Scintillation

The 'Hot Topics' clusters on the left-hand side of the front page represents stories that have shown a recent burst of activity, above their mean for the last 30 days. Key phrases extracted from each item are monitored, and if they appear over a threshold level then stories attached to that phrase are used as Hot Topics.

Previously phrases were clustered around items, which meant that often two separate stories would be inappropriately clustered together; now the clustering code has been rewritten to group items around phrases, which so far seems to work much better.

Hopefully the interesting, bursting topics on the front page will now be more clearly defined and easier to read.

Posted by Alf Eaton on November 14, 2007
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Thanks to the new arXiv API, we've been able to add arXiv search to Scintilla. At the moment saved searches aren't enabled, but once the API is updated to allow search results to be sorted by date this will be added.

Posted by Alf Eaton on November 13, 2007
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There are a couple of very useful bookmarklets on Scintilla's 'tips' page. The first - "Find in Scintilla" - is for when you've followed a link to read a story on the original site, or just ended up on a science blog post while wandering around the web, and want to get to that item on Scintilla in order to rate that story or recommend it to someone. Click the bookmarklet and if that item is found in Scintilla you'll be taken straight to it.

If the item unfortunately isn't found in Scintilla, it might be brand new and hasn't been indexed yet, or the source might not have been added to Scintilla. In the latter case, let us know and we'll look into adding the source as soon as possible.

The second bookmarklet takes the text you select on any web page and runs a "More Like This" analysis against Scintilla's index of blog posts and news items. This is a good way of quickly finding more items that discuss topics similar to the page you're currently reading.

Posted by Alf Eaton on November 02, 2007
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There are now Atom feeds for 'items recommended to your groups' (available from the Groups tab of your profile page) and 'items recommended directly to you' (available from your profile page). This should make it easier to keep track of stories that your network has found interesting enough to manually recommend.

There's also an option available in your preferences to enable email alerts when someone in your network sends you a manual recommendation.

Posted by Alf Eaton on November 02, 2007
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A couple of weeks ago Scintilla switched over to a new look, thanks to NPG's design team. Hopefully everything should be working smoothly, but if you find any problems do let us know.

There's an option in the Edit tab of your profile to switch back to the old theme, if you preferred things that way.

Posted by Alf Eaton on November 02, 2007
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