Reported on Slashdot today: Exciting news for open access research!

"Congress is expected to vote this week on a bill requiring investigators funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to publish research papers only in journals that are made freely available within one year of publication. Until now, repeated efforts to legislate such a mandate have failed under pressure from the well-heeled journal publishing industry and some nonprofit scientific societies whose educational activities are supported by the profits from journals that they publish. Scientists assert that open access will speed innovation by making it easier for them to share and build on each other's findings.

Slashdot | Bill to Require Open Access to Scientific Papers.

You can dramatically decrease the complexity of a web site project by separating the programming from the design. Seth Godin’s blog has some good tips:

Start with design. Don't involve the programming team until you're 90% done with the look and feel of your pages. It's cheap to change design if it can't by supported by programming, and cheaper and faster to have design done in Photoshop before you commit to cutting it up and coding it. [PowerPoint can also be used to create prototypes.]

From Seth's Blog: How to create a good enough website. Cited in the Globe and Mail, October 25 2007

James Robertson of StepTwo Designs agrees – in one of his terrific articles on Content Management Systems, he says that “organisations are almost always better served by separating out the design and the CMS, and sourcing these from different providers.”

According to medical scholar John Ioannidis, most published research findings are wrong.

These flawed findings, for the most part, stem not from fraud or formal misconduct, but from more mundane misbehavior: miscalculation, poor study design or self-serving data analysis. "There is an increasing concern that in modern research, false findings may be the majority or even the vast majority of published research claims," Dr. Ioannidis said. "A new claim about a research finding is more likely to be false than true." From Science Journal - WSJ.com.

Dr. Ioannidis’s 2005 essay ‘Why Most Published Research Findings Are False’ “remains the most downloaded technical paper that the journal PLoS Medicine has ever published”.

The lesson from his research is that findings must be replicated in several different studies before the results are believed.

Scheduling meetings take huge amounts of time for most organizations, especially when external people are involved (like Board members, volunteers and colleagues). it can take days of back-and-forth emails narrowing down on possible times and dates. There are a few services available now that attempt to simplify and automate scheduling processes by offering attendees choices of different times, automatically selecting the best times for everyone, and synchronizing with Outlook and/or Google calendars.

I haven’t tested any of these yet, but I’ve read favourable mentions in a couple of discussion groups. Most of them are free, or offer free versions. They may charge more for features like synchronization and corporate branding. I’ve excerpted from their web sites below.

Timebridge (www.timebridge.com)

With TimeBridge's one-step scheduling you select attendees, propose meeting times and send a meeting invitation. TimeBridge does the rest— collects everyone's availability and selects the best time. Everyone gets a confirmation once the meeting is set. To make it easy, attendees need only a web browser to respond and no registration is required.

Biz-e (www.biz-e.com)

Full Outlook Calendar Integration
Easy Meeting Choices
Meeting Attendance View
Suggest Meeting Dates
Confirm Finalized Meeting Choices
Respond to Meeting Requests via the Web

TimeToMeet (www.timetomeet.info)

Whether you're meeting with one person or one dozen, this will help find you a time that works for everyone.  How it works:

1. Everyone receives a private link to enter their availabilites on a common schedule. No sign-ups or logins necessary.
2. We'll find the best candidates and you can easily confirm a final time. RSVPs are built-in.
3. And you're done already.

Tungle (www.tungle.com)

Tungle, the first peer-to-peer (P2P) meeting coordinator, solves these [scheduling] problems. Tungle allows professionals to easily coordinate a meeting - no matter if their invitee is in the next cubicle, a business associate in a different city or a good friend on the other side of the world.

Tungle is a P2P meeting coordinator that is downloaded and installed by the end user. Its one-click setup automatically installs the software and integrates with the user's calendaring system.

Tungle provides professionals with a view of the times their friends, co-workers or business associates are free or busy - in advance of sending a meeting invitation - and independent of what time management system they are using.

Good news – online counselling is getting some serious attention.

A new training program at the University of Toronto will teach counsellors how to reach out over the Internet to support children and youth in crisis. From University of Toronto -- News@UofT -- U of T to train cyber counsellors (Jul 4/07).

