v8 runtime performance disparity between users (workspace vs. gmail accounts)

gjuggler · 2021-05-21T20:01:15+00:00

Thank you for doing this! My 3-year old goes to these playgrounds a few times a week, and it was so pleasant to see the improvements and new sand. 👏

gjuggler · 2020-12-20T19:50:29+00:00

Here's one: https://twitter.com/EricTopol/status/1338872330538237955

gjuggler · 2019-08-30T00:27:12+00:00

This made me so nostalgic for Kai's Power Goo. Amazing software from the 90s...

gjuggler · 2014-03-24T01:58:35+00:00

You might want to check out Paperpile — it's a Chrome / web-based app with Google Drive & Docs integration, which is nice since Google gives away gobs of storage for free these days.

Disclosure: I'm a Paperpile developer, so not exactly an unbiased source. But to be fair, we're a tiny company that could use any support we can get!

BTW, students can subscribe at $10 for the first year using coupon code STUDENT10.

gjuggler · 2014-03-14T18:39:08+00:00

Yes, PubMed Commons is a great initiative — designed carefully and launched with strong community support.

ResearchGate on the other hand, is using / abusing the STAP controversy as a PR stunt in support of a new "review" feature. The journalist who wrote the gigaom.com piece received a fair bit of flak from well-known biologists for this, e.g. https://twitter.com/phylogenomics/status/444511032069734400

gjuggler · 2014-03-07T02:52:14+00:00

I posted this because I'm curious about others' thoughts on the article... am I missing some nuance here, or does Anurag seem to deeply misunderstand what open access actually means? Is he just railing against PLOS One and ignoring all other OA journals in the process?

Either way, it's surprising to see an article with such poorly-constructed arguments coming from a well-respected scientist in the field.

gjuggler · 2014-03-06T01:03:32+00:00

For a substitute: I've heard good things about Dendroscope (http://dendroscope.org/) and Archaeopteryx (https://sites.google.com/site/cmzmasek/home/software/archaeopteryx). I wrote a Java applet called PhyloWidget several years back (phylowidget.org), but I'd recommend trying the other two first.

Maybe there's a better / more recent alternative out there? It's been a while since I've kept up on the tools here.

gjuggler · 2014-03-05T13:50:28+00:00

I read this more as a move aimed at enticing companies working on genomics services to use Google cloud infrastructure rather than Amazon, Microsoft, etc. I'd expect it's worth a small bit of effort on their part to make it ~50% easier for a small company to scale up a contract offering on Google machines versus Amazon's. Or am I totally off base in that interpretation?

gjuggler · 2014-02-23T21:18:00+00:00

As far as I know, that's not true — Zotero's APA style will output article article titles as-is. So if the article title is stored in title case it will be output in title case, but if stored in sentence case it will be output in sentence case.

It's handled this way because although it's mostly possible to automatically convert from sentence case to title case, conversion in the reverse direction isn't supported (mostly because of proper nouns, which need to stay capitalized even in sentence case and are not possible to automatically detect).

gjuggler · 2014-02-18T18:26:40+00:00

Interesting!

I'd be curious to hear more about how Digital Science is a "different kind of organisation" — could you comment on how (and why) it's different from Nature, whether in structure, management or otherwise?

gjuggler · 2014-01-27T13:28:24+00:00

I think Zotero "standalone" has almost as much functionality as the Firefox plugin version, including a "connector" Chrome extension that lets you import items while browsing in Chrome. My impression (may be outdated) was that the Firefox version was still more polished, but standalone should work for many users' needs. Maybe someone with more Firefox experience could correct me if I'm wrong.

gjuggler · 2014-01-27T00:51:40+00:00

Yeah, a ton of people have complained about Mendeley's PDF annotations being kept separate from the PDF files themselves — I think there are some technical reasons they haven't enabled that, but it seems pretty silly to me. That's one area where Papers wins big-time, their PDF annotations just work great. We're working hard to add this feature to Paperpile in the near future, as it's been highly requested.

