Oxford...

Yesterday I arrived in Oxford, after a 3.5 hour bus transfer from London Stansted. Long, boring ride (though I might have seen a few red kites , but seeing that they were near extinct, I am wondering what other large bird of prey has strong split tail like a swallow). Showed once more that the UK infrastructure has hardly changed since the 19th century. Enjoying an undergraduate room at one of the colleges. Pretty basic, but makes me feel more like a human than a tourist. Yes!, undergraduate students are human too! One of the advantages is you get an excellent internet connection :) 2 minute read

Open Data: the Panton Principles

The announcement of the Panton Principles is the big news today, though Peter already spoke about them in May last year (see coverage on FriendFeed and Twitter). The four principles list in their short versions: 4 minute read

JChemPaint history: CML patches in 1999

There was some talk about the history of chemoinformatics toolkits by Noel and Andrew, which made me wonder on the exact history of Jmol and JChemPaint. Below is the email Christoph dug up from his archives: 1 minute read

Updated Chemical Blogspace Layout and Software

Last night I upgraded the software behind Chemical blogspace , to the version online on Google Code, though I needed the help from Eaun to get paper titles correctly picked up for ACS journals. The number of working blogs is a bit down and now at 68 , with an average number of 30 active blogs posting more than 100 blog items each day (see Zeitgeist ). The new design looks like quite nice compared to the old one: less than 1 minute read

H-index in chemoinformatics

Peter blogged about the h-index, which is a measure for ones scientific impact. He used Google Scholar, but I do not feel that that database is clean enough. I believe a better source would be the ISI Web-of-Science. 1 minute read

The power of big numbers

Contributions to open data do not have to be large, as long as many people are doing it. The Wikipedia is a good example, and PubChem accepts contributions of small databases too (I think). The result can still be large and rather useful, even scientifically. less than 1 minute read

Chemo::Blogs #2

Because no one picked up my Chemo::Blogs suggestion, I will now officially claim the blog series title. However, unlike the original Bio::Blogs series, I will not summarize interesting blogs, but just spam you with websites I recently marked as toblog on del.icio.us. 2 minute read