Technology – Page 20 – David Bradley

When Blogging Gets You Fired

Blogger fired

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.

Harry Potter and the Terrorist Threat

Harry potter and the deathly hallows

Could the UK government’s response to the terrorist threat since 9/11 be the basis of plots and story lines in the Harry Potter series of books? Judith Rauhofer of the University of Central Lancashire believes so and has carried out a study of JK Rowling’s fictional accounts of the exploits of the child wizard with the infamous scar. She has found several subtle parallels in the books written since September 11, 2001, with contemporary society and suggests that the allegorical nature of these novels could underpin much of their appeal to adult readers.

Since the publication of the fourth book, “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire”, the publishers, Bloomsbury, has acknowledged that a large part of the readership is among adults, by publishing an adult edition alongside the children’s version. Many commentators suspect that one possible rationale for this is to allow adults to read the book in public without embarrassment.

Jon Howells of Waterstone’s told me that, “Based on our pre-order statistics we estimate that some 45 per cent of Harry Potter book 7 sales will be of the adult edition, which is up on about 23 per cent for the last book.” Book 7 – Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – goes on sale Saturday 21st July.

According to Rauhofer, book five in the series was the first Harry Potter book to be written entirely after the terrorist attacks in New York City, Pennsylvania, and Washington. “Until then, the Harry Potter series could be seen as nothing more than a simple story of good versus evil,” says Rauhofer. But, after that, “JK Rowling’s work evolved into more of a social commentary on current events.”

Rauhofer believes that with the Harry Potter series Rowling has created a parallel world highlighting many of the steps taken by the British government, which she says are mostly unfair and unjustifiable, in the name of the war on terror. For instance, in the fifth book, “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix”, all wizards are issued with emergency pamphlets. “Most people who received the UK government’s ‘Preparing for an-emergency’ pamphlet through their letterbox in 2004 will recognise the irony of Rowling’s plot detail here,” says Rauhofer.

Several key plot features hint at parallels between the wizard world and the so-called “muggle” world of humans, says Rauhofer. The marginalising of an ethnic group, for instance, by the muggles themselves, identity issues with Death Eaters masquerading as others, detention without trial of Knight Bus conductor Stanley Shunpike on suspicion of Death Eater activity, interception of Arthur and Molly’s post while in The Burrow in the name of safety, and many other examples.

“Rowling’s description of an alternative society and its government traces recent events in contemporary society,” Rauhofer adds, “The political thread going through the series largely focuses on the way in which the Ministry of Magic deals with Lord Voldemort’s return.” If Voldemort, whom of course should not be named, is the terrorist threat in disguise, then the anti-Voldemort security measures taken by the Wizards could be seen to reflect various legal and political changes that have occurred in the UK since 9/11.

Of course, it could simply be that, like countless books before it, readers find ways of looking between the lines to see hidden messages that are simply not there. Unfortunately, JK Rowling is rather busy this week and was unavailable for comment at the time of writing.

Rauhofer’s treatise appears in

Is the Web Awake?

The web's awake 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!

Thumbing Scientific Papers

A rather eye-catching paper was posted on the ChemRank site recently entitled: How to write consistently boring scientific literature. The paper is a parody on the art of writing a research paper by biologist Kaj Sand-Jensen of the University of Copenhagen. And begins, “Although scientists typically insist that their research is very exciting and adventurous when they talk to laymen and prospective students, the allure of this enthusiasm is too often lost in the predictable, stilted structure and language of their scientific publications. I present here, a top-10 list of recommendations for how to write consistently boring scientific publications. I then discuss why we should and how we could make these contributions more accessible and exciting.” Are you enticed by Sand-Jensen’s intro? Me neither. It just seems it would be as terse and as inaccessible to a lay reader as any of the papers he parodies. You can give it the thumbs up or the thumbs down on ChemRank.

Five Dimensional Online Gifts

Online communities Different social media, such as wikis, MySpace, Flickr, and various forums have different ways for people to give and receive gifts, according to Swedish scientists.

