Category Archives: Internet

English-Only Science in a Multilingual World: Costs, Benefits, and Options

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Language & research
Monolingualism in Research – probably you haven’t thought of it much (i hadn’t given it much thought either..)

Little has been done to assess the impact of monolingualism in science, let alone deal with it, but a session at the AAAS meeting in February at least laid out the issues. The participants in that panel have been kind enough to supply me with their slides, which can be accessed at http://www.the-scientist.com/languagebarrier.

May be its time you see what the fuss is all about.

Photo: Georgina

Youtubing for Academics ?!

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Its no question that Web 2.0 is taking the internet to new frontiers never dreamed before.The Social networking phenomenon i.e. ‘Wisdom of crowds’ is definitely making its presence felt on the academic population.It all started with Social bookmarking for academics,which moved on to digg like research news portals and now ladies and gentlemen its Youtube time :-) Oh! no wait if the name YouTube strikes synonmously with ‘productivity sucker’ – then this ain’t that!

How about exchanging screencasts (videos) of your research methods and ideas to like minded audience? better yet, how about performing experiments and have them recorded and published with video and audio!! Or would you prefer to give a first person view of your research publication – that is interacting with your academic audience. Well all of the above are reality.


Scivee

What is Scivee all about? ofcourse you can read it here, but somehow i believe of the three Web 2.0 services Scivee holds greater prospects in terms of early acceptance and popularity.
About Scivee

(p.s. sorry about the picture :-( )

The next service is JoVE ( Journal of Visualized Experiments)

JoVE

For the first time, JoVE allows you to publish your experiments in all its dimensions, overcoming the inherent limitations of traditional print journals, thus adding a whole new quality to the communication of your experimental work and research results.

A very interesting idea, but i am not sure how useful/popular this would become! Would be interested in watching this medium.

Google Reader for Academics

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I have written previously about how RSS is a revolutionary phenomenon for people who need to process continously updating information sources.If you are in Academia then keeping yourself updated in research publications is a must.Most people including myself used the eTOC (electronic Table of Contents) facility of journals to update what’s getting published.However after RSS came up all that has changed.I have a screencast showing how advantageous it is to go through large list of information with RSS feeds and the mightly google reader ;-)

More to Reader:

  • great interface
  • handy keyboard shortcuts
  • Google gears (access RSS feeds offline too!!)
  • Share posts from your RSS subscriptions

So give it a try you’ll notice that its much faster than the classical email subscription system :-)

PS: In screencast i show how the feeds can be organized in reader, then quickly ‘skimmed’ using the trusty keyboard shortcuts, i usually mark (star) papers/posts that i want to read for later – i also share interesting papers via my shared feed which my friends can view, this way the chances of missing  significant publication very less. Also have subscriptions from my Pubmed searches, from social bookmarking sites like connotea, citeulike etc. again a method to really get everything you are interested in. Yes this will result in a huge inflow of information, which is why i need an interface like Googlereader to go through them in the shortest time possible.