Dear all,
We are proud to announce that the next generation of the VEGA package
for Windows is now available (http://www.ddl.unimi.it) with new powerful
features:
- Introduction of the HyperDrive technology for an incredible
computational speed (the surface calculation, for example, is about 40
times faster).
- New graphic interface.
- Improved graphic performances (lighting engine and customizable view).
- Tube and trace visualization modes.
- Fast solid and mesh surface calculation & multiple surface management.
- Support for stereo devices and for distributed OpenGL rendering.
- MLP/Virtual logP included in the standard version.
- Add aminoacid side chain function.
- Tools to check protein structures.
- Enhanced image rendering capabilities.
- LaTex, PDF, PostScript and Encapsulated PostScript export.
The VEGA team
Alessandro Pedretti & Giulio Vistoli
This new offering from Google has attracted much press attention.
"Google Scholar enables you to search specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research. Use Google Scholar to find articles from a wide variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the web."
I worry however about one aspect: comprehensiveness. There is an interesting tendency amongst (graduate)
students to assume that if a quick search fails to reveal an item, it does not exist. This was particularly
prevalent at a time when many electronic journals in say the ISI/WOS database did not go back before
1981. This did actually lead to an outbreak of claims in journals to have discovered a new molecule, when
in fact that molecule had been very well recorded in the pre 1981 literature.
One wonders how long it would take for eg failure to find a reference in http://scholar.google.com/
to the assumption that the item does not exist.
Thus my brief search (taking the form author:name) revealed about 100 articles less than I
know I have authored.
On the other hand, it is free! And presumably can only get better!! (unless of course publishers start
putting a robot exclusion on their ToCs)
--
Henry Rzepa.
+44 (020) 7594 5774 (Voice); +44 (0870) 132 3747 (eFax); rzepahs(a)mac.com (iChat)
http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/rzepa/ Dept. Chemistry, Imperial College London, SW7 2AZ, UK.
(Voracious anti-spam filter in operation for received email.
If expected reply not received, please phone/fax).
>Elsevier's ScienceDirect.com has this to say about it:
>
>"You may print or download Content from the Site for your own personal,
>non-commercial use, provided that you keep intact all copyright and other
>proprietary notices. You may not engage in systematic retrieval of Content
>from the Site to create or compile, directly or indirectly, a collection,
>compilation, database or directory without prior written permission from
>Elsevier."
>
>Depends a bit on what is a systematic retrievel... would downloading all
>interesting articles be systematic?
Many issues of journals are "themed". Here the publisher has gone out of their
way to create a "collection" of articles, all of which might be interesting
scientifically to a particular person or group. But they then prohibit that group
treating the collection as a collection and systematically retrieving it.
What about database? Well, e.g. EndNote is capable of creating a collection
of citations, to each of which the original PDF article can be added. so I
presume the use of eg EndNote in this context is prohibited.
Further, they do not mention whether any parts of the PDF can be "re-used".
Sometimes, clear text can be copied/pasted. It can be parsed using regular
expressions. Thus the OSCAR project at Cambridge can extract <<data>> from
such clear text. Is this allowed? Would you have to keep intact the copyright
notice with this data?
>
>JCICS:
>
>"Articles and other information obtained from this service are not to be
>systematically downloaded, re-published in any media, print or electronic.
>Articles may not be downloaded in aggregate quantities or centrally stored
>for later retrieval. "
>
Centrally stored is a clear negation of Institutional archives. Also included
in some publisher restrictions
is storage on any sort of Network drive. This means that at our place, where
we use a SAN (Storage area network) for all home directories, placing any
PDF on this SAN is prohibited
>Again vague terminology... I'm sure I've seen it more strict somewhere... will
>report when I find it...
The issue is that virtually each publisher has slightly different restrictions. Tracking
them all by the regular user is almost impossible.
I have to say that the publishers are probably trying to promulgate policies that
are close to unenforceable, or unsustainable in the medium term. Its tempting to conclude
that the very concept of a "publisher" may not itself be sustainable in the long term.
--
Henry Rzepa.
