A while ago, I explored how the 3-coordinate halogen compound ClF 3 is conventionally analyzed using VSEPR (valence shell electron pair repulsion theory). Here I (belatedly) look at other such tri-coordinate halogen compounds using known structures gleaned from the crystal structure database (CSD). The search query specifies 7A as the central atom, defined with just three bonded (non-metallic) atoms.
OpenCon 2015 Brussels was an amazing event. I’ll save a summary of it for the weekend but in the mean time, I urgently need to discuss something that came up at the conference. At OpenCon, it emerged that Elsevier have apparently been blocking Chris Hartgerink’s attempts to access relevant psychological research papers for content mining. No one can doubt that Chris’s research intent is legitimate – he’s not fooling around here.
Quick notes on an experimental feature I've added to BioNames. It attempts to identify possible taxonomic synonyms by extracting pairs of names with the same species name that appear together on the same page of text. The text could be full text for an open access article, OCR text from BHL, or the title and abstract for an article.
I do go on rather a lot about enabling or hyper-activating[cite]10.1039/P29950000007[/cite] data. So do others[cite]10.1038/nj7461-243a[/cite]. Why is sharing data important? Reproducibility is a cornerstone in science, To achieve this, it is important that scientific research be open and transparent. Openly available research data is central to achieving this.
The blog post by Rich Apodaca entitled “ The Horrifying Future of Scientific Communication ” is very thought provoking and well worth reading. He takes us through disruptive innovation, and how it might impact upon how scientists communicate their knowledge. One solution floated for us to ponder is that “ supporting Information, combined with data mining tools, could eliminate most of the need for manuscripts in the first place ”.
Quick note about a tool I've cobbled together as part of the phyloinformatics course, which addresses a long standing need I and others have to extract specimen codes from text. I've had this code kicking around for a while (as part of various never-finished data mining projects), but never got around to releasing it, until now.
Image via Wikipedia Peter Murray-Rust has sparked off another round in the discussion of the value that publishers bring to the scholarly communication game and told a particular story of woe and pain inflicted by the incumbent publishers. On the day he posted that I had my own experience of just how inefficient and ineffective our communication systems are by wasting the better part of the day trying to find some information.
Back in 2006 in a short post entitled "Building the encyclopedia of life" I wrote that GenBank is a potentially rich source of information on host-parasite relationships.