O'Really?

May 18, 2012

Web analytics: Numbers speak louder than words

Filed under: communication,mathematics,publishing,technology — Duncan Hull @ 8:58 am
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Two hundo! by B. Rosen

Two hundred light painting by B. Rosen, via  Flickr available by Creative Commons license

According to the software which runs this site, this is the 200th post here at O’Really?  To mark the occasion, here are some stats via WordPress with thoughts and general navel-gazing analysis paralysis [1] on web analytics. It all started just over six years ago at nodalpoint with help from Greg Tyrelle, the last four years have been WordPressed with help from Matt Mullenweg. WordPress stats are unfortunately very primitive compared to the likes of Google Analytics and don’t give you access to the server log files either. WordPress probably flatters to deceive by exaggerating page views and encouraging users to post more content, but it doesn’t count self-visits to the blog. Despite all the usual limitations of the murky underworld of web analytics and SEO, here are the stats, warts and all.

As of May 2012, this blog is just shy of 200,000 page views in total with 500+ comments (genuine) comments and 100,000+ spam comments nuked by the Akismet filter. The busiest day so far was the 15th February 2012 with 931 views of a post in a single day which got linked to by the Wall Street Journal. The regular traffic is pretty steady around the 1,000 views per week (~4000 views per month) mark. Most readers come from the United States, United Kingdom and Germany (jawohl! in that order) which breaks down as follows:

Top posts: What people read when they get here

The most popular pages here are as follows:

Page Views
Home page / Archives 33,977
Impact Factor Boxing 2010 17,267
Impact Factor Boxing 2009 10,652
How many journal articles have been published? 7,181
Impact Factor Boxing 2011 6,635

Are we obsessed with dodgy performance metrics like journal impact factors? I’m not, honest guv’, but lots of people on t’interwebs clearly are.

Top search terms: How people get here

The search engines send traffic here through the following search terms:

Search terms Views
plos biology impact factor 2010 3,175
impact factor 2010 1,631
impact factor 1,589
plos biology impact factor 1,566
impact factor 2009 1,333

Is there a correlation between Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) and Impact Factor (IF)? Probably. Will it ever stop? Probably not.

Referrals: Spread the link love

It’s not just search engines that send you traffic…

Referrer Views
Search Engines 16,339
cs.man.ac.uk 4,654
Twitter 2,334
friendfeed.com 2,262
flickr.com 2,077
researchblogging.org 1,904
en.wordpress.com 1.037

… social media (twitter, friendfeed, flickr, researchblogging and wordpress etc) refers nearly as much traffic as the search engines do. I fit the demographic of bloggers previously described [1]: male, educated and a life scientist.

Top five clicks: How people leave

This is what people are clicking on:

URL Clicks
isiknowledge.com/JCR 914
feeds2.feedburner.com/oreally 407
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_on_arrival 396
aps.org/publications/apsnews/200811/zero-gravity.cfm 363
plosbiology.org 305

Dear Thomson Reuters, you should have an associates scheme like Amazon. I’m advertising your commercial product (Journal Citation Reports) for free! I’m far too kind, please send me a generous cheque immediately for my troubles or I will remove all links to your product.

Lots of people looking for the lyrics of the Friends sitcom jingle don’t know what “Your love life’s D.O.A.” means. Glad to be of service.

Conclusions

Traffic here is fairly modest compared to some blogs, but is still significant and to my mind justifies the time spent blogging. It is great fun to blog, and like most things in life, it can be very time consuming to do well. There is a long way to go before reaching the 10,000 hours milestone, maybe one day.

What people are actually interested in reading, and what you think they will be interested in reading are often two completely different things. Solo blogging has disadvantages and it’s been very tempting to try and join one of the many excellent blogging collectives like PLoS Blogs, Occam’s Typewriter or the Guardian science blogs. For the meantime though, going it alone on a personal domain name has it’s advantages too.

So, if you’ve read, commented or linked to this site, thank you very much. I hope you enjoy reading these posts as much as I enjoy writing them. Like smartphones and wifi, it’s hard to imagine life without blogs and bloggers.