The program will be carried out in a collaboration between the Faculty of Social Work and the Kids Help Phone service, focusing on children and youth, and addressing issues that youth may prefer to raise anonymously. The program takes a cautious approach to the counselling relationship, though:

Student counsellors, with supervisory support, review the questions that children and teens post to a public web forum, then create and post their responses. Youth browsing the site are able to read the questions that other kids are asking and they can see the counsellors’ answers.

Good start - hopefully they will experiment with one-to-one counselling if the FAQ approach works out.

Slashdot reports how to find large numbers of credit cards with user information using a simple Google search. A long and interesting discussion after the posting provides suggestions on why credit card companies don’t put a stop to this.

Take the first 8 digits of a standard 16-digit credit card number. Search for them on Google in "nnnn nnnn" form. Since the 8-digit prefix of a given card number is often shared with many other cards, about 1/4 of credit card numbers in my random test, turned up pages that included other credit card numbers, and about 1 in 10 turned up a "treasure trove" of card numbers that were exposed through someone's sloppily written Web app. If the numbers were displayed along with people's names and phone numbers, sometimes I would call the users to tell them that I'd found their cards on the Internet, and many of them said that the cards were still active and that this was the first they'd heard that the numbers had been compromised.

Slashdot | Why Are CC Numbers Still So Easy To Find?

‘Anonymous cowards’, according to Slashdot, are people who post comments on public web sites without using their names. The web has a long history of enabling people to post anonymously, but the habit is under attack these days. The Wikipedia scandal is putting pressure on the internet community to reveal the identities of authors who make inaccurate or inflammatory postings, and as a result we’re getting stories about ‘outings’.

Anonymity is not easy to preserve on the web if someone really wants to find you. Here’s a good article about someone who tracked down an annoying anonymous poster, which took, according to the article, about 5 minutes. Here’s an excerpt from the Slashdot article: 

It is important to know that while on the web, while emailing and while writing a blog you are leaving a trail. The trail consists of IP addresses, unique ID’s, machine names, etc. For instance, look at the headers of an email you send, you will see:

– The IP address of the machine you sent it from
– The name of the machine you sent it from (mine is ‘Nik’ – obvious)
– A unique ID which can identify the mail client you use, as well as your operating system (as well as the security level of your machine, some people need to use Windows Update)
– The mail server you used (which leads you to a provider – might be the same provider you use for your blog or website)
– A lot more!
Changing the ‘From’ address doesn’t change all this other information, so if you have an email from both the real person and the alter-ego, it’s dead easy.

Dead 2.0 Outed - or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Internet | New Web Order - Nik Cubrilovic.

Individuals or organizations can easily set up and broadcast their own internet radio stations. Live365 offers broadcasting services starting at $10/month US ($75/month for organizations) that can be used to disseminate presentations, deliver podcast-type radio shows, and so on. The packages offer royalty fees for those who want to create their own music radio stations, but only for US-based subscribers. This would be a nice tool for a community advocacy campaign.

And here is a really cheap way to set up a private radio station in your hotel room or your organization’s waiting area – the  Belkin TuneCast II (about $25) is recommended by Hexus to play an MP3 player through an FM radio, in a car or anywhere else.  Hexus says that the sound quality is as good as other FM stations; several Amazon reviews say the sound quality is worse. If you can’t connect an MP3 player to a stereo, possibly because you’re on holiday and don’t have your speakers with you, an FM transmitter might be a decent choice.

Michael Geist, a Canadian legal expert on internet law, writes about international pressure to make publicly funded research openly accessible in this Toronto Star article from Feb 27 2007:

Last month, five leading European research institutions launched a petition that called on the European Commission to establish a new policy to require that all government-funded research be made available to the public shortly after publication.

That requirement – called an open access principle – would leverage widespread Internet connectivity with low-cost electronic publication to create a freely available virtual scientific library available to the entire globe.

Despite scant media attention, word of the petition spread quickly throughout the scientific and research communities. Within weeks, it garnered more than 20,000 signatures, including several Nobel prize winners and more than 750 education, research, and cultural organizations from around the world.

In response, the European Commission committed over $100 million toward facilitating greater open access through support for open access journals and for the building of the infrastructure needed to house institutional repositories that can store the millions of academic articles written each year.

