Slashdot Mirror

http://www.citeulike.org/user/...

Or you just stick your head out the cube and say "Hey Bob, which file has the numbers I need again?"

Yea, that works if you're cubical neighbors, but not if you work in another building, city, or state never mind the same floor.

You can't share your ideas for photos over IM

Here's an article from 2004: "Exploring the potentials of combining photo annotating tasks with instant messaging fun". Sharing Photos With Yahoo! Messenger, now you can't exactly show each other how things can be done easily but you can annotate or make remarks. I knew a graphic artist who collaborated online, though not with YM.

Falcon

Wrong. Both sides of the moon have had the same level of impact

Wrong, the far side has about 1.67 times more recent impacts than the near side (citation).

The 'near' side of the moon only looks smoother because mare lava flows have smoothed it out somewhat. It's just chance that put those flows on the side we see.

No, we don't know that, there surely is a reason other than chance, we just don't know for sure what it is yet. Also, not all of it was covered by lava flows, and you can tell these areas look different from the far side. Well at least they look different to me.

Fun fact: if the earth had no weather, it would look just like the moon in terms of impact craters.

I'll assume that you chose the word weather instead of atmosphere for a reason, not too sure why, but the Earth is geologically active and has an atmosphere (assuming you weren't talking about there not being an atmosphere) then it would look more like Venus. And Venus doesn't have so many visible craters. Yeah, there's quite a difference between a body that died over 3 billion years ago and one that's still active, radiating and erupting.

NILFS2 (http://www.nilfs.org/en/) is actually a pretty interesting filesystem. It's a log-structured filesystem, meaning that it treats your disk as a big circular logging device.

Log structured filesystems were originally developed by the research community (e.g. see the paper on Sprite LFS here, which is the first example that I'm aware of: http://www.citeulike.org/user/Wombat/article/208320) to improve disk performance. The original assumption behind Sprite LFS was that you'll have lots of memory, so you'll be able to mostly service data reads from your cache rather than needing to go to disk; however, writes to files are still awkward as you typically need to seek around to the right locations on the disk. Sprite LFS took the approach of buffering writes in memory for a time and then squirting a big batch of them onto the disk sequentially at once, in the form of a "log" - doing a big sequential write of all the changes onto the same part of the disk maximised the available write bandwidth. This approach implies that data was not being altered in place, so it was also necessary to write - also into the log - new copies of the inodes whose contents were altered. The new inode would point to the original blocks for unmodified areas of the file and include pointers to the new blocks for any parts of the file that got altered. You can find out the most recent state of a file by finding the inode for that file that has most recently been written to the log.

This design has a load of nice properties, such as:
* You get good write bandwidth, even when modifying small files, since you don't have to keep seeking the disk head to make in-place changes.
* The filesystem doesn't need a lengthy fsck to recover from crash (although it's not "journaled" like other filesystems, effectively the whole filesystem *is* one big journal and that gives you similar properties)
* Because you're not repeatedly modifying the same bit of disk it could potentially perform better and cause less wear on an appropriately-chosen flash device (don't know how much it helps on an SSD that's doing its own block remapping / wear levelling...). One of the existing flash filesystems for Linux (JFFS2, I *think*) is log structured.

In the case of NILFS2 they've exploited the fact that inodes are rewritten when their contents are modified to give you historical snapshots that should be essentially "free" as part of the filesystem's normal operation. They have the filesystem frequently make automatic checkpoints of the entire filesystem's state. These will normally be deleted after a time but you have the option of making any of them permanent. Obviously if you just keep logging all changes to a disk it'll get filled up, so there's typically a garbage collector daemon of some kind that "repacks" old data, deletes stuff that's no longer needed, frees disk space and potentially optimises file layout. This is necessary for long term operation of a log structured filesystem, though not necessary if running read-only.