References

  1. Shema, H., Bar-Ilan, J., & Thelwall, M. (2012). Research Blogs and the Discussion of Scholarly Information PLoS ONE, 7 (5) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0035869

May 16, 2012

Blue Moon hypothesis tested in Large Football Collider (LFC)

Filed under: football,funding,funny,Science — Duncan Hull @ 7:36 am
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The Manchester Derby 2007. What a difference five years makes

“This is how it feels to be City, this is how it feels to be small, this is how it feels when your team wins nothing at all.”  [1,3]

If you are not interested in Football Science, look away now. Normal service will be resumed shortly.

There is a controversial idea in football that money buys trophies, also known as Mancini’s Blue Moon hypothesis.

Two rival Universities have led the way in testing this idea, The University of Old Trafford and the The University of Eastlands, both in Manchester. One institute is led by a Scot, Professor Ferguson the other by an Italian, Professor Mancini. Both Universities have assembled teams of elite researchers including Doctor Vidic (PhD, University of Spartak Moscow) and Doctor Kompany (PhD, University of Hamburger) in their respective labs to carry out the necessary experiments.

Professor Mancini’s research laboratory have recently produced some intriguing experimental results by winning the 2012 Premier League title with generous funding from the Mansour Research Council (MRC) [2] (not to be confused with the Medical Research Council). The MRC has invested significantly more funding than rival bodies like the Glazer Research Council (GRC) not be be confused with the Global Research Council, which has opened up exciting new research opportunities in applied football science.

Some leading football scientists say Mancini’s Blue Moon hypothesis has been proven beyond all doubt; money does buy you trophies. Other scientists say that is it too early to tell, these results are inconclusive and more research is needed. Professor Ferguson insists that other factors besides money are significant in winning trophies.

Experimentalists will resume their research when the Large Football Collider (LFC) is switched back on in August 2012 after its annual summer shutdown. Is Mancini’s hypothesis proven or not? Tune in next season …

References

  1. Inspiral Carpets (1990) This Is How It Feels to be Lonely, This Is How It Feels to be Small Mute records
  2. The Premier League Research Council (PLRC) funds research into basic and applied football science in collaboration with the Mansour Research Council and many others. These football science councils have a larger fund than all the other traditional scientific research councils combined (EPSRC, BBSRC, NERC, MRC, STFC and PPARC etc).

May 11, 2012

Journal Fire: Bonfire of the Vanity Journals?

Filed under: engineering,informatics,publishing,Science — Duncan Hull @ 1:15 pm
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Fire by John Curley on Flickr

Fire by John Curley, available via Creative Commons license.

When I first heard about Journal Fire, I thought, Great! someone is going to take all the closed-access scientific journals and make a big bonfire of them! At the top of this bonfire would be the burning effigy of a wicker man, representing the very worst of the vanity journals [1,2].

Unfortunately Journal Fire aren’t burning anything just yet, but what they are doing is something just as interesting. Their web based application allows you to manage and share your journal club online. I thought I’d give it a whirl because a friend of mine asked me what I thought about a paper on ontologies in biodiversity [3]. Rather than post a brief review here, I’ve posted it over at Journal Fire. Here’s some initial thoughts on a quick test drive of their application:

Pros

On the up side Journal Fire:

  • Is a neutral-ish third party space where anyone can discuss scientific papers.
  • Understands common identifiers (DOI and PMID) to tackle the identity crisis.
  • Allows you to post simple anchor links in reviews, but not much else, see below.
  • Does not require you to use cumbersome syntax used in ResearchBlogging [4], ScienceSeeker and elsewhere
  • Is integrated with citeulike, for those that use it
  • It can potentially provide many different reviews of a given paper in one place
  • Is web-based, so you don’t have to download and install any software, unlike alternative desktop systems Mendeley and Utopia docs

Cons

On the down side Journal Fire:

  • Is yet another piece social software for scientists. Do we really need more, when we’ve had far too many already?
  • Requires you to sign up for an account without  re-using your existing digital identity with Google, Facebook, Twitter etc.
  • Does not seem to have many people on it (yet) despite the fact it has been going since at least since 2007.
  • Looks a bit stale, the last blog post was published in 2010. Although the software still works fine, it is not clear if it is being actively maintained and developed.
  • Does not allow much formatting in reviews besides simple links, something like markdown would be good.
  • Does not understand or import arXiv identifiers, at the moment.
  • As far as I can see, Journal Fire is a small startup based in Pasadena, California. Like all startups, they might go bust. If this happens, they’ll take your journal club, and all its reviews down with them.

