Abbot Gregor, Mendel that is, read his paper describing the results of pea plant hybridization experiments conducted over many years to the Natural Research Society of Brunn on this date in 1865. Mendel sent copies to a number of other scientists, including one C. Darwin, who didn’t pay much attention to it, since it was discovered in his library, “uncut”, that is with the fore-edge pages not trimmed to open at any page you choose. That was a very common way for publishers to save money, especially on “loser” materials such as scientific/scholarly work. Readers had to take a knife and cut the pages themselves. Poor CD didn’t know what he had missed.
Mendel
The Abbot Reads A Paper.
February 8th, 2010ORCID, About To Bloom.
February 8th, 2010Online Researcher Contributor ID, ORCID, is the name given to an initiative undertaken by a number of major scientific and technical publishers, aided by non-profits such as the Wellcome Trust and OCLC, to establish a unique and unambiguous identifier for each person or contributor in a research investigation. The major goal is to use the capabilities of the Internet/web to solve one of the stickiest searching problems: Who’s who? Many authors share the same last name and initials, even though they are active in very different fields. And many information discovery systems have standardized author entry along the pattern LASTNAME I1 I2. So, this J. Lee we encounter in search results, who is that exactly? If ORCID gets going on time, this spring, there will be one resource with over 20 million names, and each will have a unique ID string. So, thereafter, JL Lee the biochemist from Shanghai and JL Lee the orthopedist from Baltimore won’t be “polluting” each other’s name search results. Something like this would have been pretty close to impossible to field in the pre-Internet era and even now, it’s a big job. But, a lot of major players think it’s a good idea and are willing to go along. Thomson-Reuters had such a project called RESEARCHER ID, but ORCID will use the T-R data and experience, and push the whole thing a lot further. Another plus will be the ability to include IDs for people who helped materially in the conduct of a research project, but don’t appear as authors. And people can append the ORCID string to blogs, learning objects and other productions which form a major part of their scholarly activity, but which are hard to track and credit now.
ORCID
NLM Bookshelf Adds Academies Press Items.
February 4th, 2010The NIH can and does commission other agencies to conduct research, evaluation or policy studies on various topics related to its mission. Once concluded, these studies are generally released by the National Academies Press, which serves as the outlet for documents released by the National Academy of Science, Institute of Medicine, etc. The National Library of Medicine (NLM) has arranged for about 70 of these documents to be made available in digital form through its Bookshelf service, a free portal to e-versions of important reference works and textbooks in life and health science disciplines.
You can reach the Bookshelf through PubMed. At the mainpage, click on Advanced Search, above the query line and to the right. On the next page, scan down to the bottom of the page, find POPULAR, and then go down a bit more. Bookshelf is about halfway.
This is the link to the announcement:
Academies
Apologies To Mr. Burns.
February 3rd, 2010I don’t know how I missed it, but I did. Jan. 25 is the birthday of Robert Burns, and if anyone deserves a commemoration here, he certainly does. Some years ago I made the acquaintance of a neurosurgeon from Scotland who was doing a practicum here, and he introduced me to the custom of “the Burns Supper”. It seems that on RB’s birthday, Scots at home or in the Diaspora foregather to read the poems and celebrate in a communal meal. He asked me to secure somehow a volume of the Bard of Ayershire’s works, as he had left home without his, somehow. He returned it, in good shape….the book I mean. He wasn’t quite so well, as the Supper can lead to extensive merry-making, with the inevitable consequences next morning. That’s what he said. Honest.
When Suddenly, From the Sidelines……
February 2nd, 2010A lot of industry chitchat focused on the Apple Ipad as the Kindle Killer, and so placed the Ipad in some kind of OK corral situation with all or some of the dedicated readers. But it seems that a little-known start-up company called Google has been working on a slate/tablet product of its own, and this little guy seems aimed straight at the Ipad. We have only some preliminary info, and one video clip demo-ing the putative features of the Google Thing. Assuming that the clip shows a real prototype or model and is not some kind of disinformation tactic, the Google product seems very capable: good-sized keyboard, push-around graphics, enlarge/retract and some other things as well. Of course, it could just be a “concept”…without any real chance of making it into production.
