Citation software - the next generation

Zotero < http://www.zotero.org/ >

CiteULike < http://www.citeulike.org/ >

Del.Icio.Us < http://del.icio.us/ >

Unemployment benefits

The on-line application at the New York State Department of Labor Unemployment Insurance web site is only available "between the hours of 7:30 am to 7:30 pm Monday through Thursday (Eastern Time), Friday, 7:30 am to 5:00 pm, all day Saturday, and Sunday until 7:00 pm."

Bank of America / 100 Corporate Place, Suite 403 / Peabody, MA 01960 // EIN 56-2058405 NY 562058405

212-583-8000

Lockheed Martin NV Tech, Inc. / PO Box 98521 / Las Vegas, NV 89193-8521 // EIN 88-0347976 NM 02-297731-007

Working with recruiters

What is the value of working with recruiters?

• Some have inside contacts (hiring managers).
• Some have relevant information (company X has a hiring freeze).

Coverage is spotty, though, and big firms tend to have established paths through human resources.

after-Thanksgiving sales

"Black Friday" advertisements can be found at http://bfads.net/ and http://www.fatwallet.com/. Mentioned in last Sunday's New York Times.

This year, there doesn't seem to be anything special.

Electronic Lab Notebook (ELN) thoughts

My ideal electronic lab notebook would:

• store everything in real time: I would like to paste in observations, measurements, complete data-processing histories, paper reprints;
  
• allow search for: free-text, creation date range, citation date range, citation count
  
• allow by-owner stateful highlighting of important things and collapsing of unimportant things: this would facilitate future review without permanently losing observations considered irrelevant at the time. An outline structure would probably be fine, but I would want to be able to collapse or expand any paragraph at any level.
  
• allow annotated hyperlinks to prior paragraph-level observations and dates in this notebook and others, for backwards-referencing;
  
• automatically count citations (i.e., this "observation was confirmed/rejected" or "protocol was reused" or "data was commented-on" on such-and-such entry) (the two points above combined mean that comments on previous observations, where the comments are actually new ELN entries, remain in-context);
  
• I don't see that entries more than two hours old ever need to be edited again, so don't provide an "edit" feature.
  
• treat protocols in a special way, somewhat like a source-code control or versioning system. When protocols are mature, it is easy for people to say: I used protocol ABC. However, over the course of years, there could be modifications to protocol ABC that could improve yield, save time, etc. Often, people will continue to say that they used protocol ABC. I would propose that every protocol's "permalink" should contain its version number, so that past links to protocol ABC would point to the historical ABC, not the new-and-improved ABC. Actually, this can be easily handled in the above scheme: just have the complete protocol as an entry; when the protocol is revised, then users of the newer protocol will link to the newer entries. This can be organized with a special "kprotocol" keyword, or a separate "Lab protocols" ELN where protocol developers have write access.
  

The GUI should facilitate easy linking, perhaps through endnotes for each entry.
When reading, the blog-like "Comment" button would become an "Add new entry to your own ELN" button, with the specified paragraph already referenced. 
When writing, typing a special link string (such as double open braces) should bring up an in-page pop-up allowing search or selection of recently-cited and most-popular ELN citations. While we're at it, this should also allow web search and pasting of URLs or page snapshots.

Discovered that this is an old idea: http://pubs.acs.org/hotartcl/ci/00/jan/inet.html.

Income growth and house-price growth: phase portraits

Derek Cheung mentioned last May that his brother observed income as a leading indicator for house prices in Hong Kong. Zhang Da Peng's blog is at http://dpz88.spaces.live.com/.

Now we have data to explore this in the United States.

Standard&Poors/Case-Shiller home-price indices for metropolitan areas are available at http://www2.standardandpoors.com/portal/site/sp/en/us/page.topic/indices_csmahp/0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,1,1,0,0,0,0,0.html.

The Internal Revenue Service's Statistics of Income Division http://www.irs.gov/taxstats/index.html has state- and zip-code-level sums of adjusted gross income and exemption sums. One problem with the zip-code-level sums is the cost: $500 per year for the whole United States.