I think the pros mostly outweigh the cons, so if you like the idea of a third-party hosting your journal club, Journal Fire is worth a trial run.

References

  1. Juan Carlos Lopez (2009) We want your paper! The similarity between high-end restaurants and scientific journals Spoonful of Medicine, a blog from Nature Medicine
  2. NOTE: Vanity journals should not to be confused with the The Vanity Press.
  3. Andrew R. Deans, Matthew J. Yoder & James P. Balhoff (2012). Time to change how we describe biodiversity, Trends in Ecology & Evolution, 27 (2) 84. DOI: 10.1016/j.tree.2011.11.007
  4. Shema, H., Bar-Ilan, J., & Thelwall, M. (2012). Research Blogs and the Discussion of Scholarly Information PLoS ONE, 7 (5) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0035869

May 10, 2012

The Lovelock Laboratory: A fantasy workplace in the West Country

Filed under: book review,mathematics,Science — Duncan Hull @ 9:56 pm
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έροτας : love, as described by an implicit heart curve (x² + y² − 1)³ − x² y³ = 0

An equation of love (x² + y² − 1)³ − x² y³ = 0

Former Mancunian James Lovelock runs the kind of a laboratory most scientists can only fantasise about working in as they grind through the humdrum bureaucracy of peer-review and never-ending grant applications. Lovelock is fortunate enough to run a completely independent, self-funded lab located in the beautiful West Country. There’s a fascinating interview with him on The Life Scientific with Jim Al-Khalili where he says lots of interesting things about elocution lessons, nuclear power, climate change and his grand theory of planet earth, Gaia [1,2,3]. When asked, he also made this interesting comment about being an indepedendent scientist [4]:

“It’s the most wonderful thing to do [being independent]. I keep on saying that scientists are just like artists if they are creative. If you were an artist, would you want to spend your life in an institute for fine art, quibbling with other academics about the different styles of painting? You’d rather be in your garage doing your masterpiece and selling a lot of art to some tourists to pay the way. That’s been my life as a scientist. ”

The audio file of the broadcast is available for download or just click on the play icon below:

So to become a truly independent scientist, you either need to win the lottery, nobel prize or possibly invent the modern equivalent of electron capture detection to bankroll running a lab from the bottom of your garden.

Well if nothing else, it’s an entertaining fantasy to while away dull moments in the real world…

References

  1. James Lovelock (2009). The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning ISBN:1846141850, Penguin
  2. Andrew Watson (2009). Final warning from a sceptical prophet: James Lovelock fears that humanity faces widespread death and mass migration as Earth’s systems become further unbalanced by climate change Nature, 458 (7241), 970-971 DOI: 10.1038/458970a
  3. John Gribbin and Mary Gribbin (2009) He Knew He Was Right: The Irrepressible Life of James Lovelock and Gaia, ISBN:1846140161, Allen Lane
  4. Matthew Reisz (2012) Free-range thinkers: Independent scholars can confound, complement and challenge the work of their campus counterparts. Times Higher Education

May 8, 2012

BBC Connected Studio: Get involved in shaping digital content at the Beeb

Filed under: communication,UK,web — Duncan Hull @ 10:22 am
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BBC: The Olympic Broadcaster

Olympic broadcasting by the BBC from Quay House, Salford Quays, Manchester

The BBC is currently seeking external partners for collaborative innovation around BBC Online. This is happening through a series of events called BBC Connected Studio. It’s open to small, medium and micro businesses, individuals and digital agencies from the creative sector who want to work with the BBC developing new functions, features or formats for online audiences.

The first studio was held in Manchester last Friday focusing on Home Page, Search and Navigation (HPSN), a part of the Beeb that gets around 9 million (and up to 40 million) unique visitors every week from the UK alone. International visitors to this page get sent to bbc.com which is completely separate. Here are some rough notes on the event from a non-BBC outsiders perspective.

