Technology – Page 24 – David Bradley Science Writer

Geekish girls

The Cnet newsite has a rather politically incorrect item this week listing the Top Ten girl geeks. I’m not entirely sure how they’re defining geek but among those listed are Marie Curie, Ada Byron (Lovelace), Rosalind Franklin (after whom my wife wanted to name our daughter), and…Paris Hilton (don’t ask).

So, where’s crystallography pioneer Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin? And, what about Judith Howard, first female Professor of Chemistry in the UK? Then there’s Helen Sharman first British woman in space (also a chemist), finally what about Margaret Thatcher (she trained as a chemist too and then spent her time in office effectively dismantling UK science, can’t get more geekish than that!

Brainy pictures

It always surprises me what visitors to the site are searching for when they hit these pages. A common search this month is for brain pictures. Now, from the search keywords it’s not possible to tell whether it’s a photo of the brain, an MRI scan, or a schematic that the searchers are looking for. So, to cover all bases, here are a few links that might help:

Labelled schematic brain picture
MRI scan of the brain

All these images are hosted under the US government domain (.gov) and so should be copyright free, but don’t take my word for it if you plan to use them in your science project or for anything other than personal use. Google Images, of course, would have been my first port of call for finding brain pictures.

Play real air guitar

Air guitar shirt BB King had his Lucille, old slowhand his well-worn Strat, and who could forget Jimmy Page with his Gibson SG twin-neck? You too could join the greats and learn how to play guitar, thanks to new technology from Australia’s science research centre – CSIRO. And, all you have to do is put on their new designer shirt and start strumming…the air.

Engineer Richard Helmer in the Textiles and Fibre Technology section in Geelong has created a ‘wearable instrument shirt’ (WIS) which enables users to play ‘air guitar’ and make real sounds simply by moving one arm to pick chords and the other to strum the imaginary instrument’s strings.

“Our air guitar consists of a wearable sensor interface embedded in a conventional ‘shirt’ which uses custom software to map gestures with audio samples. ‘It’s an easy-to-use, virtual instrument that allows real-time music making — even by players without significant musical or computing skills. It allows you to jump around and the sound generated.”

The WIS works by recognising and interpreting arm movements and relaying this wirelessly to a computer for audio generation. There are no trailing cables to get in the way and no risk of electrocution when you’re getting all hot and sweaty thrashing away in front of your bedroom mirror.

The real advantage of the wear-guitar is that when you reach the climax of the gig you can smash your guitar against the imaginary stack of Marshall 4x12s without wrecking thousands of dollars of equipment. Just remember, once you’re done, to ask your mom not to add it to the regular laundry.

Get research papers free

Wouldn’t it be great if you could get all those research papers you need for free without having to wait for the publishers to all convert to open access?

Well you can, kind of.

Most of the time when you scroll through the ToCs (table of contents) pages at a publisher’s site, you’ll see a little red “free” symbol next to the abstract. Click for “full paper” or “pdf” and you’re usually taken to a login page where you have to enter your subscriber username or password. That’s fine if you’re at an institution with a site-wide licence for the content, but what if you’re away from your lab and don’t have a remote login?

Well, not everyone has noticed but some of the major journals do make their content free after a set time period. Papers in PNAS, for instance, are free after six months, no login required. But, six months is a long time in research and may be too late if you’re after the most cutting edge info.

Physicists of all flavours are fairly well served with preprints courtesy of the LANL preprint server, just head on over type in your keywords and pull up papers that haven’t even been published by the journals (yet). You can read the most recent physics preprints here. Physicists after IOP journals are also well served, this publisher gives free access to papers for the first 30 days after publication, which is rather unusual.

Biological chemists are fairly well served too, at least when it comes to the Journal of Biological Chemistry, which offers pre-edited papers that have been accepted, so-called “pips” (papers in press) for free. Once the papers go live, they’re pay as you go, but until then you can grab them for nothing more than a few mouseclicks as long as you don’t mind that some t’s may not have been dotted and a few i’s may have been left uncrossed. Set yourself a Google Alert to tell you when that page changes, export it as a newsfeed or have it emailed and you’ll be able to grab the papers as soon as they appear at zero cost. Same goes for Biol Reprod and several other journals. Also in biomedical is PubMedCentral, but that’s one of those OA systems, rather than freebies by the back door. More OA journals can be found at DOAJ.

For scientists who publish in Springer journals they can make a one-off payment of $3000 at the time of writing to allow their paper to be made available to readers for free. It’s like paying for infinite digital reprints, which works out at a very small cost per reprint and is probably well within the reach of only the most prominent labs, or multi-author papers where everyone chips in a few bucks to get the word out as far and wide as possible.

Crystallographers are well served too – one source of OA crystallography material can be found here.

For chemists a quite comprehensive list of free chemistry journals can be found here and there is also Chemrefer, which we have mentioned previously which lets you search by keyword for freebie papers.

Pop-up University

Was I seeing things? I don’t know. It’s never happened before.

I just visited the site of a well-known professor at a US University, Firefox alerted me to a failed pop-up ad. Curious as to what pop-ups the University researchers might be serving I refreshed the page and this time allowed the pop-ups.

They were ads for Flirtomatic and an online gambling site.

Curious, I thought.

So, I ran Spybot S&D and Adaware Personal just to double check that I hadn’t gained some trojan or spyware along the way. Of course, these two programs may have let something slip through the net but working together they pretty much catch 99%.

Nothing, perfectly clean machine.

Opened the site again, this time in Internet Explorer 7. Same result. Pop-ups blocked. Tried it from another machine offsite and asked a couple of friends to double check. Same result.