Another modern log structured FS is DragonflyBSD's HAMMER (http://www.dragonflybsd.org/hammer/), which is being ported to Linux as a SoC project, I think (http://hammerfs-ftw.blogspot.com/)

You can find the mathematicians' article at http://www.citeulike.org/group/3214/article/3664693 or http://arxiv.org/pdf/0811.3302 (pdf warning).

I find it interesting that the article doesn't prove any theorems. At least searching for the word "theorem" in the pdf only gives references to other theorems. Searching for "proof" gives no hits.

That leaves me thinking: what does this article tell us that we couldn't find out ourselves by ripping through some prime numbers? I thought the real power of math was to say something 100% certain about some infinitude of stuff, so we don't have to go and check every case by hand.

Oh well, I guess every open question needs some results on the form "this holds for all n <= bignum"; say, like the Goldbach Conjecture (every even number n > 2 is the sum of two primes).

Bibliography Tools in the Context of WWW and LATEX

Looks like that covers your needs.

CC.

Check out http://www.citeulike.org/ Does pretty much what you are asking for. You put in the details of papers, and assign keyword tags. You can also look at other people's libraries and so on.

What is important is *anonymous* peer review. There needs to be a mechanism for new scientists to question established researchers without lasting detriment to their careers. On another note, what I thought this article might be about was CiteULike, which is great. Any academics should check it out

Educational software switching from a language with a bias towards systems programming to a language for the average programmer: that's good data from which to extrapolate.

Here here! I've recently started using LaTeX at university and although the learning curve is a little steep it is an excellent tool. There are plenty of existing templates to use for writing reports, the image and layout tools are ticky to get the hang of at first but again very powerful. I used these tutorials and they pretty much covered everything I needed

When it comes to references aswell BiBTeX is very handy for handling them all and inserting the references in the correct style. Sites like CiteULike make managing referenced papers and importing them into LaTeX very easy. Markup style tools such as LaTeX should be taught early before people learn how easy it is to use Word/Oo.o!

The page itself is pretty obviously not a high traffic news site; i almost mistook it for a genric squatter site. This is all goooogle turned up http://www.citeulike.org/article/1423027 (that's not a squatter page either). The link from TFA is pretty legit, http://www.springerlink.com/content/h0u280742k2530 6p/. Clearly a paper was written in some obscure Russian science journal and reprinted in english, and then this article surfaces out of the blue about said paper. There wouldn't be any quotes because the only source is the paper itself. Since the paper itself costs money to look at, and I don't know anything about the source journal, or how thorough its peer reviews are (not could I find anything out except from that one link from TFA), it's at least within the realm of possibility that the paper is exaggerated or even totally bogus. But jeez, look at all those names.

Hello - have you used Office 2007?

Well, it's only been out 4 months. I based everything I said off of previous incarnations of Office, from 2003 (the second latest-n-greatest) to 95 (when WordPerfect started sucking). Given I don't want to replace my shiny & new copy of Office 2003 so soon after I got it, I won't be purchasing 2007 for some time. And nor will I be using to submit to Nature or Science, apparently, even if it were free.

1. PDF publishing is supported (free)

That's good to hear, and long long missing. Questions: is the output of "Print to PDF, then print the PDF" the same as just printing? I've had issues with such software producing different output that way (even sometimes products made by Adobe!). Also, how "good" is the PDF output. That is, are the files sizes quite small, is it embedding proper scaleable fonts, and does it print fast? A big problem with the old "print to .PRN, change extension to .PS, then ps2pdf" way of going from Word to PDF was getting bloated, poor quality, and complex PDF files; even Acrobat sometimes will non-sensibly make a crappy PDF.

2. Citations and Bibliographies are both supported under Word

Having used BibTeX, I will never go back. There are huge databases of freely available BibTeX format citations. The second runner up, EndNote, hasn't nearly the amount of citations available (although importing BibTeX into EndNote isn't hard). I have used EndNote, and it is not nearly as good as BibTeX. Other people (read the comments) seem to feel that EndNote works better than Word 2007's support; I simply don't believe that a mouse-driven interface for adding citations can ever beat a text-based one.

