David Attenborough’s latest homage to biodiversity, Blue Planet II is, as always, visually magnificent. Much of its impact derives from the new views of life afforded by technological advances in cameras, drones, diving gear, and submersibles. One might hope that the supporting information online reflected the equivalent technological advances made in describing and sharing information. Sadly, this is not the case.
BBC 6Music recently went back in time to 1994. This made me wonder what albums released that year were my favourites. As previously described on this blog, I have this information readily available. So I quickly crunched the numbers. I focused on full-length albums and, using play density (sum of all plays divided by number of album tracks) as a metric, I plotted out the Top 20.
On March 30 the BBC broadcast a 40 minute talk from Martha Lane Fox. The Richard Dimbleby Lecture is an odd beast, a peculiarly British, indeed a peculiarly BBC-ish institution. It is very much an establishment platform, celebrating a legendary broadcaster and ring marshaled by his sons, a family that as our speaker dryly noted are “an entrenched monopoly” in British broadcasting.
Egon Willighagen recently gave a presentation at the RSC entitled “The Web – what is the issue” where he laments how little uptake of web technologies as a “ channel for communication of scientific knowledge and data” there is in chemistry after twenty years or more. It caused me to ponder what we were doing with the web twenty years ago.
A short post this, to remind that today is officially the 25th birthday of the World-Wide-Web, in March 1989. It took five years for a conference around the theme to be organised and below is a photo from that event. (C) CERN Photo From my perspective and perhaps from the 200 or so others present at that closing session, I went back home and told my young children that the world had changed that week. So it has.
A few years ago, we published an article which drew a formal analogy between chemistry and iTunes (sic )[cite]10.1021/ci060139e[/cite]. iTunes was the first really large commercial digital music library, and a feature under-the-skin was the use of meta-data to aid discoverability of any of the 10 million (26M in 2013) or so individual items in the store. ‡ The analogy to digital chemistry and discoverability of
Während in Deutschland über Haushaltsabgabe, Depublikation und Verweildauerkonzepte diskutiert wird, arbeitet die BBC unter dem Titel „Digital Public Space” zusammen mit weiteren öffentlichen Einrichtungen wie Museen nicht nur an einem digitalen Archiv, sondern nebenbei auch an ihrer Neuerfindung im Netz.
William Henry Perkin is a local chemical hero of mine. The factory where he founded the British (nay, the World) fine organic chemicals industry is in Greenford, just up the road from where we live. The factory used to be close to the Black Horse pub (see below) on the banks of the grand union canal.
Google's Knowledge Graph can enhance search results by display some structured information about a hit in your list of results. It's available in the US (i.e., you need to use www.google.com, although I have seen it occasionally appear for google.co.uk.Here is what Google displays for Eidolon helvum (the straw-coloured fruit bat). You get a snippet of text from Wikipedia, and also a map from the BBC Nature Wildlife site.
I thought I would launch the 2012 edition of this blog by writing about shared space . If you have not come across it before, it is (to quote Wikipedia), “an urban design concept aimed at integrated use of public spaces.” The BBC here in the UK ran a feature on it recently, and prominent in examples of shared space in the UK was Exhibition Road. I note this here on the blog since it is about 100m from my office.