Sony eReader on OSX

For future Google reference, the Sony PRS-505 is perfectly compatible with OSX (just like the Kindle). If you plug it into your mac's USB port it should show up as a new disk image ("Untitled", but still); just drag and drop EPUB, PDF or text files into the database/media/books directory et voila.

Unfortunately it won't charge through USB while plugged into Macbook Pros (don't know about other laptops or desktop Macs) - seems like there's not enough power. I had to find a PC to recharge at.

Graham Lawton and Darwin was Wrong

New Scientist this week has an eye grabbing cover.

The cover sports a big green tree with the words “Darwin Was Wrong.” I hope they sell a lot of magazines with that load of tripe, since they certainly were not thinking about the generations of school kids and church-goers who will now be treated to that cover in every creationist power point presentation between now and the Rapture. How many people do you think will actually read the article to discover what it was, precisely, that Darwin got wrong?

(from EvolutionBlog)

There's some fair (I think) coverage in a couple of places like Sandwalk and lots of not so fair coverage everywhere else.

I don't really understand what the big deal is. How dare a mainstream publication use a sensational cover to help sell copies? How dare a journalist cover a story that might be quote mined selectively by creationists?

It doesn't really matter if you're on a magazine front cover or tucked away on pg 127 - if somebody wants to quote you out of context then they can. Surely the thing to do at that point is to confront the person doing the mis-quoting, not to berate the original author.

The cover does make a lovely image for ID proponents to include in powerpoint presentations, yes. But why should New Scientist care? Why should they pander to creationists and sell fewer copies of a magazine that probably does more than any number of science blogs to get schoolkids interested in science?

Graham Lawton is not the enemy.

(New Scientist is full of crap sometimes, though)

Unforgiving UTF-8 to ASCII conversion

The bulk loader for App Engine doesn't support unicode (?). Irksome.

Here's a quick and dirty solution if you've got iconv installed.

iconv -c -f UTF-8 -t ASCII utf8_data.csv > ascii_data.csv

Drops unacceptable unicode characters (i.e. anything that doesn't have a direct ASCII match). Did say it was dirty...

A specialist OpenID service to provide unique researcher IDs

I was going to write a post re: this epic Friendfeed thread (and Cameron's original post) but then Geoff Bilder left some comments that pretty much covered everything:

Let me just address a few points:

a) Yes, CrossRef is exploring this space.
b) For those afraid of CrossRef being in the thrall of "traditional publishers", I will note CrossRef members include PLOS, PubMed Central, The Encyclopedia of Life, Hindawi, Jove, OECD, World Bank, some IRs... In short, we are catholic in our definition of "publisher". I should also note that we are a non-profit. When/if we charge for things, it is only so that we can sustain the service.
c) It is true that CrossRef could go under. Any place could go under. But because so many depend on us already, a central concern of our members is to make arrangements so that we can pass-on data and systems should something happen.
d) CrossRef is looking for something that will work across disciplines. We represent the sciences, social sciences, humanities, etc.
e) Cameron is right- the author ID problem is "much bigger than publishers". We are talking to researchers, librarians, funding agencies, etc. about what they would require from a service. We were at the CNI meeting and Cliff Lynch is on our advisory board and is aware of our project.
f) We too see OpenID is a critical component of the system, but we don't think OpenID and the Contributor ID are one and the same. As Richard says, OpenIDs are pretty fragile. There are also complicating issues that would arise from multiple institutional affiliations, etc. (OpenID delegation is only a geek solution to this).
g) Gumunder described our approach pretty well. We envision creating a repository of profiles. People could use open-ids (they might have a few) or shibboleth ids to authenticate with the service in order to edit their profiles. OAuth and MicroID might be used for other aspects of the service (e.g. profile exchange, blog signing)

I'm definitely up for getting off the ground quick and fast - and arguably the big disadvantage of CrossRef is that it's not always very good at that simply because it represents so many interests - but basically they're the people best placed to do this and they have the will and technical ability to see it through. Why compete when you can cooperate?

You could still start small, be unafraid to fail and try things out before any CrossRef sanctioned solution arrives though. It might be cool (and useful) to see unique author IDs across particular datasets or disciplines and if things were set up properly you could potentially just import the unique author ID / person pairs into CrossRef later to help seed the system.