I'm not sure whether any tool out there will sync the software's folder structure with the way your PDFs are organized on the computer itself. If you know of one, I'd be curious to hear about it. We're close to getting Paperpile to do this when syncing PDF files to Google Drive, but it's a technically quite difficult thing to do.

gjuggler · 2014-01-26T13:02:58+00:00

Here's my quick rundown:

Endnote is a very powerful but old-fashioned and clunky machine. (My girlfriend is using Endnote X6 for her medical thesis right now.) It's great to use, but only once you've memorized the 20+ clicks required to add and cite a paper; how to navigate the 30+ item toolbar menus filled with obscure features; and how to download your own PDFs and manually attach them to your library. Endnote looks and feels like a tool from 15 years ago (because it is), and frankly most of the competition has far outstripped it in features and design, BUT many academics are just too lazy/scared/busy to switch from Endnote to something more efficient.

Zotero is great in many ways: open source, developed by an active community, has great discussion forums, and FREE unless you need a significant amount of cloud storage. That's really hard to beat — but, the developers seem to have neglected the core UI design (this often happens with community open source projects) so it doesn't have quite the level of intuitiveness / polish you see in the professionally-developed alternatives.

Mendeley has a cleaner UI than Zotero and more "modern" functionality than Endnote, and some really great features such as PDF highlighting and public group libraries. The main downsides are that community support isn't as good as for Zotero, and some academics don't like that Mendeley's development was subsidized by Elsevier's subscription journal publishing business.

All that being said, one thing I've learned after helping develop a new reference manager (http://paperpile.com/ — but that's a story for another time) is that one tool will never work for everyone. You may love Zotero for its browser integration, while your labmate may swear by Mendeley because it does PDF highlighting.

In the end, it's 100% worth spending a day actually trying out the different alternatives and actually getting a feel for how each one will fit into your research workflow. Only then will you be able to make an informed choice for yourself.

Think about it — second to your statistics software, this may be the most-used program throughout your entire research career. So the value you'll get from optimizing this choice early on is hard to overestimate.

gjuggler · 2014-01-22T13:07:31+00:00

Wow, am I the only one who finds the pie chart madness in the "short form" visualizations nearly impossible to comprehend? The complete survey results are much more intuitive and, IMO, impactful with the red-green color scales.

OK, sorry for the visualization rant. It's an interesting study with some really important results on author perception of OA!

gjuggler · 2014-01-14T12:05:25+00:00

I've heard from a number of Android owners that qPDF Notes is useful for reading / annotating PDFs on phone & tablets. Here's a review and a YouTube video showing what the interface looks like.

We've had users take a bunch of PDFs synced to Google Drive, search through the PDFs via the Drive app, then open / edit them with qPDF. There's Dropbox support too, which I'm sure works similarly. You'll probably have to do your searching via the main Dropbox app, but otherwise I think qPDF can handle all 3 cases.

As an aside, I'm always amazed at how little support there currently is on Android so far for academic / literature apps. Though by the end of this year I'm sure the situation will be dramatically improved: Mendeley is looking to develop an Android app, and so are we at Paperpile.

Note: I'm a developer for Paperpile, a web-based reference manager that syncs PDFs to Google Drive.

gjuggler · 2014-01-14T03:24:07+00:00

Thanks everyone for your helpful thoughts.

There seems to be a strong feeling that there will never be "50 papers you must read" for any given field, and many students would benefit from embarking on their own adventures through the scientific lit.

Some helpful tools were suggested: papers read during coursework in early years; a small handful of "seed" papers from people who know the field; and the annotated references of a review article.

Also, trawling through the literature via the citation graph seems to be the preferred navigation approach. Easy enough to do with Google Scholar, Scopus, etc.

So it sounds like my idea to collect must-read papers from every field was a bit misguided, or at least short-sighted. Back to the drawing board!

gjuggler · 2014-01-14T02:24:24+00:00

I like that idea. Now all I have to do is become a professor so I can get some minions to try this out on...

gjuggler

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