To fully understand online gifting and the successes and failures of online communities, we need to consider the question “who gives what to whom, how and why?”

Every day, more and more people join online communities, such as MySpace, FaceBook, and Second Life, and use file sharing systems like BitTorrent. In these virtual spaces they can reinvent themselves, make new friends, and share information and resources with others. Understanding how people give and receive digital items, “gifts”, online is key to understanding the successes and failures of countless online communities.

Now, computer scientist JÃ¶rgen SkÃ¥geby of LinkÃ¶ping University in Sweden writing in the International Journal of Web Based Communities, explains how there are five dimensions to the way people give and receive gifts online, whether those gifts are information, mp3 files, photos, or illicit file shares.

Initiative – spontaneous giving and sharing, e.g. SourceForge.net and flickr.com
Direction – the path the gift follows
Incentive – exploited in point-scoring systems such as BitTorrent networks
Identification – anonymous or recognised
Limitation – access control

Gifting is a central human activity in many communities, both offline and online, explains SkÃ¥geby, “As more and more of human social activities will be copied or migrate entirely to online, we need to consider what dimensions are central to these activities, so that we can analyse their long-term impact on individuals and society.”

SkÃ¥geby’s work is reported in Int. J. Web Based Communities, 2007, 3, 55.

Academic Rebellion

Science nature microsoft 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.

Chemrefer Chemspider Coupled

A mash up between Chemrefer, the search engine for open access chemistry papers, and molecular structure search engine Chemspider launched today. I have to confess to playing no small part in facilitating this collaboration having introduced the Chemspider team, virtually speaking, to the owner of Chemrefer, Will Griffiths, who was a Reactive Profilee in June 2006. You can access the chemical mash up here. Search for any term of interest and the new hybrid tool will return all the pertinent results that are available for instant free access from the journal publishers. There are something like 50000 papers accessible this way via a search of more than 14.5million+ chemical entities.

Open access medical records

Open access medicine Fancy being a case report for medical scientists to ponder? If your answer to that question is yes, then you probably carry a donor card, regularly give blood, and have already willed your body to medical science. If the answer was no, then read on, the following may persuade you to if not donate your remains then perhaps make yourself a case in point.

Medical case reports serve a vital role in medicine. Like those howto and self-help feature articles one sees in popular lifestyle magazines, they focus entirely on an individual patient, but at a slightly more technical level. Case studies provide unique insights into the rare side effects of new medications, early warning indicators of potential new diseases, unexpected associations between diseases or symptoms, and much more. Indeed, it was through case reports in the medical literature, that the earliest information on AIDS, Lyme disease and toxic shock syndrome emerged.

In recent years, however, economic and ethical pressures have led research journals to publish fewer and fewer medical case reports. The main pressure seems to be that such papers are of limited interest when read in isolation and more problematic from the publishers’ point of view are unlikely to be highly cited. Many research journals tout citation counts as a major selling point both to authors and subscribers, so poor-selling papers are unattractive to the marketing team.

The end result, is that a vast wealth of unique scientific data is simply lost.

Michael Kidd, Professor and Head of the Discipline of General Practice at the University of Sydney, hopes to change all that. He is founder of the open access (OA) Journal of Medical Case Reports. The OA approach taken by this journal means that medical case reports can find an audience regardless of citation concerns. By utilizing the OA publishing model, interesting case reports can reach the medical profession where previously they would simply sink without trace. With open access to this information, doctors can easily compare symptoms and treatments between patients and researchers and can sift through thousands of reports to formulate hypotheses and search for patterns and correlations. Who knows when the next AIDS or Lyme disease will emerge. Case reports might provide the first hints from the unfortunate “early adopters.”

How colourful language can improve your image

Color gamut Colourful language usually refers euphemistically to the kind of expletives and oaths you hear in a barrack room brawl. But, in the context of technology it could be the next big thing in colour printing.

