13 Wednesday Dec 2017
Posted in My general observations
I did a quick check of Sci-hub, three weeks after they lost their sci-hub.io DNS name. It does appear to be totally dead now — in that the fallback TOR Onion address is 404-not-found today, and their two non-DNS URLs are also dead (in terms of still having a viable front-page, but being unable to handle any DOI article-fetch requests).
10 Sunday Dec 2017
Posted in New titles added to JURN
10 Sunday Dec 2017
Posted in JURN tips and tricks
Force Facebook to sort-by-date on posts: facebook.com/?sk=h_chr Yes, you can do this with a setting in the F.B. Purity browser add-on, but it takes a few seconds to load the unsorted posts, then to reload as date-sorted. During which time you may glimpse the ghastliness that is the un-purified and un-adblocked version of Facebook. Using this URL is a far less clunky way of forcing the newest posts to the top of your main Facebook feed.
08 Friday Dec 2017
Posted in Ecology additions, New titles added to JURN
07 Thursday Dec 2017
Posted in Ecology additions, Spotted in the news
PeerJ expands. Fifteen additional subject areas in environmental science, and a “full fee waiver until 31st January 2018”. Nice, and it’ll all enhance JURN’s comprehensive coverage of the openEco journals in due course.
07 Thursday Dec 2017
Posted in Spotted in the news
VitiSynth is a claimed “open access” database for wine and grape professionals. The site foregrounds recent research, and does an interesting auto-highlighting of industry-specific terms and details in research abstracts…
Also does auto-translation to English of Spanish abstracts etc.
There’s no RSS, though. And the website’s “open access” sub-title is rather misleading. The website is public, but the research being linked to is often pay-walled and there’s no “Open Access research only” filter for results.
07 Thursday Dec 2017
Posted in JURN's Google watch
I just ran a search on Google Scholar, and Scholar decided to present me with only two results (from Elsevier and Springer). The other 231 results (perfectly valid, often also from Elsevier and Springer) were hidden behind a small link to “See all results”. A curious new behaviour…
It seems we may need a browser add-on that forces “show all results” as the default page of results.
04 Monday Dec 2017
Posted in Spotted in the news
That’s some preprint! The Alliance of American Museums has just published their November/December 2040 issue of Museum magazine. It’s free to all, in PDF. Generally too tame and fearful of snipping at our present-day cat’s-cradle of consensus about the future, I’d say. But I do like the whimsical idea of a future Volcano Adventures Museum…
“recent technological advances in protective heat shield clothing have made it possible for group tours to climb down into the crater of the volcano”
04 Monday Dec 2017
Posted in Spotted in the news
The entire Egon Schiele catalogue raisonne is to be placed online in public, thanks to the Kallir Research Institute and an anonymous donor. ETA for the new website: October 2018, when it will include…
“the hundreds of works by Schiele that have been discovered since the current [print] edition was published in 1990.”
Egon Schiele, self-portrait.
04 Monday Dec 2017
Posted in Spotted in the news
“Zoom.ai trawls the web for information and posts to create an instant personal profile of people you will meet for the first time.”
An interesting development in the “I’m too lazy/dumb to search, have a bot do it for me” Dept. Possibly illegal under EU and UK data protection and data re-matching laws, I’m guessing, but this sort of technology is likely to be an interesting factor in future search, provided it can establish Name Authority with 100% accuracy. Possibly also of future interest to negligence lawyers: “You mean, you relied on a new closed-source algorithm to decide who to invest $1m in / hire / partner with, based on so-called ‘personality profiles’ that were delivered to you just minutes before you entered the meeting?”