Nascent

To co-incide with the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Bali next week, we will be holding a special series of events in Second Life.

The UN conference runs from the 3rd - 14th of December, and over that fortnight, Second Nature will play host to a range of speakers including Dr Simon Buckle, Director of Climate Change Policy at the Grantham Institute for Climate Change; Dr Tara LaForce, Imperial College on her research on carbon capture and storage and George Monbiot, Guardian columnist and author of Heat: How to stop the planet burning.

The first speaker will be Tara LaForce on Tuesday 4th December at 6pm GMT/ 10am PST, SLT, and all events will be held on our flagship Second Nature island. All events are free and no specialist knowledge is required - all welcome!

For more details on times, dates and new speakers, watch our Second Life blog for updates, email me, or join the "Nature" group in Second Life. Lastly, if anyone's interested, but has never tried Second Life before, now's a good time, and I'd be very happy to help anyone get started and show you round Second Life - email me, or find me in SL as Joanna Wombat.

Posted by Joanna Scott at 10:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The new version 1.5 of OS X literature management tool Papers has lots of new and improved features, but one of the most immediately useful is the ability to parse the DOI string out of a PDF and use it to look up the metadata for that file from PubMed. As the metadata that publishers put in PDF files is generally pitiful and basically unreliable for any practical use, this is a very welcome feature.

Here's a quick screencast demonstrating this, as well as a few other things:

Get Flash to see this player.

Download the full resolution QuickTime movie (9.5MB)

This video shows:

1. The new landing pages for Nature articles, where abstracts and metadata are visible to readers who aren't signed in, so you can link directly to articles and not worry that visitors will just get the default "you need to buy access to this article" page.
2. Signing in to nature.com with the Secure Login Firefox extension.
3. Zotero's recognition of the article, import of metadata and automatic collection of a HTML snapshot and the associated PDF.
4. Reading the PDF in Skim.
5. Importing the PDF by drag-and-drop to Papers (you can also just drag the PDF onto Papers' dock icon).
6. Using Papers' "Match" button to extract the DOI from the PDF, look up the metadata from PubMed and attach it to the PDF in Papers' library.

The Zotero step isn't crucial - you could just use Papers and Skim - but I wanted to demonstrate both applications at the same time. Using both leads to a bit of duplication, as you'll have metadata and PDFs in both Zotero and Papers separately, but there are possibilities for syncing between multiple bibliographic/literature management tools in the future.

This is a big step closer to getting a decent workflow for discovering, storing, reading and annotating scientific literature.

Posted by Alf Eaton at 07:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

The next event in the Second Nature Lecture series is today and is the rescheduled event about patents.

Our guest is Sue Scott, a patent attorney working as a consultant to Abel & Imray in London. Before that, she acted as an advisor on patent matters to the UK government on a number of occasions, was Head of Patents at BTG and originally began life with a chemistry degree from Oxford.

Sue will talk to us all about patents in science, why patents exist and are controversial, explain the basic things all scientists need to know about patents, and attempt to dispel some of the most common misconceptions about patents.

Judging by the interest in at the last abandoned event, I'm certain this is going to be a fascinating event, and Sue is prepared for rigorous questioning!

All welcome - please do come along! Voice will be used, so if you need any help setting up, come along a few minutes early.

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Title: This Importance of Patents to Scientists

Date: Monday 5th November

Time: 11am SLT/PDT, 7pm GMT

Location: Second Nature Island

Contact: Joanna Wombat

Posted by Joanna Scott at 05:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Rather than fill up Nascent with posts about Scintilla, we've moved Scintilla's development talk to a separate blog, Scintillation. There you'll find news of features, usage tips and discussion of other related issues, including the new design.

Posted by Alf Eaton at 10:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

October 31, 2007 will forever be remembered as an important day in publishing history. After more than ten years in research and development, the STIX fonts (Scientific and Technical Information Exchange) have finally launched and are freely available in beta! This new web font set properly renders mathematical symbols on any browser alleviating the need for publishers to assemble symbols from a variety of fonts. It includes over 8,000 glyphs.By making the fonts freely available, the STIX project hopes to encourage the development of widespread applications that make use of these fonts. The TeX version of the fonts should be available soon after the production version is released.

Much thanks goes to the six publishers who collaborated to design, fund, and manage the STIX project include American Chemical Society (ACS), American Institute of Physics (AIP), American Mathematical Society (AMS), American Physical Society (APS), Elsevier, and Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and their technical partner MicroPress, Inc.

Congratulations to Tim Ingoldsby (Project Chairman) and his terrific team for seeing this through.

I recommend all publishers download the fonts from the STIX web site at www.stixfonts.org today.

Posted by Howard Ratner at 05:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)