Technology – Page 24 – David Bradley

Pop-up University

Was I seeing things? I don’t know. It’s never happened before.

I just visited the site of a well-known professor at a US University, Firefox alerted me to a failed pop-up ad. Curious as to what pop-ups the University researchers might be serving I refreshed the page and this time allowed the pop-ups.

They were ads for Flirtomatic and an online gambling site.

Curious, I thought.

So, I ran Spybot S&D and Adaware Personal just to double check that I hadn’t gained some trojan or spyware along the way. Of course, these two programs may have let something slip through the net but working together they pretty much catch 99%.

Nothing, perfectly clean machine.

Opened the site again, this time in Internet Explorer 7. Same result. Pop-ups blocked. Tried it from another machine offsite and asked a couple of friends to double check. Same result.

I thought for a moment it might be University policy, but no other pages produced the pop-ups. I suspect therefore that it’s someone in the department, a student with an affiliate ad account, perhaps, hoping to cash in on site visitors. I asked the webmaster at the University to look into this and within 24h they’d replied to say the ads had been removed. So, it wasn’t just me. They didn’t say whether my hunch was right or whether it was a compromised server.

Of course, Sciencebase would never stoop so low. We carry editorially independent advertising to help subsidise the site, of course, who doesn’t? But, if you ever see a pop-up let me know and I’ll advise on how to clear your site of Spyware, because it won’t have been coded at this end of the service!

Grabbing the long tail of search engines

A revamped search engine from Heriot-Watt University in the UK makes the most of the long tail allowing searchers to drill way down into the most obscure, but nevertheless useful, pages across dozens of technology databases and sites.

“It’s a prerequisite for any successful search service in technology
subjects to have a ‘Long Tail’ (or large inventory), Heriot-Watt’s Roddy MacLeod explains, “This is because the majority of search queries made by technologists, or by others seeking information in technology-related subjects, tend to be very specific. It’s in the nature of the subjects, and the real information retrieval needs of those involved in these subjects, for granularity to be important.”

MacLeod heads up the team behind TechXtra http://www.techxtra.ac.uk/. This search engine aggregates content from a vast array of databases with technology-related content, and provides meta results that are essentially invisible to general search engines. “A search of TechXtra will search across more than 4 million records of various kinds – articles, technical reports, digital theses and dissertations, books, eprints, news items, job announcements, video, learning & teaching resources, key websites, and more – most of which relate to technology subjects,” MacLeod adds.

You can restrict searches to a particular format (technical reports, or
articles, or books, and so on), or select only specific databases among those listed with the ubiquitous Advanced Search option.

Among the most interesting of the databases for the Youtube generation is perhaps the Open Video Project, which is a growing repository of digitized video. And serious tech research can provide the full text of thousands of theses, eprints from arXiv, earthquake engineering
technical reports from Caltech, and almost half a million articles in computer and information science from CiteSeer. In addition many articles in Digital Open Access Journals (DOAJ), are available.

I’ve added a TechXtra link to the Sciencebase science search toolbox and will upgrade that to a fully-fledged search link in the next few days.

One thing which is a fairly recent development is the number of freely available full text digitised theses that TechXtra can now access. “These theses are the results of considerable research,” MacLeod told me, “they can be excellent resources on specialised topics.

HW University also produces the superb Internet Resources Newsletter.

Firefox 2 launched

Version 2.0 of the alternative web browser Firefox, has now been launched. The latest browser has many of the features of version 7 of that other browser, including a pop-up blocker, safer surfing, virus protection, tabbed browsing, and better handling of newsfeeds. One thing it will hopefully lack is the never-ending release of security patches that other browser seems to need on a regular basis.

I’m loathe to say that Sciencebase is optimised for Firefox. It’s not. In fact, it’s not optimised for any specific browser at all. It’s set up to hopefully adhere to the general W3C web standards rather than favouring any particular browser, so that it is compatible with them all. That said, I personally tend to use Firefox as my day to day browser and drop out to MSIE only to check formating of this site and others with which I work. Even if you have IE only sites you visit, there’s a plugin for Firefox that runs IE in a Firefox browser tab so you don’t even need to switch programs. Unless you’re smitten with Mr Gates’ turtleneck sweaters, I’d go for something bushier.

You can download version 2 officially from the Mozilla site from Tuesday October 24, although if you view the cache of this post you will see a set of pre-release links.

Richard Hammond Explodes (Microwave Ovens) Again

Probably a really, really good idea to take Brainiacs presenter Richard Hammond’s advice NOT TO TRY THIS AT HOME. The Brainiacs team set up two microwave ovens and stuffed in all the stuff they’d already tested in microwave ovens on previous shows (as a serious experiment so that you don’t have to do it at home). Beer, CDs, soap, petrol, champagne, wire wool and much more leads to some pretty lights and them some serious damage.

Richard Hammond Explodes (Alkali Metals)

British TV presenter Richard Hammond gained notoriety recently for smashing himself up at almost 300 mph in a dragster for the show Top Gear, but in a parallel life he was presenter of the science experiments show Brainiacs.