The basic format of the day goes something like this:

  • You are given a brief
  • There is an introduction from various people to kick things off
  • You have access to experts within the BBC, to pick their brains
  • There is time to work up your ideas on the day
  • Then you pitch an idea in ~2 minutes (like a much friendlier version of Dragons’ Den) to an assembled audience of about 80-ish people collected on the day.
  • There is time for questions and feedback
  • Successful pitches are notified after the event with the opportunity to build a functioning prototype and potential pilot project

For the event last Friday, the studio was kicked off by introductions from Ralph Rivera and Adrian Woolard, James Thornett and Clare Hudson.

During the day, there was expert advice available, formally at Speakers’ Corner and informally via conversation. This covered a wide range of topics including Simon Williams on audiences, Tim Fiennes on market analysis, Tom Broughton on homepage technology, Steve Gibbons on user experience and Phil Poole on personalisation.

Following this there was time to work on concepts and plan presentations, including a very useful audience feedback session with some real users of the BBC home page.

At the end of the day there were just over 20 open public pitches and 9 closed private pitches (those with sensitive intellectual property rights). I teamed up with Nick Drummond (of ATilla the AT-AT pet fame) to pitch an idea called Show Me More – providing links to BBC content directly on the home page (bbc.co.uk).

What worked well

The event went well, especially since this was the first one of the series. The audience feedback sessions and speakers corner were well organised and well attended. Whatever the outcome, this was a good opportunity to bid for work, see what goes on at the BBC and meet some of the people behind the BBC online. There was lots of advice available on how to work up a pitch, the audience was friendly and respectful. It was enlightening to watch other people’s presentations. The fifth floor of Quay house at MediaCityUK (pictured above) is an ideal venue for this kind of event with lots of different sized spaces for collaborating, thinking, eating, drinking and enjoying the fine views of Manchester from an elevated perspective.

How it could be improved

There was (inevitably?) a fair amount repetition in the 20 pitches as everyone was pitching to the same brief. It might be better next time to have fewer pitches and encourage people to work in slightly larger groups and reduce duplication. You can’t say very much in two minutes but perhaps that’s the idea…

As an aside, I’d love to see a public open API to BBC content, as far as I know there isn’t really one (yet). An open API would allow innovation by opening up content and services to organisations and businesses outside the BBC. Something along the lines of the Twitter API, Flickr API or Google Maps API would be great. An API seems to fit squarely with the needs of it’s constitution as a public service broadcaster. I asked about this at Speakers’ Corner and on twitter (speakers’ corner of the interwebs). There are security issues (as usual) but:

I think there might be a BBC SPARQL endpoint somewhere (there certainly used to be), which is an API of sorts but can’t find the exact location at the time of posting this.

All in all, BBC Connected Studio was informative and fun, thanks to Adrian Woolard and everyone at the BBC for your excellent hospitality. If you’re interested in taking part, it’s well worth joining in.

How to get involved

If you’d liked to get involved in BBC Connected, there are various events scheduled in 2012 on different products at the Beeb including: Weather & Travel, CBeebies, UX&D, CBBC, Sport, TV / iPlayer, News, Knowledge & Learning, Radio & Music. For more info subscribe to the BBC Internet blog, follow tweets @BBC_Connected or visit BBC Connected Studio.

May 3, 2012

Need to re-invent the Web (badly)? There’s an App for that!

Filed under: engineering,informatics,mobile,technology — Duncan Hull @ 1:39 pm
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The Mobile App Trap

The App Trap: Why have just one Web App when you can have hundreds of mobile Apps? A selection of popular Android apps from Google Play, also available for iPad and iPhone from the Apple App Store

I love the convenience of mobile applications but hate the way they re-invent the wheel and are killing the Web. What can be done about it?

I’m in love with the mobile Web

I’ve been smitten with the Web since first venturing out on the information superhighway back in the nineties. This love affair is taken to a new level with the advent of the mobile Web. As an incurable information junkie, having access to news is on the move is great. Using location based services like Google Maps is fantastic, on foot, bike or in the car. I love nerdily scanning barcodes to read Amazon book reviews while browsing the shelves in bookshops, much to Tim Waterstone’s annoyance. And it can be great to have wikipedia in your pocket to settle arguments down the pub.

I hate the mobile Web too

But there’s a big problem with all this appy clappy mobile fun, it’s killing the Web through fragmentation, both for producers and consumers of information. Let me explain.