But Apple doesn’t know that and can’t just reach out and rake in the pot, which is probably the message that they were supposed to get. The game is still going on and Google hasn’t shown all its cards yet. It might, if it cares to, launch a very, very good reader/slate/kindofcomputer, which could restrict the Ipad’s impetus. They’ve already ventured into the hardware arena with the GooglePhone, and might do it again.
Gslate
In another sign of exactly how quickly the e-reader competition has advanced in the last 9 months or so, recall how Amazon pretty much made the publishers it deals with goose-step to a tune they didn’t care for. That was the $9.99 sale price for e-editions of recently published books labeled as the “Kindle edition price”. The publishers thought this was way, way too low for a newly released item, especially one from a popular author. But Amazon was adamant on the money thing, because they wanted to generate sales and keep the buzz going. Well sir, along comes Apple and says, you know, that was kind of rough of Amazon to dictate your prices like that. Why don’t y’all come on over and do business with us? We’ll let you set your own prices. So, they did. And the latest word is that Amazon has had to knuckle under, if they want to get books for downloading from Macmillan, one of the bigger outfits. The others won’t be long in getting new deals for themselves either. It’s all been rather dizzying. Not all the players have entered the game. A number of the items debuted up to now may not make it any further, if the manufacturers decide the market is iffy for smaller players. Amazon, SONY, Apple, B&N, maybe Google? The dance floor is getting a little crowded.
But, in case you think that Google has been having things too much its own way for awhile now, the company is catching all kinds of heck from courts and regulators in Europe about how it does business there. Copyright concerns in Germany, privacy complaints in Italy and clashes with trans-national bodies over competitiveness are making life a little rough for the Googleers at the moment. The G wants to tread carefully, since the dollar business value of its operations in several of these countries exceeds by far the dollar value of its work in China. On the other hand, it’s easy to gripe about the dominance of the Google search engine, but since there isn’t much in the way of Continental competitors or alternatives, the regulators have a problem. If they get tough with Google, and restrict what it’s doing, who picks up the slack? No European “winner” is around to reward. It’s an interesting dilemma.
An Anniversay for the OED.
February 1st, 2010My wife drove me in to work today, and we were listening to The Writer’s Almanac on the way. It seems that today is very important for all serious scholars of our language because it was on this day that the first part of the Oxford English Dictionary was released, covering A through Ant. The original intention had been to finish the work in ten years and release four volumes. But complete the first edition consumed seventy years and took ten volumes, the past of which was issued in 1928. The OED is unique among all the reference and analytical tools of scholarship. There is quite simply nothing even remotely like it in any other language, and because of its depth and quality of its analyses, it is used as a reference source in the study of many other languages apart from English. Any major academic library in any country almost certainly has the OED. A second edition in twenty volumes appeared in 1989, but that will probably be the end of the printed editions. It’s available online, and is constantly being updated and supplemented by new research. Publishing a new print version is not a serious business proposition because of the amount of material needed and the cost involved. Such a work would need at least sixty volumes and weigh about a quarter-ton. Never happen.
Simon Winchester wrote a very good account of how the OED came to be in his book
The Meaning of Everything, which I think is now out in paperback.
More Notable Deaths.
