As well as big famous superstars at Science Foo Camp (scifoo), there is a chance to meet and “geek out” with younger engineers and scientists like Vince Smith, Aaron Schwartz and Vaughan Bell.
Aaron Schwartz and the open library project
On Sunday at scifoo, Aaron (of archive.org) gave a quick demo of the Open Library. Currently this project is taking books that are out of print and not in other book catalogues like Amazon, and making them available online. They are intending to move into archiving scientific journals, so watch that space. I’ve always wondered how the internet archive survived financially, and managed all its interesting projects (like the open library). It’s all funded by some bloke called Brewster Kahle. They provide some great services, like hosting digital artifacts for free, see http://www.archive.org/create/.
Vince Smith, Museums and Drupal
Vince Smith is a “cyber-taxonomist” at the Natural History Museum in London. He’s a world expert on parasitic lice, and uses a multi-site installation of Drupal, see vsmith.info (Hmmm, that drupal skin looks familiar…). Vince uses a drupal module for bibliographic citations, called biblio, looks handy. It’d be nice to have it on nodalpoint? Anyway, anytime spent looking around Vince’s site is time well spent.
Vaughan Bell, Mind Hacker
Vaughan Bell is a clinical psychologist. We chatted about wikipedia and science, as demonstrated by Schizophrenia. He’s also a contributor to a book on MindHacks and blogs at mindhacks.com. My suitcase is full of free O’Reilly book-schwag I filled my boots with on Friday, one of which is Vaughan’s book. Looks like it will be a good read on the plane home, because my brain is in need of some serious “optimisation”.
(Two more geeks, pictured right, but regular nodalpoint readers will know all about them already, Deepak Singh and Euan Adie.)
Theres plenty more I could blog about scifoo, but I’m all foo-ked up, geeked out and mashed-up. It’s time to go home. For more scifoo blogging see www.technorati.com/tags/scifoo, www.nature.com/scifoo and network.nature.com/blogs/tag/scifoo.
References
- Aaaaah: Freak Out! Le Freak, C’est Chic…
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