Much brighter ball for a brighter 2008

The city is going to get crazy (apparently there is a new ball) in few hours. Except for the ShaBot6000 the Robot
And to all my sales colleagues who have been teasing me for years about my "diode" addiction here you go again another place where diode is used:


"The ball that will descend Monday atop 1 Times Square is a new, $1.1 million high-tech creation, with a skeleton of aluminum and a skin composed of 672 Waterford crystal panels and additional pyramid-shaped mirrors to best reflect the light of 9,576 diodes generating 625,033 lumens. That is more than double the dazzle-power of last year’s ball, which looked like a porcupine with 600 halogen-quill bulbs."Via New York Times

To all my readers, friends, colleagues have a healthy, happy and succesfull 2008. Salud.

Believe in it and deploy Semantic Web applications

Here is a good example from Harper's on how semantic web can enhance information delivery and brings insights. If you have subscription, read the "Semantic Web in Action" at Scientific American. (Indeed this is available on the web in you search a bit heard)You'll find many interesting cases studies and companies who are prototyping and deploying semantic web applications. If I were running an online journal delivery platform in STM publishing , I would definitely allocate some resources to integrate semantic web applications in it. You may want to listen to John Udell's interviewwith Richard Wallis who is a technology evangelist for Talis.

Schlumberger gets exclusive distribution rights to MetaCarta search techology

"MetaCarta search technology combines map-driven geographic search, geographic referencing, temporal filtering and data visualization capabilities, for both structured and unstructured content, making that content "location-aware". via Schlumberger

Earlier this year MetaCarta introduced GeoIntel vertical search for petroleum industry.

Open online Access to NIH funded research becomes Law

Now that's an holiday gift for some people.

While most STM publishing community and my publishing colleagues are in Holiday, President Bush signs the "Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2007" which "includes a provision directing the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to provide the public with open online access to findings from its funded research. This is the first time the U.S. government has mandated public access to research funded by a major agency."

"The provision directs the NIH to change its existing Public Access Policy, implemented as a voluntary measure in 2005, so that participation is required for agency-funded investigators. Researchers will now be required to deposit electronic copies of their peer-reviewed manuscripts into the National Library of Medicine’s online archive, PubMed Central. Full texts of the articles will be publicly available and searchable online in PubMed Central no later than 12 months after publication in a journal." via ATA

via Charles Bailey

Godiva goes to Turkey

New Year, new owner. Godiva gets a new owner.

Christmas Eve in Istanbul & Holiday Greetings

It seems that the tradition among some American Jews is that they "celebrate" Christmas by eating Chinese or Indian food.
I was thinking what the Jews in Istanbul do on Christmas Eve? As they have a great cuisine compared to American "cuisine", Chinese and Indian food are not very big among Turkish Jews (at least when I was growing up). But the in thing for them is to go to St. Antoine.
I know that my niece who flew to Istanbul from New York yesterday, is in St. Antoine now with all her friends.

To all of you-whether you are celebrating Christmas, or you recently celebrated Hanukkah or Kurban or if you don't believe in anything- have a good holiday.

Life is good!

Your airconditioner is calling you

IBM's second annual "IBM Next Five in Five"presents five technology innovations that have the potential to change the way we work, live, commute, eat....

One of the five major changes is around Driving(pdf)

"The cities you live in will find a cure for congestion using intelligent traffic systems that can make real-time adjustments to traffic lights and divert traffic to alternate routes with ease. Your car will have driver-assist technologies that will make it possible for automobiles to communicate with each other and with sensors along the road -- allowing them to behave as if they have 'reflexes' so they can take preventive actions under dangerous conditions. Your car will automatically tell you where traffic is jammed up and find you an alternative route to take."

Can't wait to see this in NYC....

Another topic in the list of 5 is how Doctors (pdf) will treat us

"In effect, doctor’s will gain superpowers – technologies will allow them to gain x-ray like vision to view medical images; super sensitive hearing to find tiniest audio clue in your heart beat; and ways to organize information in the same way they treat a patient."

Scribd and Copyright

Scribd launched a new program (QPP) for publishers where they can create a Shelf to sell and promote their content.

"Scribd, the leader in online document sharing and publishing, announced today an initiative to work with publishers through its Qualified Publisher Program (QPP). The program offers a variety of premium features and enables publishers to proactively fight piracy by providing control over the distribution and viewing of their copyrighted materials."

" Scribd’s new QPP works in conjunction with copyright holders and automatically blocks uploads of the copyrighted content by non-rights holders. Scribd uses its new Text Matching System (TMS) to compare documents that users upload against those contributed to the filter by copyright holders. Attempts to upload content identified as copyrighted and deemed to be infringing are automatically stopped by Scribd’s TMS."

Copyright issues that were raised earlier still go on and will go on until publishers create a shelf.

Join Elsevier to create and market next generation information products

If you really want to enjoy and have fun with what you are doing and and make genuine contributions to the science and health communities join Elsevier E&T Group. In our product group we are looking for two special people to create and market online information products. (Yes, they should be better than what Google is offering to corporate R&D market.)
One thing that I can guarantee with these positions is that they are for a very exciting product line. Here are links to the job postings Product Manager & Marketing Manager
If you know anyone who might fit these positions, please let me know or if you are interested just apply for the positions.

Google Knol: I love this game

Now some major publishers are thinking how and if Google Knol will disintermediate publishing. Here is John Blossom's insights on Knol.
It's too early to say how this will work. The success of this may depend on community and collaboration feature that Knol will use. A young scientist who is knowledgeable on Automatically Precise Manufacturing (APM) may choose to create a topic page on APM and expose his knowledge. Or Google may choose to leverage the expert names that they have in Google Scholar and encourage authors to write topic pages? Who knows? One thing that I know is this kind of moves by Google makes our job more interesting and challenging.

Customer Focus: Key to success

Once again Booz Allen Hamilton experts Barry Jaruzelski and Kevin Dehoff found no correlation between companies R&D spending and their innovation success. Their study found that the most successful companies align their innovation efforts with their corporate strategy and listen to their customers at every stage. via strategy+business

"And as in years past, we found no statistically significant connection between the amount of money a company spent on innovation and its financial performance."

"Companies more focused on customer insight or market needs are also more successful than their less-customer-focused peers. In particular, companies that directly engaged their customer base had twice the return on assets and triple the growth in operating income of the other survey respondents."




I look forward to reading this report every year.

Spinning

dreidel with an engineering spin. Dreidel lasts O(n²)spins

Tonight is the start of Hanukah and my yearly explanation (similar to a broken record) to my family why I don't do gifts in Hanukah. The kids are lucky that my wife is British and she gets 1 or 2 things for them.

Importance of Google Scholar to Google

Dean Giustini highlights 5 problems with Google Scholar after being in beta for three years. I think Anurag Acharya and his team of few engineers at Google Scholar have created more than a "good enough" product for a free service. Can Google team do better? Sure. Will they improve the product? I don't have a clue. So far it seems that Google Scholar is not a priority for Google as their Renewable Energy initiatives