One of the great things about the Web is that you there is one app to rule them all; a “killer app” called a Web browser. There are several flavours, but they all basically do the same thing using similar technology: they let you surf the Web. One software application (a browser), gives you access to an almost infinite number of Web applications. Wonderfully simple, wonderfully powerful – we’ve got so used to it we sometimes take it for granted.

Now compare this to the mobile Web where each page you visit on a mobile suggests that you download an app to read it. Where there used to be just one application, now there are thousands of glorified “me too” Web browsers apps many of which have re-invented the Web, badly.

Consider the applications in the table below and illustrated on the right. They are all accessible from a Web browser on one of the “four screens ”:  desktop, mobile, tablet and smart-TV:

Native mobile app Purpose Web app
Amazon mobile Online retailer Amazon.com
BBC News mobile News and propaganda news.bbc.co.uk
The Economist mobile More news and propaganda economist.com
eBay mobile online garage sale ebay.com
Flickr mobile photo sharing flickr.com
Guardian mobile Even more news and propaganda guardian.co.uk
Google Reader mobile Feed reader reader.google.com
Google Maps mobile Maps and navigation maps.google.com
MetOffice mobile UK Weather metoffice.gov.uk
PostOffice mobile Postcode / Address finder royalmail.com/postcode-finder
Google Search mobile Search engine google.com
Google Translate mobile Language translator translate.google.com
Twitter mobile Entertaining time-wasting application twitter.com
Wikipedia mobile Encyclopædia en.wikipedia.org/wiki
WordPress mobile Blogging tool wordpress.com
YouTube mobile Videos youtube.com

As you can see, users are encouraged to download, install, understand and maintain sixteen different apps to enjoy this small part of the mobile Web. And this is just the tip of the iceberg, there’s bucket-loads more apps like this in Google Play and the App Store. As a user, you could just use a mobile Web browser on your phone, but you’ll be discouraged from doing so. We’ll return to this later.

Producers and consumers both suffer

As well as being a pain for users who have to manage hundreds of apps on their phones and tablets, the pain is magnified for producers of data too. Instead of designing, building and maintaining one Web application to work across a range of different screens (a challenging but not impossible task), many have chosen to develop lots of different apps. Take twitter for example, in addition to the desktop and Web apps, twitter currently makes no fewer than five different applications just for tablets and phones:

    1. twitter.com/download/ipad (for iPad)
    2. twitter.com/download/blackberry (for Blackberry)
    3. twitter.com/download/wp7 (for Windows phones)
    4. twitter.com/download/android (for Android)
    5. twitter.com/download/iphone (for iPhones)

So a challenging task of delivering content onto a range of different devices has now been transformed into an almost impossible task of building and managing many different apps. It’s not just Twitter, Inc. that chooses to play this game. Potentially any company or organisation putting data on the mobile Web might consider doing this by employing an army of android, blackberry, iPhone and windows developers on top of the existing Web developers already on the payroll. That’s good news for software engineers, but bad news for the organisations that have to pay them. Managing all this complexity isn’t cheap.

Not Appy: How do we get out of this mess?

In the rush to get mobile, many seem to have forgotten why the Web is so successful and turned their back on it. We’ve re-invented the wheel and the Web browser. I’m not the first [1] and certainly not the last [2] to notice this. Jonathan Zittrain even predicted it would happen [3,4] with what he calls “tethered devices”. One solution to this problem, as suggested at last months International World Wide Web conference in Lyon by some bloke called Tim, is to develop mobile Web apps rather than native mobile apps:

There are lots of examples of this. Sites like trains.im provide train times via a simple Web-based interface, no app required. Many Web sites have  two versions, a desktop one and a mobile one. Wikipedia has a mobile site at en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki, Flickr at m.flickr.com, The Economist at m.economist.com, BBC at m.bbc.co.uk/news and so on. But in many cases these sites are poor cousins of the native mobile apps that software developers have focused their efforts on, diluting their work across multiple apps and platforms.

Maybe it’s too late, maybe I’m suffering from the “suspicious of change” syndrome described by Douglas Adams like this:

  1. everything that’s already in the world when you’re born is just normal;
  2. anything that gets invented between then and before you turn thirty is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it;
  3. anything that gets invented after you’re thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it until it’s been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really.