February 1st, 2010The US lost three major authors last week. All of them, I’m pleased to day, lived very long lives. Louis Auchincloss died in New York at the age of 92. He was the chronicler of the lives and fates of the privileged who live in and around New York and especially on the Upper East Side, where the money is, Old Money that is. None of this nouveau riches stuff, made in computers or something. These old-timey WASPs inhabited the quiet offices on Wall St, had estates outside the city, married well (within the tribe, of course) and went on to make money, lots of it. Of course rich WASPs have problems too, and those were Auchincloss’s raw materials, which he mined to produce a large number of well-crafted novels and stories. The novelist J.D. Salinger died at the age of 91. His The Catcher in the Rye, published in 1950 was a great success when it was first released, and it remained for a very long time the classic portrayal of disaffected, directionless youth, as personified in the main character Holden Caulfield’s suspicion of “phonies” and his search for something true and genuine. In the story, Holden has just been tossed out of prep school and is wandering around New York City, trying to figure out what to do next. Salinger’s Nine Stories was also influential and he wrote several other novels less successful than Catcher. For much of the latter part of his life lived in retirement, some might even say in reclusion, on his property in New Hampshire. On the other hand, the locals up there say they saw him around a lot, eating in the local diner and buying things he needed for the place. The last of the recently lost is Howard Zinn, one of the last of the unabashed, bare-knuckled Old Left. His People’s History of the United States went at things quite differently from the usual recounting, paying much more attention to slavery, maltreatment of the Indians, the excesses of Gilded Age capitalism and so on. It’s hard to believe that there was once a time when a militant Left was a serious factor in American public life and when it was represented by a series of tough and articulate defenders, always ready for a fight and not inclined to back down on anything. Zinn was 87, lived an active life, and influenced a lot of people. Quite a number are also glad to see him gone, frankly, but I just put People’s History higher on my list, so even now he’s continues to bug the bosses. He spent a lot of time reminding people of things in our history we all would rather not talk much about, and he said outright that too much of what passed for history was mere self-congratulation. Americans needed to see the whole picture, “warts and all” and he helped them do it.
Ipad Reviews.
January 28th, 2010There are any number of reports circulating on the Apple Ipad. And some are very “spec rich”, in that they note every dimension and performance parameter so far released. Others are more “global”. I’m linking to the one on the Huffington Post, for no particular reason apart from just having one, for completeness’s sake. Those who need more detail will not have much trouble finding it.
This Is The Day.
January 27th, 2010I took a swim at lunchtime and TV in the means’ locker room had a business channel on. They were covering, live, Steve Jobs’ presentation of the much awaited New Gadget. Every time Jobs announced a feature or noted a performance parameter, there would be this flurry while various “analysts” and “insiders” pondered what it could mean. One guy noted that it was 30 mins into the speech and Jobs still had not talked price….perhaps an ominous sign. But, honest, there they were, grown men and women hanging on every word of what is, in effect, a press release-cum commercial-cum Nazi party rally. It was hard to get a good look at The Leader, but he seemed to be in better shape than last time around. Some of the back and forth on the panel was completely forgettable, but you have to give these guys some room. Remember the dictum: NO DEAD AIR! So they have to say something, and at times that something is rather banal or even foolish. I just shook my head. I guess I don’t understand the world. The Gadget has the uninspiring name of Ipad, which sounds like something you clean sinks with, or stuff into you jacket to make your shoulders like bigger. Surely Apple could have done better than that. But, Iphone, Ipod, Ipad. Or is it the other way round? I forget. Everybody run right out and buy at least two or three of these things.
The Royal Society At 350.
January 27th, 2010This year marks the 350th anniversary of the foundation of the Royal Society. The RS would go down in history simply for the illustriousness of its founders and members, even if it had never done anything: Wren, Boyle, Newton, Darwin, Banks, Davy, Rutherford, Einstein, Fleming, Crick and a battalion of others. Although not the first scientific society, it has been in existence longer than any other, and its journal The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society has the longest continuous publication history of all. Now, a commemorative volume has been issued, edited by the apparently tireless Bill Bryson. Called Seeing Further it contains interpretative essays by a number of contributors from both the Sciences (Richard Fortey, Richard Dawkins, Ian Stewart) and the Humanities (Neal Stephanson, Rebecca Goldstein). The book is abundantly illustrated. Here’s what the London Telegraph thought:
Seeing Further: The Story of Science and the Royal Society
Bill Bryson (Editor). HarperPress (January 7, 2010)