Category: Technology

If you’re in North America, you can sign up for a free subscription to Advanced Imaging. The magazine is published monthly and provides some 55,000 imaging professionals in industry, science, medicine, the arts, broadcasting, and the media with the latest news on imaging hardware, software and peripherals (digital cameras, CCD etc) that are used in capturing, displaying, manipulating and storing images.

According to the magazine’s blurb, if you are working on a daily basis with all forms of digital imaging for various applications, on any computer platform, then you can get a free subscription and find out about the available imaging tools and techniques used by fellow professionals in their work.

For more freebies and offers, grab the Sciencebase Science Newsfeed where you can gain access to additional offers, including invites to web 2.0 sites, such as Pownce (Twitter on steroids) and Joost TV, as well as the chance to get a free text link on Sciencebase.com Be sure to add the newsfeed to your reader ASAP and check back for updates to the Sciencebase secret subscribers’ page.

You wouldn’t think that writing up a few random thoughts in a blog could get anyone into trouble, would you? Obviously, if you’re making libelous statements then some day soon you are going to be sued, allegedly. But, most of us are sensible enough not to slander anyone in print, in person, or online, aren’t we?

No, the issue to which I am alluding to is the case where you, as a blogger, overhear some juicy gossip, perhaps not all the details, but enough to make you respond strongly enough that you want to tell the world. You do a short write-up, expressing your opinions about the turn of events as you heard them, you mention no one by name, make no direct connections to the place or time of the happening, and do all this in a personal blog.

Next thing you hear, someone connected with the gossip has made the connection, found out where you work and emailed a serious complaint, cc’ing your boss. The complaint alludes to an abuse of privacy laws, trust, and customer-client confidentiality. You panic, confess all to your boss, a meeting is called with the bosses and HR and before you know what’s hit you, you’re fired.

There have been several instances of medical professionals and others being barred from writing blogs recently. There is usually a serious conflict of interest between the public discussion of medical matters and the confidentiality inherent in the Hippocratic Oath. It’s the same when professionals present case studies in their trade publications, particularly if they mention any two of the following, portable vacuum cleaners, potatoes, genitals, the rectum, or hot-tubs, in the same sentence.

Seriously though, what can you, as a compulsive blogger, do to minimise the risk of employment cessation? Here are my top tips, which you can take or leave, but which do not represent secure advice in the legal sense but merely some common sense thoughts.

First off, decide whether the benefits of blogging and the risks it might entail actually outweigh the benefits of gainful employment. I suspect 99 times out of 100 they won’t, unless you’ve optimised your ads really, really well.

Second, double check your employment contract and any professional oaths you take to make sure there is no conflict of interest or that you are not automatically precluded from revealing your inner thoughts to the public.

Third, do not under any circumstances use your employer’s computing equipment, services, web connection, email, telephone or anything else for personal use and particularly not in relation to your blog, unless you have explicit permission. Even then, be very cautious of blogging from a work IP. They could string you up on a technicality if you even used the phone once to call your grandmother. In fact, they could fire you for all kinds of reasons on this one whether you’re blog breaks the rules or not.

Fourth, ensure your blog is entirely personally run, owned, and in no way tied to your employer. (Also see item 3 in this regard).

Fifth, make sure that what you are saying is legal and does not defame anyone, it’s a basic rule of journalism, and if bloggers are staking a claim on that realm, then they ought to learn the rules, for their own safety.

Finally, a bonus tip. Go back to point one and decide whether running a blog to vent off steam is really a better outlet than a trip to the pub with friends where you can ruminate to your heart’s content with (usually) no fear of losing your job. Ask yourself, does my blog shed a good light on me as a professional or my employer as the entity paying my bills?

In a recent report from American Medical News, some physician-bloggers have found that what they wrote could be used against them. That doesn’t mean you have to stop, or never start, says the report. But, people do get sacked for running blogs and saying the wrong thing, at the wrong time.

Incidentally, this post is NOT autobiographical. I didn’t. Honest. But, I’m not going to embarrass the blogger who did get fired this week, having essentially failed to adhere to those safe blogging rules.

Meanwhile, more public cases of blog firings that show this is nothing new. Read ’em and weep:

When Blogging Gets Risky

Blogging Blunders Could Lead To Pink Slip

US Blogger Fired by Her Airline

I Was Just Fired for Blogging

Of Blogging and Unemployment

5 Reasons Blogging Leads to the Unemployment Line (You’re Fired!) – Adds, the caveat that you must sure you’re not late for work or slacking cos you’re blogging.

Be warned though, not blogging can get you fired too!

And, it’s not just blogging that could get you into trouble, your boss could “own” your Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Pownce, etc accounts if you even mentioned running one at work, under your contract of employment. Just as a research chemist who invents a new life-saving drug, attempts to take out a patent in their own name will most likely discover that anything they produce while employed will defer to the intellectual property of their employer. Unless their contract contains a get out clause or an IP sharing paragraph, they will not profit from their invention even if they did it in a home lab.

