Although the PubChem system has been discussed in numerous recent D-F articles and elsewhere, there’s much more to the story that hasn’t been told. One of the more intriguing things PubChem can do is look up CAS Numbers for free.
I’m normally not one for sports analogies, but this one just seems to fit so well. Somewhere around 2005, science was a low-scoring game of trying to get the most publications into journals nobody had the time or money to read.
Creative Commons, the group that brought intellectual property licensing to the masses, has recently spun off a new group - OwnTerms. The new effort is “intended as a clearinghouse for Creative Commons-licensed stock legal documents.
Experimental procedures are strange beasts. Loathed (at least temporarily) by those who must prepare them yet central to science, the lowly experimental section is mostly forgotten in the daily struggle of publish or perish. Abstracts, discussions, and conclusions will probably be useless 20 years from now, at least in chemistry. In contrast, the experimental section (and the tables based on them) may well live forever.
Ein Fehler ist aufgetreten. Sieh dir dieses Video auf www.youtube.com an oder aktiviere JavaScript, falls es in deinem Browser deaktiviert sein sollte. As part of research I’m doing on a new collaborative chemistry Web application, I’ve been using quite a few social networking and news sites.
A recent D-F article discussed the potential for online videos in chemical research. Although chemistry has been slow to catch on, biologists have been busy creating phenomenal video content. One of the best efforts in this space is the Journal of Visualized Experiements (JoVE). YouTube videos spread so quickly in part because of their ability to be embedded into other Websites.
Like SMILES, InChI is a line notation that can be used to encode and store chemical information relatively efficiently. Although there are a number of scenarios where this strategy is used, what many of them have in common is the need to eventually convert an InChI into a human-readable form. In most cases, this form will be a 2D chemical structure.
Web 2.0 may be all about participation, but the numbers reported by The McKinsey Quarterly suggest a self-selecting oligarchy rather than a democracy. Success may well depend more on engaging the top 2-10% of users rather than appealing to all of them. Food for though when forming your next community, be it electronic or otherwise.
With the ever-increasing volume and heterogeneity of data that we need to cope with, data visualization is a skill that every effective scientist needs to master. Like most essential scientific skills, data visualization is one of those things that is not so much learned in classes, but rather absorbed from one’s surroundings. So if you want to improve your data visualization skills, where can you turn?