The mobile Web makes me suspicous because many apps re-invent the wheel. I’ve argued here that it is against the natural order of the Web, we’ve waved goodbye to the good old Web [5] and its the beginning of the end. I really hope not, it would be a tragedy to carry on killing the Web as it’s given us so much and was designed specifically to solve the problems described above. Let’s hope native mobile apps gradually turn out to be alright really.

References

  1. Gary Marshall (2011). Could smartphone apps be taking us back to the days of “best viewed with … ”? Net Magazine
  2. Jason Pontin (2012). Why Publishers Don’t Like Apps: The future of media on mobile devices isn’t with Apps but with the Web Technology Review
  3. Jonathan Zittrain (2007). Saving the internet. Harvard Business Review, 85 (6) PMID: 17580647
  4. Jonathan Zittrain (2009). The Future of the Internet: And How to Stop It Penguin, ISBN:014103159X
  5. Hamish MacKenzie (2012) Web 2.0 Is Over, All Hail the Age of Mobile, Pandodaily

April 25, 2012

Bicycle sharing with a twist: Brompton Dock launches at UK railway stations

Filed under: cycling,technology — Duncan Hull @ 11:02 am
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Brompton, Brompton, Straight Outta Brompton. New Brompton dock launches in in Manchester.

Bicycle sharing is becoming increasingly popular in cities around the world. London has Boris Bikes, Paris has Vélo Liberté: Vélib’ and New York should soon have thousands of new Bixi-bikes this summer. There are scores of public cycle hire schemes in other cities. With the health benefits of cycling well documented [1] and with the potential reduction of traffic congestion which blight many of our cities, it’s not difficult to see why sharing schemes are gaining popularity.

An interesting new cycle sharing scheme launched in the UK last month, Brompton Dock, which hires out Brompton folding bicycles from railway stations around the UK. By the end of 2012 there will be 17 of these docks around the country. The twist (or fold) with Brompton Dock is that these bikes neatly fold away into secure lockers and also under your office desk or in a cupboard at home. Here are some quick thoughts from a trial spin earlier this month:

Brompton Dock Pros Brompton Dock Cons
They are beautifully designed and built bicycles, folding is very simple and ingenious (once you’ve worked it out). The bikes have high quality components (hub dynamo), shimano gears etc Quality comes at a price and Brompton bikes aren’t cheap. Although hiring is cheap (see below), you’re liable to a ~£700 replacement charge if it gets stolen. Ouch!
You can take this bike anywhere (train, office, cupboard, boot of your car etc). Handy if you live in a flat with no outdoor cycle storage. No lock provided to secure the bike. You can just fold it away but this isn’t handy if you’re just popping into the shop. It’s probably not a great idea to lock it up for long because these expensive bikes will be a target for theft.
Bromptons have a pretty sturdy construction, which is just as well because hire bikes have to take a fair amount of abuse. Bromptons are quite heavy, weighing around 12 kilos. You’ll notice the weight when you try to carry the bike with one hand onto a train. On the road, they’re not as zippy as a lighter machine and the small wheels give a different handling to larger wheeled bikes.
Brompton dock is a nation-wide scheme which allows you to hire from one city and drop off in a completely different one, something you can’t do with Boris Bikes. Most cities have only one or just a small handful of these docks so city-wide hop-on, hop-off is more limited than other cycle sharing schemes
No luggage carrying equipment comes as standard, there is no pannier rack to put things on.
Secure lockers mean that vandalism will be less of an issue than with other schemes. The lockers have a very nifty keyless system where you send a text message and receive a unique code to release a bike (once you’ve registered)
Comes with a pump, neatly tucked away on the frame. A minor point, but I found the pump can fall off easily and be tricky to get back on.
A great way of “try-before-you-buy” a Brompton of your own. Prices look reasonable to me and there are a wide range of pricing options starting from just one week hire and membership for a mere ten quid. You might be reluctant to return it to the dock, and may even want to buy one of your own!

Personally I think Brompton Dock is a great idea and it will be interesting to see how successful it is. If Brompton Dock, and  other bicycle sharing schemes, get more people out of cars and onto bicycles and trains then it can only be a good thing. Try for yourself, you can hire one from a UK station near you in 2012.

(Disclaimer, I’m not being paid by Brompton Dock or Brompton Bicycles to write this review, but they did give me a free T-shirt for being their first (!) customer).

