpha computes its answers primarily from [Wolfram's] own curated data to the extent possible; [Stephen Wolfram] sees Alpha as the home for almost all the information it needs, and will use to answer users' queries.

I can see why you wouldn't want to rely on connections to third party data sources for anything that looks like a search engine; users expect a quick response. But in fast moving scientific fields the systematic knowledge that's useful to researchers isn't static like dates of birth or melting points - datapoints get updated, corrected and deleted all the time. Does Wolfram bulk import whole datasets regularly? If I correct an error in a record at the NCBI when will Wolfram pick it up?

Can a monolithic, generalized datastore run by Wolfram staff work as well as smaller specialized databases run by experts? What's the incentive for the specialized databases to release data to Wolfram in the first place, given that WA will be a commercial product?

(for more science tinged coverage there's lots of Wolfram|Alpha chatter on Friendfeed, a new room dedicated to collecting life sciences feedback for Wolfram and Deepak has a good blog post out)

Springtime at Springers

2009-05-11T20:06:00Z

A big achievement. Bravo Springer. Arriving Spring this year. Should be soon. Feel the attractor force ?

Social Publishing Site Scribd Adds E-Commerce; 80 Percent Revenues To Publishers

2009-05-18T06:21:14Z

Document-sharing site Scribd will begin beta tests of an e-commerce platform today in an effort to tap into publishers' increasing interest in charging consumers directly for digital content. The company also hopes its e-book marketplace will tamp down criticism that it abets online piracy of printed books; complaints about Scribd and competitor Wattpad were highlighted just last week in the NYT.

Scribd, which has offered free uploading and sharing of documents since launching two years ago, believes that the rise of Amazon's Kindle has made the notion of buying texts online much more acceptable. After this week's launch, Scribd will focus on a corresponding iPhone app, similar to the idea behind the Kindle iPhone app. But that's where the similarities end.

More after the jump

—Publishers will set prices: Unlike Amazon's revenue-share model, which typically takes as much as a 70 percent split of the revenue from some content providers, the new Scribd Store will let content owners keep 80 percent of the revenue from purchases of their works, said Tammy Nam, Scribd's VP-content and marketing, in an interview with paidContent. Authors and publishers in the Scribd Store will also be able to set their own prices and DRM options. Prices currently range from $1 for a graphic novel panel to $5,000 for an in-depth market-research report on China.

"For the most part, there's a lot of work that's going to be uploaded, so we wanted to lower the barriers," Nam said of the reasoning behind the pricing and DRM structure. "Our main objective is to get new content to the site. We think it's going to be a lot like eBay (NSDQ: EBAY) in a lot of ways, where you'll have a mix of amateur and professional content sellers. But in particular, as a site with 60 million monthly readers, we believe there is a huge long tail of non-professional content."

—Combating piracy: The introduction of the Scribd Store and its self-serve DRM settings won't necessarily cut down on plagiarism and copyright violations. But by giving authors and book publishers a chance to make some money from its site, Scribd hopes to mollify its critics. Separately, Scribd said it maintains a "copyright database" of protected works and tries to police against unauthorized use. Every work uploaded to the Scribd Store will be automatically added to that database, which also covers the free site. Several publishers are already lined up for the Scribd Store. For example, the Lonely Planet community site and travel guide will sell single chapters starting at $2.50 and $12.50.

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On Semantic Web: What It Is, And What It Will Never Be

2009-05-14T14:06:57Z

Whenever there’s talk about a semantic search engine or the semantic web in general, the term “semantic” is used to describe two quite different, unrelated concepts.

One concept has to do with adding metadata to the structure of the web, which should increase the overall organization of the bulk of data that comprises the Internet, and help machines (search engines, for example) find, share, and combine this data in a way that makes more sense to humans.

The other concept has to do with humans using a language similar to human language when communicating with these machines.

I think that while the first concept is a praiseworthy effort and will probably redefine the web in the years to come, it does not mean we will be able to talk to search engines and other machines (in the broad sense of the word) as we do to humans, nor that we should even try to.

A good example of this dichotomy is Wolfram Alpha. The huge buzz around the “semantic” search engine has people up in arms about how we’ll be able to ask it “intelligent” queries and questions. From the AP story on the subject:

Which has a bigger gross domestic product, Spain or Canada?
What was New York City’s population in 1900?
When did the sun rise in Los Angeles on Nov. 15, 1973?
How far is the moon right now?
If I eat an apple and an orange, how much protein would I get?

Sounds exciting? Not to me. I can already ask Google these questions. Consider these:

Spain Canada GDP
NYC population 1900
Sunrise Los Angeles
Moon Earth distance
Apple orange nutrition protein

Go ahead, try them out. All of these will get you the answer in the very first result. Furthermore, these are all from the top of my head; only for the last one I had to modify the query a little bit, but even the first query I tried (”Apple orange protein intake”) got me the answer in the first couple of results. I even mistyped GDP (wrote GPD instead) and still got the right answer in the first result.

Yes, compared to human speech, these queries might look a little crude, but they’re actually quite effective; more effective, I dare say, than the way humans normally talk. In fact, if I added the Whys and Whats and Ifs and Buts, Google would tell me these aren’t necessary. The conclusion?

Computers and the web will not adjust to the way people talk. People will adjust to the way computers talk.

This is a complex question and it’s definitely open to debate, but I’m willing to take on any opinion on the matter (please, speak your mind in the comments). The history has shown us this: we’re not talking or waving to computers, we’re typing. We’re not manipulating data by giving human language-like queries to computers; we’re not saying: “Could you please create an application that does this and this”, we’ve devised new languages, ones that machines can understand, and we’re using those.

Yes, the semantic web will help us get better results when we search the web. Giving HTML and other data formats on the web more context and meaning (meaning that machines can make use of) through structured metadata should help us eliminate spam and conduct effective searches. But trying to make a search engine understand human speech is, for the most part, a waste of time.

Reviews: Google

Tags: Google, semantic search engines, semantic web, wolfram alpha