Phase portraits (y = momentum; x = position) can show the behavior of a damped driven harmonic oscillator in different regimes: simple undamped is a circle; underdamped spirals clockwise to the origin; resonance spirals clockwise outward. If we plot inflation-adjusted income growth on the x-axis and inflation-adjusted house-price growth on the y-axis, then counter-clockwise motion would mean income leads housing. I suspect driven or undamped behavior in the first quadrant, and damped behavior in the other three quadrants.

Essay idea: stickiness of housing and job markets

The value of skills in the job market is always backwards-looking, just like comparable sales in a housing market. I have forgotten where this essay idea was going, but I think it was going to be a personal essay about going to work on mortgage-backed securities, learning about house-price appreciation, and then trying to find work elsewhere in finance.

"A great programmer might be ten or a hundred times as productive as an ordinary one, but he'll consider himself lucky to get paid three times as much. ... this is partly because great hackers don't know how good they are. ... it's also because money is not the main thing they want." (Paul Graham, "Great Hackers", July 2004, http://paulgraham.com/gh.html, in The Best Software Writing I, edited by Joel Spolsky (Apress, 2005))

Blogs and Wikis again

Just finished reading The Best Software Writing I, edited by Joel Spolsky (Apress, 2005).

On pp. 197-198, I read of an idea of running an instant messenger and a wiki in parallel with a conference or conference. The link is: http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html, about halfway down (search for "modes") Each presenter could have her or his slides on the wiki, and interesting questions and comments from the real-time chat could be added. The wiki would then become an annotated proceedings.

With big-enough screens, you could see everything: instant-messenger chatroom, wiki, and external reference with browsing history.

New mission for blog

Previously, I had no use for this blog. Now I see that it can be a useful content management system for annotating my web-browsing history. It is more suited for my purposes than a wiki: I anticipate that I will generate only a handful of posts per week, so I don't need a big management or organization system. Since so many resources to be referenced are available from the web, this is more in-context than other forms of scrapbooking software. Finally, unlike many wikis, it's free for multiple users and I don't have to administer it.

For now, I will change the name from the solipsistic paean "A song I can sing in my own company" to "Richard C Yeh et al".

Test link

Link to network share via UNC \\Dice\Test: file://///Dice/Test/. (Works in Internet Explorer 7, but not Firefox 1.5.0.9 and not Opera 9.10.)

Link to network share mapped as drive Z: file:///Z:/. (Same as above, if mapped. Example 1 doesn't require the mapping to be in place.)

Link to local file: file:///C:/ipconfig.txt. (Always fails, if web page is not a local html file.)

Try this now:
1. In Windows, go to Start -> Run... and in the dialog, type:
cmd /k ipconfig /all > C:\ipconfig.txt
This will create a file for testing.
2. Paste this into your web browser:
file:///C:/ipconfig.txt
This should display the file.
3. In the wiki, make a link to:
file:///C:/ipconfig.txt
View the wiki, and click on the link.

If nothing happens in step #3 (which is behavior different from step #2), then you are experiencing a problem described at: < id="9601">. I find that I can replicate this problem with Microsoft Internet Explorer 7, Mozilla Firefox 1.5.0.9, and Opera 9.10. I find that I can work around this problem in Internet Explorer, but not the other two.

Blogs and Wikis

After a good friend mentioned his ideas of using blog and wiki technologies in his new lab, I couldn't resist trying these again, in the hope that I'll better understand the possibilities of these. At work, I've documented some oft-used database tables and queries on the group wiki pages, served by Atlassian Confluence, which also runs the technology bug/issue-tracking system. Atlassian also has a blog feature, which I am trying to use to highlight developments in my work.

Away from work, I tried to install my own wiki on a server where I have no administrative privileges, but there are many configuration questions that I cannot answer. I told my friend that there would be significant effort in setting up and maintaining such a system, and I am happy to hear that he found a solution at http://openwetware.org/.

I am always impressed at the efficiencies to be wrung from outsourcing. For example, I think the Google Apps for Education product in use at Arizona State University is a good example to follow. There is much duplication of information technology effort across organizations, and consolidating and outsourcing those efforts could improve the quality and reduce the cost. I recall considering the purchase of a network-attached storage device and backup system for a research group where I was a graduate student. There's no educational value in that exercise. IBM's attempt to sell compute time is also notable, but has a smaller market, which probably needs time to play and explore. Drucker would have applauded our giving the problem to an expert to handle.

References:

• Google brochure
  
• Arizona State University news posting