References

  1. Kremers, S., de Bruijn, G., Visscher, T., Deeg, D., Thomése, G., Visser, M., van Mechelen, W., & Brug, J. (2012). Associations between Safety from Crime, Cycling, and Obesity in a Dutch Elderly Population: Results from the Longitudinal Aging Study Amsterdam Journal of Environmental and Public Health, 2012, 1-6 DOI: 10.1155/2012/127857

April 2, 2012

Open Data Manchester: Twenty Four Hour Data People

Filed under: cycling,data mining,Science,technology — Duncan Hull @ 12:38 pm
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Sean Ryder at the Hacienda by Tangerine Dream on flickr

Sean Ryder, the original twenty-four hour Manchester party person of the Happy Mondays, spins the discs at the Wickerman festival in 2008. Creative commons licensed image via Tangerine Dream on flickr.com

According to Francis Maude, Open Data is the raw material for “next industrial revolution”. Now you should obviously take everything politicians say with a large pinch of salt (especially Maude) but despite the political hyperbole, when it comes to data he is onto something.

According to wikipedia, which is considerably more reliable than politicians, Open Data is:

“the idea that certain data should be freely available to everyone to use and republish as they wish, without restrictions from copyright, patents or other mechanisms of control.”

Open Data is slowly having an impact in the world of science [1] and also in wider society. Initiatives like data.gov in the U.S. and data.gov.uk in England, also known as e-government or government 2.0, have put huge amounts of data in the public domain and there is plenty more data in the pipeline. All of this data makes novel applications possible, like cycling injury maps showing accident black spots, and many others just like it.

To discuss the current status of Open Data in Greater Manchester there were two events last week:

  1. The Open Data Manchester meetup “24 hour data people” [2] at the the Manchester Digital Laboratory (“madlab”), which recently made BBC headlines with the DIY bio project
  2. The Discover Open Data event at the Cornerhouse cinema
Here is a brief and incomplete summary of what went on at these events:

(more…)

March 15, 2012

Be nice to nerds … you may end up working for them

Filed under: conferences,engineering,funny,google,Googleology,mathematics,Science,technology — Duncan Hull @ 1:21 pm
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Thought for the day: be nice to nerds because you might end of up working for them.

This sound advice comes from DARPA defector and newly appointed Googler Regina Dugan (see picture below).

Regina Dugan by Steve Jurvetson

What’s that you say? You’re not sure exactly what a nerd is? There are many definitions but the graphic below sums it up better than the Oxford English Dictionary ever could.

Are you a nerd, geek, dork or dweeb?

But beware! Many self-confessed nerds may actually be dorks, dweebs or geeks. It’s a grey area out there in the Venn of Nerdery, not quite as clear cut as the diagram above. To be sure of treating nerds right, you’ll need to be nice to dorks, dweebs and geeks too! See video for details…

[Creative Commons licensed picture of Regina Dugan at TED via Steve Jurvetson]

February 15, 2012

The Open Access Irony Awards: Naming and shaming them

Filed under: data mining,publishing,Science,technology — Duncan Hull @ 11:23 am
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Ask me about open access by mollyaliOpen Access (OA) publishing aims to make the results of scientific research available to the widest possible audience. Scientific papers that are published in Open Access journals are freely available for crucial data mining and for anyone or anything to read, wherever they may be.

In the last ten years, the Open Access movement has made huge progress in allowing:

“any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers.”

But there is still a long way to go yet, as much of the world’s scientific knowledge remains locked up behind publisher’s paywalls, unavailable for re-use by text-mining software and inaccessible to the public, who often funded the research through taxation.

Openly ironic?

ironicIronically, some of the papers that are inaccessible discuss or even champion the very Open Access movement itself. Sometimes the lack of access is deliberate, other times accidental – but the consequences are serious. Whether deliberate or accidental, restricted access to public scientific knowledge is slowing scientific progress [1]. Sometimes the best way to make a serious point is to have a laugh and joke about it. This is what the Open Access Irony Awards do, by gathering all the offenders in one place, we can laugh and make a serious point at the same time by naming and shaming the papers in question.

