Sunday

Reading

  • International Symposium on Biomathematics and Ecology: Education and Research – This looks excellent, wonder if I can make it.  Besides, it’s in Portland and the acronym is promising.
  • Pacific Ecoinformatics and Computational Ecology Lab - Based in Berkeley, looks rather intriguing, hard to tell how active this is as a group.
  • Ecoinformatics? So it does exist? Paraphrasing Jeremy Fox, has it done anything?  A rather nice review in ARES: (Jones et. al. 2006)
  • HHMI to take measuring achievement of education programs seriously in its next round of $60M in grants to primarily undergrad institutions.  (Asai, 2011).
  • Integrating writing into science courses makes it into the Education Forum of this week’s issue.  (Moskovitz & Kellogg, 2011)
  • Great post over at Oikos blog on NCEAS, prompted me to some writing. Too much fun.
  • DataONE users group reads like a who’s who in data archiving in ecology and evolution.

Programming

Rmendeley

  • Fixed my difficulties with search queries in RMendeley by discipline.  The documentation read that the argument was “discipline-id”.  While you do give the id-number (i.e., “6” for computer science, see categories() for a list of id numbers), the API argument should just read “discipline.” Looks like the documentation has been updated, and I’ve learned how to log in to edit the wiki (sign in is at the bottom of the page).
  • This should just about complete the public API.  A few testing things still to do: Searches with spaces should be entered as %20, and DOI forward-slashes may need to be escaped, but haven’t figured out how to do so.  Another question posted to the Dev-list.

Dryad

  • Can OAI_MPH can search/query by any of the metadata tags by specifying the tag by the metadata prefix?  Doesn’t seem like it, maybe I’m missing something.  Once again a question for the dev-list.

Blog updates

Okay, so as I say, this is a lab notebook, not a blog.  Except when it’s a blog.  In that spirit, I’ve decided to register with a few relevant blog networks, to share my more bloggified notebook entries with their relevant audiences – namely, entries about the literature, and entries about R.

Finally registered for ResearchBlogging.org.  I love this idea, but I think they could include a few recommendations.

In the past I’ve hesitated from registering because I’ve wondered what exactly their standardswere, and what theapproval processlooked like.  I’ve finally found them, but they could be placed somewhere more obvious and look a bit more formal?  Primarily as this information might be of interest to those looking to read blogs but not register.  Their automatic citation thing is great – but I’d like to use my own automatic citation thing (kcite).  I wish either one supported CiTO.

There’s no obvious statistics associated with Research Blogging (number of blogs, breakdown by discipline), or a way to search for blog entries on a specific paper (by, say, title or DOI), which seems like it should be simple given that users all add the little RB citation script to their page.

I’ll have to figure out which posts I would actually tag as research blogging.  I cite articles in most of my posts, but many would not quite fit the research-blogging paradigm.  We’ll see how my approval goes and where I go from there.

R-Bloggers

Pushed my R tag as an RSS to R-bloggers.  Includes two posts so far.

References