jodischneider.com/blog

I’m still looking for real-time collaboration tools for LaTeX. I need to try shareLaTeX again. Sadly, LaTeX-lab (which layers ontop of Google Docs) is only designed for a single editor at a time (kind of defeating the purpose). Apparently, ScribTeX (discovered via pinboard search) is popular (and there’s also verbosus) — and sounds useful.

One of the sticking points of using Google Docs (which is useful at some points of the editing) was its use of smartquotes. That, at least is avoidable: Tools -> Preferences gives the option to disable smart quotes and automatic substitution.

Google Docs preferences - disable smart quotes

James Malone reflects on a panel discussion on evaluation and reuse of ontologies. He wants there to be a “a formal, objective and quantifiable process” for “making public judgements on ontologies”. Towards that, he suggests that we need:

1. A formal set of engineering principles for systematic, disciplined, quantifiable approach to the design, development, operation, and maintenance of ontologies
2. The use of test driven development, in particular using sets of (if appropriate, user collected) competency questions which an ontology guarantees to answer, with examples of those answers – think of this as similar to unit testing
3. Cost benefit analysis for adopting frameworks such as upper ontologies, this includes aspects such as cost of training for use in development, cost to end users in understanding ontologies built using such frameworks, cost benefits measured as per metrics such as those above (e.g. answering competency questions) and risk of adoption (such as significant changes or longer term support).

– James Malone, in Why choosing ontologies should not be like choosing Pepsi or Coke, about his International Conference on Biomedical Ontology panel ‘How to deal with sectarianism in biomedical ontology.

• Touched, not typed
• Sent from my $DEVICENAME
• Consider any misspellings my gift to you
• Typed with thumbs
• Sent with mobile solution
• Sent from a mobile operating system. Which one isn’t of any importance to you, the receiver. However, if you feel that knowing this detail would affect positively your reading of this email you can, of course, ask me.
• Sent from my smartphone platform of choice….hint not a fruit
• I prefer robots to fruit.
• Fruits are for fruitcakes, Robots are for emailing.
• bots best for smart phones
• Smart fruit is an oxymoron
• Sent via a really tiny keyboard
• Sent from a mobile device. Erroneous words are a feature, not a typo.
• Sent from mobile; pls excuse typos
• $DEVICENAME = specific mobile operating system of choice
• Sent from my stationary operating system of choice.
• Erroneous words are a feature, not a typo.
• (Short, curt and ill-formed message sent from my portable telephone machine.)
• > Sent wirelessly from my BlackBerry device on the Bell network.
  > Envoyé sans fil par mon terminal mobile BlackBerry sur le réseau de Bell.
• *Sent from a mobile phone – please excuse the brevity of the message
• via small communication device/pardon random autocorrects and fat finger typos.
• Warning: I either dictated this to my device, or I typed it clumsily. Expect typos and weirdness.
• Sent from a mobile device. Excuse brevity and typos.
• Typed by thumbs and sent by my Verizon Wireless gadget
• Sent from a mobile device. Please excuse brevity and tpyos.
• Sent from my Verizon Wireless 4G LTE smartphone
• Sent from tiny touchscreen gizmo, excuse any auto correct nonsense that slips in…
• Sent from my rotary phone
• Sent with my thumbs (Thanks to Andy Powell.)
• sent from my shoe (Thanks to Larry Hynes.)
• Sent while walking into stuff(Thanks to Ryan Sarver (via Laura Dragan and Tim O’Reilly; used by David Cohen)

—
Previously discussed on Twitter (thanks to David Crowley and Becky Yoose for spreading my question). Apparently desktop users want forgiveness too.

Increasingly, I’m using Google Docs with collaborators. Yesterday, one of them pointed out the new “Research” search tab within Google Docs. (Tools->Research). I’m a bit surprised that your searches don’t show up on your collaborators’ screen. I’m particularly surprised that sharing searches doesn’t seem possible.

Google Docs' new 'Research' tab promotes search within Google Docs.

Apparently, it is pretty new. More at the Google Docs blog.

One thing I can say about Kindle: error reporting is easier.

You report problems in context, by selecting the offending text. No need to explain where - just what the problem is.

Feedback receipt is confirmed, along with the next steps for how it will be used.

By contrast, to report problems to academic publishers, you often must fill out an elaborate form (e.g. Springer or Elsevier). Digging up contact information often requires going to another page (e.g. ACM.). Some make you *both* go to another page to leave feedback and then fill out a form (e.g. EBSCO). Do any academic publishers keep the context of what journal article or book chapter you’re reporting a problem with? (If so, I’ve never noticed!)