Giest goes on to say that, "Canadian funding agencies are increasingly at risk of falling behind their counterparts around the world by dragging their heels on the open access front. ...The failure to lead on this issue could have long-term negative consequences for Canadian research."

Several of the major academic search engines and standards bodies are working together to improve literature searches and academic repositories. The following quote is not terribly readable unless you already know most of the acronyms:

CrossRef (http://www.crossref.org), the reference-linking network of the Publishers International Linking Association (PILA), has officially launched a free DOI look-up feature called Simple-Text Query (http://www.crossref.org/freeTextQuery). Users can enter whole bibliographies with citations in almost any bibliographic format and receive back the matching Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) for these references to insert into their final bibliographies.

…CrossRef actively encourages DSpace repositories to assign DOIs to original, nonduplicative works and register their DOIs with CrossRef, rather than just relying on registration with CNRI….

CrossRef also supports OpenURL links, using the OpenURL syntax in its own system and making all its publishers “OpenURL compliant” for its library participants. It also works with services such as Google Scholar, Microsoft’s Windows Live Academic Search, and Elsevier’s Scirus to connect content to the leading Web search engines.

Linking Up Bibliographies: DOI Harvesting Tool Launched by CrossRef.

‘Deadman’s Handle’ is laptop utility software that deletes any directories that you have defined as confidential if someone uses your computer without permission.

When your laptop is started up, DeadMan's Handle presents an innocuous-looking challenge: fail it, and all designated information on the system is securely deleted. DeadMan's Handle also deletes itself, leaving no trace that there was anything of importance on the machine. Laptop Utility Software: DeadMan's Handle for laptop security.

This is great if you have highly confidential information like medical files or sensitive financial data. It could be pretty inconvenient if a coworker innocently tried to use your computer when you were away from your desk. ‘Deadman’s Handle’ requires a good data backup.

Videoconferencing and online chat are becoming social necessities in Baghdad. Internet access is increasing rapidly, even with restrictions on electricity and broadband. It will be interesting to see what happens with online interactions once the country becomes safer (eventually). If incorporated into business and social life, virtual relationships will support economic diversification and increase the use of Arabic on the internet.  

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - In the endless daily battle against the fear and isolation of life under lock-down, the people of Baghdad have found a way to keep their city alive: moving it online.

Instead of enjoying an outdoor meal at one of the fish restaurants along the Tigris embankment, 28-year-old housewife Dunya Saad spends her evenings at the computer in her living room, chatting with her friends on Yahoo! Messenger.

Most of her relatives and friends live on the far side of the Tigris, and seeing them in person is nearly impossible.

"It's sad not to see your friends like in the good old days," she sighed. "But online chatting has made things better."

Since the February bombing of a Shi'ite shrine in Samarra sparked a wave of sectarian bloodshed, the Internet has gone from being a hobby for tech-savvy enthusiasts to a mass replacement for the daily interactions of city life.

In locked-down Baghdad, city life moves online | In Depth | Reuters.com.

Jakob Neilsen has published the second edition of the “Usability of Intranet Portals” report. Anyone who is developing an intranet portal should buy the report – it’s expensive at $250 but a lot cheaper than creating one without the research on what works.

Intranet portals are being pushed heavily by technology vendors, but the experience from the many portal managers contacted for this report is that technology only accounts for about one-third of the issues they had in implementing their portals. Organizational issues and company politics account for two thirds.

Intranet Portals Usability: Report With Case Studies From Real Projects.

In Neilsen’s newsletter this month, he also recommended a terrific article on how to choose software platforms for portals by Joel Spolsky. In a nutshell, Spolsky says:

What I do know for sure, though, is two things:

1. People all over the world are constantly building web applications using .NET, using Java, and using PHP all the time. None of them are failing because of the choice of technology. [In the article, he also suggests Python as a fourth reasonable choice.]
   
2. All of these environments are large and complex and you really need at least one architect with serious experience developing for the one you choose, because otherwise you'll do things wrong and wind up with messy code that needs to be restructured.

In a related article, Spolsky says:

[The software] worlds are just too big and complicated to compare any more.  … So for now, my advice is this: don't start a new project without at least one architect with several years of solid experience in the language, classes, APIs, and platforms you're building on. If you have a choice of platforms, use the one your team has the most skills with, even if it's not the trendiest or nominally the most productive.