I thought for a moment it might be University policy, but no other pages produced the pop-ups. I suspect therefore that it’s someone in the department, a student with an affiliate ad account, perhaps, hoping to cash in on site visitors. I asked the webmaster at the University to look into this and within 24h they’d replied to say the ads had been removed. So, it wasn’t just me. They didn’t say whether my hunch was right or whether it was a compromised server.

Of course, Sciencebase would never stoop so low. We carry editorially independent advertising to help subsidise the site, of course, who doesn’t? But, if you ever see a pop-up let me know and I’ll advise on how to clear your site of Spyware, because it won’t have been coded at this end of the service!

Grabbing the long tail of search engines

A revamped search engine from Heriot-Watt University in the UK makes the most of the long tail allowing searchers to drill way down into the most obscure, but nevertheless useful, pages across dozens of technology databases and sites.

“It’s a prerequisite for any successful search service in technology
subjects to have a ‘Long Tail’ (or large inventory), Heriot-Watt’s Roddy MacLeod explains, “This is because the majority of search queries made by technologists, or by others seeking information in technology-related subjects, tend to be very specific. It’s in the nature of the subjects, and the real information retrieval needs of those involved in these subjects, for granularity to be important.”

MacLeod heads up the team behind TechXtra http://www.techxtra.ac.uk/. This search engine aggregates content from a vast array of databases with technology-related content, and provides meta results that are essentially invisible to general search engines. “A search of TechXtra will search across more than 4 million records of various kinds – articles, technical reports, digital theses and dissertations, books, eprints, news items, job announcements, video, learning & teaching resources, key websites, and more – most of which relate to technology subjects,” MacLeod adds.

You can restrict searches to a particular format (technical reports, or
articles, or books, and so on), or select only specific databases among those listed with the ubiquitous Advanced Search option.

Among the most interesting of the databases for the Youtube generation is perhaps the Open Video Project, which is a growing repository of digitized video. And serious tech research can provide the full text of thousands of theses, eprints from arXiv, earthquake engineering
technical reports from Caltech, and almost half a million articles in computer and information science from CiteSeer. In addition many articles in Digital Open Access Journals (DOAJ), are available.

I’ve added a TechXtra link to the Sciencebase science search toolbox and will upgrade that to a fully-fledged search link in the next few days.

One thing which is a fairly recent development is the number of freely available full text digitised theses that TechXtra can now access. “These theses are the results of considerable research,” MacLeod told me, “they can be excellent resources on specialised topics.

HW University also produces the superb Internet Resources Newsletter.

Firefox 2 launched

Version 2.0 of the alternative web browser Firefox, has now been launched. The latest browser has many of the features of version 7 of that other browser, including a pop-up blocker, safer surfing, virus protection, tabbed browsing, and better handling of newsfeeds. One thing it will hopefully lack is the never-ending release of security patches that other browser seems to need on a regular basis.

I’m loathe to say that Sciencebase is optimised for Firefox. It’s not. In fact, it’s not optimised for any specific browser at all. It’s set up to hopefully adhere to the general W3C web standards rather than favouring any particular browser, so that it is compatible with them all. That said, I personally tend to use Firefox as my day to day browser and drop out to MSIE only to check formating of this site and others with which I work. Even if you have IE only sites you visit, there’s a plugin for Firefox that runs IE in a Firefox browser tab so you don’t even need to switch programs. Unless you’re smitten with Mr Gates’ turtleneck sweaters, I’d go for something bushier.

You can download version 2 officially from the Mozilla site from Tuesday October 24, although if you view the cache of this post you will see a set of pre-release links.

Richard Hammond Explodes (Microwave Ovens) Again

Probably a really, really good idea to take Brainiacs presenter Richard Hammond’s advice NOT TO TRY THIS AT HOME. The Brainiacs team set up two microwave ovens and stuffed in all the stuff they’d already tested in microwave ovens on previous shows (as a serious experiment so that you don’t have to do it at home). Beer, CDs, soap, petrol, champagne, wire wool and much more leads to some pretty lights and them some serious damage.

Richard Hammond Explodes (Alkali Metals)

British TV presenter Richard Hammond gained notoriety recently for smashing himself up at almost 300 mph in a dragster for the show Top Gear, but in a parallel life he was presenter of the science experiments show Brainiacs.

This is the classic alkali metals experiment we used to get to watch in chemistry class, but with a difference! These guys take it to the extreme to demonstrate not the fizzing and popping of lithium and sodium, not even just the smashed glass for potassium but the enormous almost Korean-scale explosion possible when caesium is added to water (DO NOT TRY THIS ONE AT HOME!!!).

(Sorry, the video was causing errors – removed)

Sadly it emerged recently that they probably didn’t use caesium in the final experiment at all, but an explosive charge that could nevertheless simulate the devastation a chunk of wet caesium might cause.

For more on the alkali metals and every other element come to that check out the animated periodic table.

Mobile science news

We’re beta testing a new way for Sciencebase readers to grab the science headlines. You can now access Sciencebase science news headlines on your WAP phone and similar devices, no need to tell us your phone number or anything, just follow this science wap link.

Everything seems to validate and it shows up on my cellphone and renders properly with wmlbrowser extension in Firefox, but I’d like to hear from readers who cannot access the site using their mobile device. Please post details of the device your using the browser it runs and and what you see or don’t see when you try to connect to the sciencebase wap site, thanks.

Of course, you can always get them the traditional way by clicking the RSS subscribe button at the top left of this page and following the simple instructions.