I noticed that GMail is warning about missing attachments and heard that Thunderbird does this, too, from Arber Borix, who also responded to a request for a screenshot (below). Thanks, Arber!

Thunderbird: Found an attachment keyword: attached. Add Attachment... Remind Me Later

There may be an implied relationship between tweets (as between sentences) which is not made explicit.

Androgyny is a key trait of the most successful performers.
(Because)
A person’s fame depends on fans of the opposite sex who wish to be that person.

(via the twitterfunding list from the twitterfunding experiment).

See also: my favorite example argument on Twitter.

Altmetrics is hitting its stride: 30 months after the Altmetrics manifesto ((J. Priem, D. Taraborelli, P. Groth, C. Neylon (2010), Altmetrics: A manifesto, (v.1.0), 26 October 2010. http://altmetrics.org/manifesto)), there are 6 tools listed. This is great news!

I tried out the beta of a new commercial tool, The Altmetric Explorer, from Altmetric.com. They are building on the success and ideas of the academic and non-profit community (but not formally associated with Altmetrics.org). The Altmetric Explorer gives overviews of articles and journals by the social media mentions. You can filter by publisher, journal, subject, source, etc. Altmetric Explore has a closed beta, but you can try the basic functionality on articles with their open tool, the PLoS Impact explorer.

"The default view shows the articles mentioned most frequently in all sources, from all journals. Various filters are available.

Rolling over the donut shows which sources (Twitter, blogs, ...) an article was mentioned in.

Sparklines can be used to compare journals.

A 'people' tab lets you look at individual messages. Rolling over the photo or avatar shows the poster's profile.

Altmetric.com seems largely aimed at publishers ((“Altmetric sustains itself by selling more detailed data and analysis tools to publishers, institutions and academic societies.”, says the bookmarklet page, to explain why that is free)). This may add promotional noise, not unlike coercive citation, if it is used as an evaluation metric as they suggest: ((‘This quote from an editor as a condition for publication highlights the problem: “you cite Leukemia [once in 42 references]. Consequently, we kindly ask you to add references of articles published in Leukemia to your present article”’-from the abstract of Science. 2012 Feb 3;335(6068):542-3. Scientific publications. Coercive citation in academic publishing. Wilhite AW, Fong EA. summary on Science Daily.))

Want to see which journals have improved their profile in social media or with a particular news outlet?

Their API is currently free for non-commercial use. Altmetric.com are crawling Twitter since July 2011 and focusing on papers with PubMed, arXiv, and DOI identifiers. They also get data from Facebook, Google+, and blogs, but they don’t disclose how. (I assume that blogs using ResearchBlogging code are crawled, for instance.)

A tabletop storytelling interface called a Narration Negotiation and Reconciliation Table allows disagreements to be visually represented:

Points of Disagreement… can be dragged onto any part of a story to explicitly denote disagreement without preventing the story from continuing.

From A Reflection on Using Technology for Reconciliation through Co-Narration (PDF) by Oliviero Stock, Massimo Zancanaro of FBK-irst, Italy and Chaya Koren, Zvi Eisikovitz, Patrice L. (Tamar) Weiss of University of Haifa, Israel. In the CHI2012 HCI for Peace workshop.
The mutltitouch table interface was tested for peace reconciliation work with Israeli-Jewish and Palestinian-Arab teen boys.

I’d love a screenshot. Quick searching turned up a project description and an (unrelated) discussion of the role of narrative in reconciliation. I excerpt:

The textbooks juxtaposed both historical narratives on the same page: on the right side of the page, the Israeli narrative began with the birth of Zionism in the 19th century; on the left, the Palestinian narrative commenced with Napolean’s plans to establish a Jewish state in Palestine. Historical events faced off like soldiers in trenches; and while students were scrutinizing their positions, they were simultaneously recongnizing their own involvement in the conflict. This, of course, was an intended pedagogical tool carefully thought out by the authors of the book.

From Political Reconciliation and Narrative Negotiation (PDF): by Nadim Khoury of the Department of Politics at the University of Virginia.

This points out the obvious: reconciliation first requires understanding and externally representing the disagreements. Rooting out the disagreement in mundane situations discussed online, and providing representations for them, are a big part of my current work.

“Wikipedia discussions can thus be seen as a mirror of a stream of public consciousness, where those elements which are still not part of a shared consolidated heritage are object of a continuous negotiation among different points of view.”

There is No Deadline – Time Evolution of Wikipedia Discussions. (2012) Andreas Kaltenbrunner, David Laniado. arXiv:1204.3453v1

via summarizing it for Wikipedia Signpost, longer summary space on AcaWiki