This is good practical advice, and an elegant answer to an impossible question.

The results are coming in about the impact of open access (OA) on research citations.

OA articles are freely available on the web, so that a search on Google Scholar will bring up the full text instead of a publisher’s page that demands payment before you can read it.

A ten-year research study now under way suggests that an OA article may be cited far more often than an article in the same journal that has not been posted on the web by its author.

Comparing the Impact of Open Access (OA) vs. Non-OA Articles in the Same Journals.

This is such a fundamental issue for policy analysis. I’ve been frustrated yet again this week by trying to track down an article that is not available on the web, nor even in the York University online library. Apparently it’s available in University of Toronto’s online library but I have no access to it. As a result, this article will have no influence on policy. And researchers wonder why no-one listens to them!

Most scholarly journals now permit authors to self-archive their articles on the web either before or after publication. Many funders of research are beginning to demand that their researchers self-archive, or publish in open access journals, as a way to increase the impact of the findings. Given that publication is a small proportion of the cost of doing research, and most of the research is funded by public money, it seems obvious to get the information out to the public.

From Wired Magazine:

The [peer review] process is lousy at policing research. Bad papers get published, and work that's merely competent (boring) or wildly speculative (maverick) often gets rejected, enforcing a plodding conservatism. It seems silly to say this about a system that's been in development since the mid-1700s, but the whole thing seems kind of antiquated. "Peer review was brilliant when distribution was a problem and you had to be selective about what you could publish," says Chris Surridge, managing editor of the online interdisciplinary journal PLoS ONE. But the Web has remapped the universe of scientific publishing – and as a result, peer review may finally get fixed.

In June, Nature began experimenting with a new method online. Authors submitting papers can choose a two-track process. While the work goes through the usual peer review drill, a preprint version gets posted on the Web. Anyone – even you – can comment, as long as you attach your name, affiliation, and email address. As of July, 25 articles had undergone this process, and the journal plans to issue a report late this year on how the test went.

… In other quarters, traditional peer review has already been abandoned. Physicists and mathematicians today mainly communicate via a Web site called arXiv. (The X is supposed to be the Greek letter chi; it's pronounced "archive." If you were a physicist, you'd find that hilarious.) Since 1991, arXiv has been allowing researchers to post prepublication papers for their colleagues to read. The online journal Biology Direct publishes any article for which the author can find three members of its editorial board to write reviews. (The journal also posts the reviews – author names attached.) And when PLoS ONE launches later this year, the papers on its site will have been evaluated only for technical merit – do the work right and acceptance is guaranteed. "Data becomes useful only if it's shared," Surridge says. "At the moment, our mechanisms for sharing information are the traditional journals, and if they're hard to get into, data is completely lost."

I don’t know whether the Implicit Association Test (IAT) is accurate or not, but it’s a great conversation opener. In diversity and anti-racism workshops, participants often deny having any prejudice at all. Inviting them to take a couple of these mini-tests, without sharing the scores with anyone else, might be an effective way to encourage them to address ways that prejudice affects workplaces, and what people can do to minimize it.

Welcome to the disturbing world of implicit bias, where people's preferences for racial, ethnic, and other groups lie outside their awareness and often clash with their professed beliefs about those groups. In the past 15 years, most social psychologists have come to agree that implicit biases, also known as unconscious attitudes, play an often-unnoticed role in our lives. Researchers study implicit biases using any of several techniques, such as tracking participants' feelings and behaviors after subliminally showing them pictures of black or old people.
However, one measure—the Implicit Association Test, or IAT—has proved especially popular.

From The Bias Finders: Science News Online, April 22, 2006.

 You can take the IAT here.

I like this librarian’s web log focusing on academic search. For example, here’s a comment from July 13:

Gunther Eysenbach's cogent editorial "The Open Access Advantage" over at the open-access Journal of Medical Internet Research hits several points square on the head. The one I find most appealing is that incremental benefits accrue to researchers who publish in open-access journals; the data is clear and unequivocal. Another is the simple truth that open source tools like those developed by UBC's Public Knowledge Project are better alternatives to the commercial OA publishers.

UBC Academic Search - Google Scholar Blog.

From HRSolutionsToday.com:

Companies looking for a way of checking on the immigration status of employees have a little known but effective program available at no cost that is being provided as part of the federal government’s homeland security agency.