Colour and natural language experts at Xerox have been working on what sounds like an entirely new way to get the best out of your digital photos. Their research could allow you to talk to your printer and tell it to “make the green a ‘mossy’ green” or “make the sky more sky blue”. More technically, you might one day be able to do all the kinds of colour and contrast corrections that are usually the preserve of programs like Photoshop, with simple phrases sent to the printer itself.

The approach speed up the workflow for graphic artists, printers, photographers and other image professionals and their assistants who could save time side-stepping the on-screen fine tuning process of printouts.

“You shouldn’t have to be a colour expert to make the sky a deeper blue or add a bit of yellow to a sunset,” research leader Geoff Wolfe says. The software is still in the development stages, but works by translating human descriptions of colour – “emerald green”, “brick red”, “sky-blue pink” – into the precise numerical codes printers use to control the amount of each primary colour they deposit at a single point in the printed image.

“Today, especially in the office environment, there are many non-experts who know how they would like colour to appear but have no idea how to manipulate the color to get what they want,” Woolfe adds. Moreover, the vast majority of computer screens in “non-expert” offices are setup incorrectly for screen to print comparisons and so cause the whole gamut of problems when a document that looks okay on screen is printed. Simple commands to rectify such issues avoid the problem of having to know how to set up the screen and ambient lighting.

Woolfe’s discovery could mean that colour adjustments can be made on devices like office printers and commercial presses without having to deal with the mathematics. For instance, cardinal red on a printer or monitor is really expressed by a set of mathematical coordinates that identify a specific region in a three-dimensional space, which is the gamut of all the colours that the device can display or print. To make that colour less orange, the colour expert distorts (morphs) that region to a new region in the gamut.

The ability to use common words to do this gamut morphing and adjust colour would have far-reaching implications for non-experts as well as graphic artists, printers, photographers and other professionals who spend a significant amount of time fine tuning the colours in documents.

“In the end it’s all about usability,” Woolfe adds, “Colour is so prevalent today, you shouldn’t have to be an expert to handle it.”

Open Access Abbreviated, Combined

$Phys Math Central$ Just when you thought that the publishers had ran out of combinations of shortened discipline names – PhysChemOrgPhys, ChemCommPhysChem, CommPhysOrgGeoAstroChem (You know who you are!), BioMedCentral(!) is yet to launch another – PhysMath Central. PMC, an open access publishing platform, goes live today with a call for papers for its first journal is officially accepting papers for publication in its first journal, PMC Physics A, B, and C.

My former colleague on ChemWeb(!) Chris Leonard who is now heading up PMC tells me about why this endeavour is so important to the scientific community and publishing in general. “Global access to peer-reviewed research is as essential in the physical sciences as it is in the life sciences,” he says, “The same benefits apply, namely; increased readership, increased citations, decreased access barriers and the retention of copyright by the author.” Leonard is on record as saying that his move from the world of traditional publishing to the OA end of the spectrum represented an epiphany. “I started off at ChemWeb.com and subsequently moved to Amsterdam to work for Elsevier,” he explains, “I have now seen the light and am very happy to be developing physics and mathematics journals for the Open Access publisher BioMed Central.”

BMC explains the rationale behind the launch as being aimed at meeting the increasing demand for open access journals from major research institutes (such as CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research) and other funding organizations and government bodies. PhysMath Central could make research in physics, mathematics and computer science more widely available and increase access to this research to all institutes and individuals, without the burden of subscription charges. “The demand for open access is growing constantly as all scientists from all disciplines become aware of the benefits of open access publishing,” adds Leonard. Success will hinge, as with any new journal launch, on whether or not the putative authors feel the return on investment of submitting to the new journal will pay off in terms of readership and impact factor.

If the existence of yet more journals in the literature is not enough, PMC is also launching a blog, be sure to add it to your blogroll to keep up with developments and impact factor evolution. Oh, and one more thing, for their British authors: they deliberately missed off the “s” from “maths”.