This is the classic alkali metals experiment we used to get to watch in chemistry class, but with a difference! These guys take it to the extreme to demonstrate not the fizzing and popping of lithium and sodium, not even just the smashed glass for potassium but the enormous almost Korean-scale explosion possible when caesium is added to water (DO NOT TRY THIS ONE AT HOME!!!).

(Sorry, the video was causing errors – removed)

Sadly it emerged recently that they probably didn’t use caesium in the final experiment at all, but an explosive charge that could nevertheless simulate the devastation a chunk of wet caesium might cause.

For more on the alkali metals and every other element come to that check out the animated periodic table.

Mobile science news

We’re beta testing a new way for Sciencebase readers to grab the science headlines. You can now access Sciencebase science news headlines on your WAP phone and similar devices, no need to tell us your phone number or anything, just follow this science wap link.

Everything seems to validate and it shows up on my cellphone and renders properly with wmlbrowser extension in Firefox, but I’d like to hear from readers who cannot access the site using their mobile device. Please post details of the device your using the browser it runs and and what you see or don’t see when you try to connect to the sciencebase wap site, thanks.

Of course, you can always get them the traditional way by clicking the RSS subscribe button at the top left of this page and following the simple instructions.

Red, red wine

How come it is next to impossible to get a red wine stain out of a white shirt, and yet as soon as inadvertently include a red shirt in with a white load in your washing machine you ended up with all those whites turning pink instead of bluey?

Can’t those dye chemists use whatever it is that makes red wine stain so well to fix the red pigment in that shirt so that it doesn’t come out in the wash?

Just a thought.

Chemical flickr

It was a tough call given how many photos there are of what those Stateside call a pharmacy or druggist, as opposed to a chemist in the UK, but I managed to track down a few chemists on flickr. Remember, regardless of appearances, chemists are always hot (it’s all those exothermic reactions).

Once again gender merging raises PC concentration.

Flickr Chemists

Grinning Don
Rhiannon
Lynn
Becky
Naser
Begoggled
Gregory
Cleopatra
Karl Pilkington
Little chemist

Any suggestions for the next round of hot science welcome…

Chemists escape browser lock down

WebME chemical structure drawing Is your browser so locked down that you can’t install any plugins or enable Java? Firewall refusing to cooperate with your molecules? Antivirus screaming at your structural efforts?

If so, then you probably find it rather difficult to run some of the chemistry drawing packages available for interactive use on the Web. There is an alternative.

Molinspiration Cheminformatics has released WebME, a molecule editor for creating
and editing molecules within a web browser that doesn’t need Java support and requires no plugins to be installed. The molecular editor is based on Web 2.0 Ajax technology and structure processing runs on serverside rather than on your machine.

The result is a web-based structure-input program with all kinds of potential that is not only platform independent but works with those locked down browsers.

Click to try WebME. In this implementation, the program is being used as the structure input for a molecular property calculator.

It may not have the depth of field of programs like ChemSketch and ChemDraw (yet), nor the bells and whistles of the many other structure packages available. But, the benefits to those behind restrictive user settings (in chemistry libraries for instance) are obvious.

The program is still in the beta stages of development, sitting at version 0.96 whatever that means. It seems nice and smooth to use though, quickly calculates properties and generates a Smiles string that you can then use elsewhere to search for your molecules. I hope they add InChI support soon though that’s the way to go for molecular searching these days.

There is, of course, another application that operates under similar general principles – PubChem sketcher (click the sketch button at PubChem.

Pod, poddy, podd

Apple has got ever so touchy about websites using the term podcast more liberally than its claims to trademark registration would allow. Cease and desist letters have been sent to the likes of Mypodder and Podcastready by the company, according to reports in Wired and The Register.

There are, of course, some bloggers that claim that the term podcast actually has nothing to do with Apple’s brand of mp3 player and that it originates in the phrase “publish-on-demand”-cast. Yeah, right!

Nevertheless, there is no mention of Apple in the dictionary.com definition of podcast: “a Web-based audio broadcast via an RSS feed, accessed by subscription over the Internet” or “to deliver a Web-based audio broadcast via an RSS feed over the Internet to subscribers”. Moreover, despite the term having an obvious etymology in a bastardisation of iPod and broadcast, neither an iPod nor over-the-air broadcasting is need to make or listen to a podcast.

Mark Ramsey of Hear 2.0 reckons it’s time we ditched the term podcast anyway, too few people “get it” he says, and the word should be changed to “audiomag” or something similar. This assertion is made despite the fact that the Ricky Gervais Show is mentioned in the Guiness Book of Records as the most popular podcast, presumably that will change soon with the launch of Sciencebase’s very own Geordie Boffin Podcast. Well, we can all dream, can’t we?

Bizarrely as ever, The Register includes a list of podified words in its report: antipodean, cephalopod, chiropodist, monkeypod, podgy and uropod. They overlooked arthropod, podiatrist, peapod, monopod…some of which point to the fact that pod, the prefix, has its etymology in the Greek word for foot. Maybe it’s time to give it the boot and go with Ramsey’s suggestion, or better still, we could rename them “blogcasts”, no doubt that would open yet another can of bad applies as the trademark owner of that term would more than likely kick up a fuss too.