The British Library and Microsoft collaborated on this wonderful exemplar, Turning Pages. I played with it for a bit and it's wonderful. Just point your browser to the Turning Page WPF application URL and it will be automatically started. You need to have .NET 3.0 installed or running Vista.

... but he's going to turn up soon, I am sure.

"Coast Guard searches for missing Microsoft researcher"  (link doesn't work anymore)

Google news

... but he's going to turn up soon, I am sure.

"Coast Guard searches for missing Microsoft researcher"

Here's an example where a physics engine is utilized in the management of documents. I don't actually like the interface for day-to-day activities but I can see how useful ideas/technologies can be extracted and integrated in modern desktop/applications user interfaces.

(YouTube video)

Found this cool app for managing my Netflix queue (via Kostas' blog). Nice!

I got the following email from the Public Library of Science and signed their petition. If you agree, please consider signing it too.

Dear PLoS Letter Signers,

We are writing to you because you signed the PLoS open letter some years ago urging scientific publishers to allow the research reports that have appeared in their journals to be distributed freely by independent, online public libraries of science. As you supported that initiative we are now asking you to support a further one that will encourage the European Commission to take action that will secure vastly increased access to publicly-funded science output. Professor Harold Varmus, Nobel laureate and co-originator of the PLoS open letter, has already put his name to the petition and we encourage you to follow his lead.

In the wake of the publication of the report from the "EU Study on the Economic and Technical Evolution of the Scientific Publication Markets of Europe" a consortium of organisations working in the scholarly communication arena is sponsoring a petition to the European Commission to demonstrate support for Open Access and for the recommendations in the report. Signatures may be added on behalf of individuals or institutions.

Please register your support for Open Access in this way. To sign the petition, please go to http://www.ec-petition.eu/

The sponsoring organisations are JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee, UK), SURF (Netherlands), SPARC Europe, DFG (Deutsches Forschungsgemeinschaft, Germany), DEFF (Danmarks Elektroniske Fag- og Forskningsbibliotek, Denmark).

Warm regards,

Mark Patterson, Director of Publishing

I have been getting so many spam comments, I've decided to spend few minutes adding antispam support for pblog. I suspect that the spammers will manage to bypass the very simple protection I've built but it'll do for now.

Please let me know if you encounter any problems. If you don't type the numbers in the given string, pblog will not accept your comment and will fail silently.

I am planning to reimplement some aspects of pblog so I can play with microformats, ASP.NET AJAX, WPF/E, etc. I will revisit the antispam functionality then.

Yesterday, I was talking with Mike Buschman of Windows Live Academic Search and I set myself a challenge: I suggested to him that I could demonstrate the integration of scholarly publication search directly within Word 2007, all during the course of the presentation we were just about to attend (I had already seen the slides so I could code during the talk).

Yes, I did manage to do it within the time limits of the presentation. The screenshot below shows the end-result. The custom taskpane at the right allows one to search for keywords against Windows Live Academic Search. The user chooses a paper from the returned results to insert in the current document's bibliography (if you haven't seen Word 2007's bibliography-related features, you should check them out). Once the paper is in the bibliography, it can be inserted in the document as usual.

Most of the time was spent on figuring out the format of the XML structure expected by the Word 2007 bibliography-related object model. Since I couldn't find the related documentation anywhere, I added few entries manually and then, using VBA, displayed them in a debug window. That gave me an idea on how to convert the XML returned by Windows Live Academic Search. The conversion is currently done in code but I would like to write an XSLT to do this. If it wasn't for this XML translation, the entire effort would have taken just 10-15 minutes!

I will probably be writing more things like this in the future. Perhaps even articles to capture the process.

I arrived at San Antonio today for the Open Repositories 2007 conference (I am surprised they don't have a unique URI for the 2007 conference site, at least not yet). Tony Hey will be giving the closing keynote on Friday. We are keen to engage with this community since we believe in the value of digital information preservation, especially in the research/scientific space. Also, we are keen supporters of the Open Access movement. It should be really interesting and educating.

How about that? Remember the discussions from months ago ("WS-Web" and "Names and Addresses - a different view") about the identity of resources and their relationship to HTTP URIs? I just read this story about Netscape taking down the resource representation of the RSS 0.91 DTD Schema at the end of the http://my.netscape.com/publish/formats/rss-0.9.dtd URI. They brought it back but with an expiration day in July. I may have missed it but does RFC 2616 say anything about URI expiration?

Yes, agents around the world should cache the resource's representation; they shouldn't retrieve it every time it is used; they should be implemented defensively against the brittle, loosely coupled nature of the Web. Still, the resource's representation is retrieved 4M times per day. Now, if the resource was associated with a protocol-independent URI that could be retrieved/searched/indexed irrespective of the protocol/technology used to access it, we wouldn't have this problem.

I think the coupling of identity with protocol semantics makes it more difficult to program defensively.

Please, be gentle in your comments :-)

Well, it had to happen at some point... a Grid game :-) I saved humanity from a volcano erruption, an eartquake, the avian flu, and I've even found aliens; all with the power of Grid computing!!!

Via Dan.

Paul Watson pointed me to the January 2007 issue of the "Physics world". You'll notice a number of articles related to open access and the impact of Web to scholary publication and the peer review process. It's funny how not all of those articles are available :-)

I found that "talking physics in the social Web" is not going far enough in the exploration of social networking for scientific collaboration or exchange of ideas. The article merely reports on recent events. However, social networking can enable so many different scenarios. I believe it can revolutionize the way conferences get organized, the way scientists report their work and become famous, the way students explore a research field, etc.

I just read that Don Ferguson has joined Microsoft. Very cool!

These are funny.

I just finished watching Bill Gates' keynote at CES from last Sunday (I know, I should have been reviewing papers instead). I watched Steve Jobs' keynote at Macworld from yesterday.