Called the SAVE Program and administered by the Federal Citizen and Immigration Service, this offering is currently being used by more than 6,000 companies throughout the United States.

By signing up for the program, called Basic Point, companies can quickly check on the immigration status of new employees by typing in key information provided by applicants and receive an answer back quickly on the legal status of that individual.

Government Program Offers Easy, Free Method To Verify Immigration Status Of Potential Employees.

 

In a related offering, the US government and many states enable anyone to look for inmates of its prisons, past and current, using advanced searches. Friends Beyond the Wall (a prisoners network) offers a list of web resources; see for example, the State of Georgia’s Inmate Query.

PC World reviews 17 free and low-cost online storage services this month.

The new version of Windows Live Messenger allows users to share files with their contacts and is competing directly with Skype by partnering with Verizon to make calls to regular phones. And chats will soon be compatible with Yahoo! Messenger.

LanguageLine, a major international interpreting service, is now using Skype for interpreting assignments. For $2.99/minute US they will interpret in 150 languages.

Google Translator has added Arabic to English and English to Arabic as a beta service. They offer nine languages, most of which translate to and from English only. (German and French are the only non-English pairs.)

In a non-online launch, the National Federation of the Blind is coming out with Ray Kurzweil’s newest invention – a handheld scanner that reads text aloud. This will be another Kurzweil evolution for people with visual impairments.

And finally, neuroscience research is proposing that learning something new, particularly grasping a new concept, is associated with an opium-like ‘fix’. The buzz that we get from the new new thing really is an addiction. Imagine that!

John Lavis’s Program in Policy Decision-Making has  updated its web site to include new research on knowledge transfer.

A presentation on ‘Assessing provincial or national efforts to link research to action’, dated January 2006, contains many interesting points on promoting evidence-based policy.

Among them is a reference to the reader-friendly writing style of ‘graded entry’, in which there is a 1:3:25 ratio of content. A description is posted on the Canadian Health Services Research Foundation site:

Every report prepared for the foundation has the same guidelines: start with one page of main messages; follow that with a three-page executive summary; present your findings in no more than 25 pages of writing, in language a bright, educated, but not research-trained person would understand.

These are great guidelines, and are aimed at increasing the likelihood that research reports will lead to action.

I found what looks like a good review site for web hosting companies. It measures several criteria, including uptime – “Good web hosts should have at least 99.5% monthly uptime”.

One of their top-rated web hosts, Midphase, has a very simple web site creation service using SiteStudio. See the demo here; it’s impressive. And their sites are only $8/month US including email, unlimited bandwidth, 12 gigabytes of storage, and guaranteed 99.9% uptime. I haven’t tested them though.

Here’s an interesting article by Malcolm Gladwell (of Tipping Point and Blink):  In homelessness and with many other social problems, a small number of people account for a huge proportion of cases, representing a massive cost to the whole system. ‘Solving homelessness’ may involve giving those few people free apartments and keeping them out of expensive last resort services.

“Homelessness doesn’t have a normal distribution, it turned out. It has a power-law distribution. “We found that eighty per cent of the homeless were in and out really quickly,” he said. “In Philadelphia, the most common length of time that someone is homeless is one day. And the second most common length is two days. And they never come back. Anyone who ever has to stay in a shelter involuntarily knows that all you think about is how to make sure you never come back.”

“… It was the last ten per cent—the group at the farthest edge of the curve—that interested Culhane the most. They were the chronically homeless, who lived in the shelters, sometimes for years at a time. They were older. Many were mentally ill or physically disabled, and when we think about homelessness as a social problem—the people sleeping on the sidewalk, aggressively panhandling, lying drunk in doorways, huddled on subway grates and under bridges—it’s this group that we have in mind. In the early nineteen-nineties, Culhane’s database suggested that New York City had a quarter of a million people who were homeless at some point in the previous half decade —which was a surprisingly high number. But only about twenty-five hundred were chronically homeless.

It turns out, furthermore, that this group costs the health-care and social-services systems far more than anyone had ever anticipated. Culhane estimates that in New York at least sixty-two million dollars was being spent annually to shelter just those twenty-five hundred hard-core homeless.”

The New Yorker: Fact.