Office 2007 documents can be saved to document managment servers for sharing

I think you're missing the point. LaTeX easily allows you (and encourages you) to split your documents up into multiple files. So, regardless of what collaboration service you use, anything from emailing files back and forth to something overly complicated like SourceVault, you can have multiple people editing the same document simultaneously. They just work on different sub-files. I've done it with email, but usually do use RCS to automate the locking support. Unless Office 2007 vastly changes things, Word documents are still monolithic files. That makes it quite difficult to support simultaneous editing; you *need* a concurrent versioning system. And, forgoing large changes in Office 2007, .doc files are still stored as BLOBS, which makes automated commit/merging difficult to impossible.

4. LaTeX has style files; Word has templates. What's the difference?

As best I can tell (I've never found it, and I've tried...) you can't apply a template to a document after the fact (and get the expected results). If my paper is rejected from one place, I can reformat the entire document by changing which style file I include. Style files pretty much guarantee that all of the final product will have a consistent look, and that said look is easy to change across the board. Journals that are either done all in LaTeX or those that hire separate typesetters (for mucho $$$) have the most consistent appearance. Others look a bit like just a bunch of papers glued together.

I can't claim Office 2007 is better than LaTeX, since I've not used the latter extensively,

Except for those on the Office 2007 team, *nobody* has used Office 2007 extensively :)

From talking with people who have used 2007, there is quite a learning jump to go from 2003 to 2007. Especially since 2007 breaks math support for journals, it makes sense to consider moving to LaTeX just a

If anyone else is a little uncomfortable about the web app (if not to say 'Web 2.0') consolidation going on at the moment, especially wrt Yahoo, they may be interested to know about an alternative to Flickr.

It's called iMob and is run by the folks from Seattle Wireless.

It's not polished like Flickr, and I don't know how much usage it gets, but I figure that more people using it is only going to encourage further development of the site.

As for a non-corporate alternative to del.icio.us, that's less clear. CiteULike is nice for academic papers, but Annotea Ubimarks might be the answer (plus they're nicely semantic web flavoured).

whoa dude, you are horribly misinformed. First of all, vitamin E does not decrease your lifespan! Vitamin E is an antioxidant that works synergistically with other antioxidants like Vitamin C, selenium, and glutathione to reduce your oxidative stress. Oxidative stress is thought to be one of the main causative factors in aging and antioxidants help to neutralize this stress. Heres some links to catch you up... Linux Pauling Institute: Linus Pauling was a known advocate of Vitamin C and vitamins in general. The site is pretty informative on the role of nutrients, minerals, and vitamins, in our health as well as in our physiology. if your feeling brave then here are some link so some pertinent research aticles. The role of mitochondrial oxidative stress in aging Ive also compiled quite a few relevant articles here I suggest you get to reading! ;) marquis

It seems to me that Asians(esp. East Asians) actually tend to age much less than caucasians. Japan especially tends to have a lot of very old people, I remember in 2003 the oldest person in the world was Japanese, they died, and then again the oldest person in the world was Japanese

I second that. I use Bibdesk and it is quite good -- very Mac like and much better than managing .bib files by hand. Furthermore it handles the .RIS (Endnote) and .BIB files that most electronic journal sites generate. I don't even type citations by hand these days - I just search for them on EngineeringVillage2 or Elsevier and drag the .RIS file into Bibdesk. Then I just drag the item into TeXshop and the citation is there.

As for porting it.... well, could be tough considering it uses the Cocoa framework.

However, since the poster is asking for a Linux solution, I can only think of web-based bib managers:

Cite-U-Like - a del.icio.us for journals, can export to Bibdesk.
Refworks - if your campus has a subscription to Refworks, it's one of the best web-based bibliography managers around. It like the Bloglines of academic journals... well kind of...

Pybliographer looks promising too...

There's also CiteULike which uses a del.icio.us model to handle academic papers: http://www.citeulike.org/