+44 (020) 7594 5774 (Voice); +44 (0870) 132 3747 (eFax); rzepahs(a)mac.com (iChat)
http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/rzepa/ Dept. Chemistry, Imperial College London, SW7 2AZ, UK.
(Voracious anti-spam filter in operation for received email.
If expected reply not received, please phone/fax).
A rant (please excuse). I do so because for the first 8 years or so of the (Chemical) Web,
most of my colleagues largely ignored it for teaching. In the last two, most now have
some sort of presence on our teaching site. But I cannot remember the last occasion when
HTML has been offered. Its all Acrobat now, bloody great big globs of it. Typically
between 1 - 5 Mbyte (although the record is 18 Mbytes thus far). The contents
are linear, ie depart not all all from the serial fashion of yesteryear, and contain no
"interactivity" whatsoever (let alone semantic markup), or simple navigation
aids such as a ToC. So I expect most students
rail about the cost of printing our lecture notes nowadays! We have of course largely stopped
photocopying them for students now that they are "available on the web".
None of it streams either (whatever happened to
streaming Acrobat?), so the students can forget viewing it unless they use broadband
on their computer.
In 2nd place is raw Powerpoint. HTML, like eg Apple computers,
has possibly 2% of the market!
Lets hope Adobe don't go out of business!
By the way, talking about libraries, I have heard that Acrobat downloaded
from Journals may be subject to surprising restrictions. Thus some journals may
require all local copies to be deleted if at any time the institutional subscription is
cancelled. Most journals only allow "personal use", which means eg passing a
reprint on to a student is disallowed. As for "scraping" say an entire themed
issue of a journal, that has resulted in the
<<entire institute>> being barred from using the journal (at least for a period;
the explanation was that one naughty user called "Web Cache" was responsible,
according to the publisher).
--
Henry Rzepa.
+44 (020) 7594 5774 (Voice); +44 (0870) 132 3747 (eFax); rzepahs(a)mac.com (iChat)
http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/rzepa/ Dept. Chemistry, Imperial College London, SW7 2AZ, UK.
(Voracious anti-spam filter in operation for received email.
If expected reply not received, please phone/fax).
I am posting this because I see "FAQs" on this topic widely, and I dont know
many of the answers myself!
Its the issue of greek characters, much used in chemistry! Over the last 10 years,
it seems many mechanisms have been used to display them in browsers. Many
of these mechanisms had short lifetimes!
The current recommended way, if using the standard (7-bit) ASCII text character set,
is to define an entity. thus β or Β (its case sensitive). Older deprecated
methods ( <font face="symbol">b</font> ), along with CSS
equivalents, by and large no longer work.
The "future way" is to use utf encoding. Here is where confusion can start.
Thus http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/rzepa/greek.html
contains (according to my unicode compliant text editor, bbedit 8) a utf-8
encoded beta. One has to tell the browser that the default encoding is indeed
Unicode utf-8, but in my hands at least, this does not result in display of a beta.
Is there anyone out there who can explain it all to us?
--
Henry Rzepa.
+44 (020) 7594 5774 (Voice); +44 (0870) 132 3747 (eFax); rzepahs(a)mac.com (iChat)
http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/rzepa/ Dept. Chemistry, Imperial College London, SW7 2AZ, UK.
(Voracious anti-spam filter in operation for received email.
If expected reply not received, please phone/fax).
Hi,
November's MOTM is the infamous sedative and painkiller, Morphine. It has
been written by Enrico Uva, a teacher at LaurenHill Academy, in
Montreal, Canada.
Direct link: http://www.chm.bris.ac.uk/motm/motm.htm#nov2004
regards,
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Dr Paul May, School of Chemistry, University of Bristol, BRISTOL BS8 1TS, UK
tel: +44 (0)117 9289927 fax: +44 (0)117 9251295 mobile: +44(0)7811371539
Email: Paul.May(a)bristol.ac.uk
Web: http://www.chm.bris.ac.uk/staff/pwm.htm
MOTM: http://www.chm.bris.ac.uk/motm/motm.htm
"If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate"
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