To get the ball rolling, here is are some examples:

  • The Lancet owned by Evilsevier, sorry I mean Elsevier, recently  published a paper on “the case for open data” [2] (please login to access article). Login?! Not very open…
  • Serial offender and über-journal Science has an article by Elias Zerhouni on the NIH public access policy [3] (Subscribe/Join AAAS to View Full Text), another on “making data maximally available” [4] (Subscribe/Join AAAS to View Full Text) and another on a high profile advocate of open science [5] (Buy Access to This Article to View Full Text) Irony of ironies.
  • From Nature Publishing Group comes a fascinating paper about harnessing the wisdom of the crowds to predict protein structures [6]. Not only have members of the tax-paying public funded this work, they actually did some of the work too! But unfortunately they have to pay to see the paper describing their results. Ironic? Also, another published in Nature Medicine proclaims the “delay in sharing research data is costing lives” [1] (instant access only $32!)
  • From the British Medical Journal (BMJ) comes the worrying news of dodgy American laws that will lock up valuable scientific data behind paywalls [7] (please subscribe or pay below). Ironic? *
  • The “green” road to Open Access publishing involves authors uploading their manuscript to self-archive the data in some kind of  public repository. But there are many social, political and technical barriers to this, and they have been well documented [8]. You could find out about them in this paper [8], but it appears that the author hasn’t self-archived the paper or taken the “gold” road and pulished in an Open Access journal. Ironic?
  • Last, but not least, it would be interesting to know what commercial publishers make of all this text-mining magic in Science [9], but we would have to pay $24 to find out. Ironic?

These are just a small selection from amongst many. If you would like to nominate a paper for an Open Access Irony Award, simply post it to the group on Citeulike or group on Mendeley. Please feel free to start your own group elsewhere if you’re not on Citeulike or Mendeley. The name of this award probably originated from an idea Jonathan Eisen, picked up by Joe Dunckley and Matthew Cockerill at BioMed Central (see tweet below). So thanks to them for the inspiration.

For added ironic amusement, take a screenshot of the offending article and post it to the Flickr group. Sometimes the shame is too much, and articles are retrospectively made open access so a screenshot will preserve the irony.

Join us in poking fun at the crazy business of academic publishing, while making a serious point about the lack of Open Access to scientific data.

References

  1. Sommer, Josh (2010). The delay in sharing research data is costing lives Nature Medicine, 16 (7), 744-744 DOI: 10.1038/nm0710-744
  2. Boulton, G., Rawlins, M., Vallance, P., & Walport, M. (2011). Science as a public enterprise: the case for open data The Lancet, 377 (9778), 1633-1635 DOI: 10.1016/S0140-6736(11)60647-8
  3. Zerhouni, Elias (2004). Information Access: NIH Public Access Policy Science, 306 (5703), 1895-1895 DOI: 10.1126/science.1106929
  4. Hanson, B., Sugden, A., & Alberts, B. (2011). Making Data Maximally Available Science, 331 (6018), 649-649 DOI: 10.1126/science.1203354
  5. Kaiser, Jocelyn (2012). Profile of Stephen Friend at Sage Bionetworks: The Visionary Science, 335 (6069), 651-653 DOI: 10.1126/science.335.6069.651
  6. Cooper, S., Khatib, F., Treuille, A., Barbero, J., Lee, J., Beenen, M., Leaver-Fay, A., Baker, D., Popović, Z., & players, F. (2010). Predicting protein structures with a multiplayer online game Nature, 466 (7307), 756-760 DOI: 10.1038/nature09304
  7. Epstein, Keith (2012). Scientists are urged to oppose new US legislation that will put studies behind a pay wall BMJ, 344 (jan17 3) DOI: 10.1136/bmj.e452
  8. Kim, Jihyun (2010). Faculty self-archiving: Motivations and barriers Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology DOI: 10.1002/asi.21336
  9. Smit, Eefke, & Van Der Graaf, M. (2012). Journal article mining: the scholarly publishers’ perspective Learned Publishing, 25 (1), 35-46 DOI: 10.1087/20120106

[CC licensed picture “ask me about open access” by mollyali.]

* Please note, some research articles in BMJ are available by Open Access, but news articles like [7] are not. Thanks to Trish Groves at BMJ for bringing this to my attention after this blog post was published. Also, some “articles” here are in a grey area for open access, particularly “journalistic” stuff like news, editorials and correspondence, as pointed out by Becky Furlong. See tweets below…

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