The same might apply to your StumbleUpon account, your Digg page, your del.icio.us bookmarks, and links you share with others using the Share This plugin displayed below.

A vast underground network exists in the American North West. The network is composed of the usual hubs of major activity with numerous interconnections, a complex packet-based communication system, and peer-to-peer sharing. But, this is not the familiar kind of network of BitTorrents, search engines, and wikis. This is a living organism, perhaps the biggest living organism. A fungus known as Armillaria ostoyae. we know almost instinctively that A. ostoyae is alive. It is an ordered entity, it assimilates nutrients and excretes waste products, it grows, it reproduces. Its metabolic pathways carry packets of chemical information along its network of tendrils. It exists beneath a 9 square kilometre area east of Prairie City in a remote corner of Oregon’s Blue Mountains at about 2000 metres.

So, asks Philip Tetlow in his latest book The Web’s Awake, can we similarly define the World Wide Web as being somehow alive, and more philosophically, aware?

Seemingly not. Tetlow draws together a network of evidence but comes to no more solid a conclusion than we cannot yet know whether or not the Web is awake, aware, or simply awash with random clusters of information and interlinks. His title would imply that he had evolved an answer to one of computing’s quintessential questions, can a true Turing machine exist? If the Web were awake, then it would be as parasitic as any fungal sprawl. But, it not only feeds on us, it offers us a symbiotic relationship in which we feed on its digital gifts.

The Armillaria ostoyae network would not exist if it were not for the roots of its forest host, but we still feel it to be alive. In the same way, the Web would not exist without the information and power we feed it. Nevertheless, we do not feel that the Web is alive. Of course, we do not yet know what future structure and organisation may emerge within the Web, maybe its offspring will be autonomous, a parasite or symbiote, maybe it will feed on us just as A. ostoyae feeds on the forest above and will ultimately destroy it.

There are no straight answers to Tetlow’s questions. Maybe we should JFGI. Just Flipping Google It!

Science is revolting! A revolution is underway and the battles are taking place on the Microsoft Office frontline. Science, the journal of the America Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), is ditching support for Microsoft format office documents. In its notice to authors it advises that:

“Because of changes Microsoft has made in its recent Word release that are incompatible with our internal workflow, which was built around previous versions of the software, Science cannot at present accept any files in the new .docx format produced through Microsoft Word 2007, either for initial submission or for revision. Users of this release of Word should convert these files to a format compatible with Word 2003 or Word for Macintosh 2004 (or, for initial submission, to a PDF file) before submitting to Science.”

There is also a warning that Microsoft Word 2007 is no longer acceptable in revision documents because of problems with incompatibilities with Equation Editor.

But, it is not just hefty Science magazine, Nature has also weighed into the battle:

“We currently cannot accept files saved in Microsoft Office 2007 formats. Equations and special characters (for example, Greek letters) cannot be edited and are incompatible with Nature’s own editing and typesetting programs.”

Thanks to An Antic Disposition for bringing the S and N issues to our attention. But, is this the only evidence of a rebellion? Certainly not. While Science and Nature are ditching the various Microsoft proprietary formats for technical reasons but staff and students at Imperial College London are truly up in arms over the imposition their institution makes on them to use Microsoft products.

The Software Freedom for Imperial College is hoping to persuade IC to implement a college-wide policy that ensures students are not coerced into purchasing M$ products in order to complete their studies. At present, many tutors and professors ask for Word format files, Powerpoint presentations, and Excel spreadsheets. All of which are infinitely more expensive than the Open Source equivalents of these Office products which are widely available and widely accepted in many quarters.

The movement also hopes to discourage the use of Microsoft products for email attachments and to preclude Microsoft’s awful winmail.dat (workaround here). They want IC to ensure that all web services are standards-compliant and fully functional in all major web browsers, not just the dreaded IE. And finally, they want to see the use of free and open source software for services when high quality and reliable alternatives exist.

Several top universities have already made the move to OS and ditched Microsoft either completely or partially. In fact, IC is the only one of the Top 20 academic centres of excellence around the world that still uses a proprietary web server that is not 100% standards compliant. This resulted, according to the site in 313 errors during testing compared to University of Cambridge: 0, University of Oxford: 0, MIT: 0, and Yale University: 1 error. SFIC hopes to negotiate with IC to rectify the problems. The main issue is probably inertia, even within academic science, Word, Powerpoint, Internet Explorer, Outlook, are all considered pretty much standard the world over.

There are viable and better, free alternatives to almost all Microsoft products, such as Thunderbird email, Firefox, Safari, and Opera web browsers, OpenOffice etc etc as well as countless non-proprietary server systems.