Wow! The geek in me cannot wait for all the things that have been announced. I love the style and interface of the iPhone. I am always jealous of the style and seamless integration of hardware and software Apple is able to deliver with its products. I guess they can do that well since they control both.

After watching Jobs' keynote, I wondered why Microsoft cannot deliver exciting products like Apple. Then I watched Gates' CES keynote and I got excited again about what my company is doing. Yes, we are not creating excitement (we are not 'fun') and that probably needs to change. However, the announced products/technologies are way more exciting than Apple's in the greater scheme of things (at least that's what I think). This is not me just being a Microsoft employee; this is me just being a technology geek.

Yes, I love the iPhone because of its potential to revolutionize cell phones and make them more fun. For now, however, I am going to stick with the Windows Mobile platform. Apart from iPhone, though, I didn't find anything else exciting in Jobs' keynote. On the other hand, the CES keynote had:

• IPTV on the Xbox 360. Did you see the instant channel surfing with picture-in-picture functionality? That was cool.
• Xbox Live on Windows!
• The messaging about Vista is not bad. I like the common theme, the style. Finally! Some style in Windows. There were laptops in the video that looked really nice. I am looking forward to the launch for all the different designs that will be announced. I do hope there would be something to match the elegance of the MacBook. Vista looks good. I've been running it for months now and I love it.
• Then there was DreamScene. Ok... Perhaps not the most useful feature for an operating system but still cool demonstration of clever engineering. I've been amongst the very few within MS beta testing it for a while now. It's been running on my laptop and I don't really notice it, performance-wise. I agree, though... nothing really really exciting here to improve one's productivity.
• The potential for the delivery of clever tools and technology through Vista Extras. I didn't know about the GroupPhoto technology. It's absolutely fantastic to see Microsoft Research technology being delivered to users around the world in this way.
• I am looking forward to the Windows Home Server as well.
• And then, it was Gates' home of the future. Isn't it just great to have a team that can deliver the prototype and demo of your vision? I loved the use of RFID technology to locate and deliver information in the context of a users' actions. Human-computer interaction research has been looking into such areas for some time now but it's great to see a big company like Microsoft doing prototypes. I am sure there are folks considering the business potential of such technologies.

I hope I don't sound like I have been braistormed or anything but, honestly, this is how I felt after having watched both videos. I was very impressed by the iPhone but I got a warmer feeling about all that Microsoft talked in whole. Apple's and Steve Jobs' delivery was stylish of course, as always. Microsoft needs to be more fun, stop using the boring long names for its products, introduce style, excite more. We certainly seem to have the technology.

Panos is visiting Microsoft and he's staying in Seattle for few days. It's great to see him. Need to think what we are going to be doing over the weekend.

I went to pick him up from building 41 today to go out for dinner. It took me 2 1/2 hours to cover a distance I usually do in 5 mins. AMAZING! As soon as some snow falls in the area, the local drivers just panic and don't know what to do. You can see cars abandoned all over the place. We just went locally for dinner until the situation got better.

It's 4.40am and I just finished my 10 (!!!) paper reviews for CCGrid 2007. Hmmm... I will think hard before I accept another invitation to join a Grid-related Program Committee.

I read some really poor papers, with no attention to presentation, no clear focus/contribution, nothing exciting, etc. Since I always try to give lots of feedback, I dedicated many hours of my life in this.

I think that I am seeing a pattern with papers in the Grid space. It seems that research work is presented as novel when in fact the real targeted area has been exhaustively investigated over the decades. I guess young researchers as they start their research work in the "Grid" identify issues related to fault tolerance, distributed computing, modeling, etc. and since they don't find prior Grid-related work they think they have discovered something new. For example, I couldn't believe that work on thread migration and sharing of variables in a distributed environment could ever be presented as new, with no references at all to distributed shared memory systems, tuple systems, parallel runtime systems, etc. Or that researchers would prefer to present their work on pro-active and re-active fault tolerance techniques to a Grid-related conference rather than the specialized and prestigious (in their field) fault tolerance conferences.

We definitely need to do something about the way in which scientific results are reported. I think people should be discouraged from submitting just anything. The review process should be completely transparent. It should be the entire community, the domain-specific community, that discovers filters out the good papers, the good research work. Why should fault-tolerance methodologies be reported in a Grid-related conference and the merit of the research judged by Grid, instead of fault-tolerance, experts? Also, why should the identities of the PC members and their views remain secret? Why should rejected papers be 'forgotten'? The authors should be accountable to the community for submitting garbage and the reviewers for their comments. Once personal reputation is on the line, perhaps we'll see some more self filtering and, who knows, the "publication factories" may start disappearing. The fact that careers are judged by the mere quantity of publications rather than their quality and their impact is a big problem. Government organizations seem to encourage the focus on publication numbers due to their project/university reviewing processes.

I think social networking can help us here. I have some ideas (already written!) and I am discussing them with Tony Hey and soon with Jim Gray. We all hope to make a change in this space. I am off to the Open Repositories 2007 conference in two weeks as part of my engagement with the Open Access movement. This is going to be one of my playgrounds for all the microformat-, social networking-, knowledge representation-related ideas.

Need to get a couple of hours of sleep. Tomorrow I will have to start reviewing the 10 (!!!) papers for WWW 2007. Oh man!

The PLoS ONE service seems to be an interesting one. It's a community-based approach to reviewing scientific reviews. Social networking is going to play a key role in the future of scientific research, study, exploration, search, collaboration, reporting of results, etc. I do hope that this attempt proves successful now that Nature's social networking endeavor has been abandoned.

Reference: Shorelines (2 January 2007). Thanks to Lee Dirks for the pointer.

Happy New Year everyone!