CircleCount helps you better understand Google+

2013-05-24 18:17:14 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

I liked it.

2013-05-24 13:08:23 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

Scalzi on the Amazon FanFic thing. Short version, it's not a good deal for authors. That's no big surprise.

Scalzi spots the terms lift rights (and potentially royalties) away from the author. I'd be surprised that it's a planning to grab the work for free. It's not a good long term strategy to openly rip-off authors because if you're not getting paid then why bother going through Amazon? I think it could be more about putting an effective lock on the text to prevent ePub versions for other eBookshops.

2013-05-24 10:12:06 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 4 +1s)

If academics don't get credit for blogging, is that a problem with blogging or with academic assessments?

2013-05-24 08:34:42 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 2 +1s)

Richard III paper online - Grab it while you can

You can download the PDF of the Richard III paper from Antiquity at http://antiquity.ac.uk/Ant/087/0519/ant0870519.pdf

Usually papers in  Antiquity are behind a paywall regardless of publicity. I don't know if this is a change in policy or a temporary set-up.

2013-05-24 08:34:08 (0 comments, 1 reshares, 4 +1s)

Richard III paper online - Grab it while you can

You can download the PDF of the Richard III paper from Antiquity at http://antiquity.ac.uk/Ant/087/0519/ant0870519.pdf

Usually papers in  Antiquity are behind a paywall regardless of publicity. I don't know if this is a change in policy or a temporary set-up.

2013-05-23 18:39:48 (2 comments, 3 reshares, 5 +1s)

I found this while looking for something else. I don't know if it's visible outside the UK. If not, that's a shame because the use of sound is impressive and sinister. There's a few clips from Life where a carnivorous plant hisses when it sets its trap.

2013-05-23 18:33:11 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

Ordered a Sarracenia flava, S.purpurea purpurea and S. purpurea x oreophila along with three sundews for the garden.

I'm tempted to order a Darlingtonia californica too. Flies banging their heads against a window really annoy me, so I'm pleased by the idea of a plant that uses this habit to trap them.

2013-05-23 09:58:15 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

This interests me. With some shows / films / books it's the fans who make a big difference by evangelising about it. Giving the fans a chance to participate more in the storytelling is a positive move.

I'll change my mind once they open the floodgates to Star Trek and Harry Potter.

2013-05-23 09:41:55 (1 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

I keep seeing flurries of snow pass my window as I work.

#blossom  

2013-05-22 21:51:40 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 5 +1s)

Related to an argument elsewhere, JPG is pronounced Throatwobbler-Mangrove.

2013-05-22 19:32:15 (0 comments, 1 reshares, 0 +1s)

Super Science Circle - May 2013 Edition

Need more science in your Google+? Well, here's all the science you can handle! Enjoy my latest, heavily curated edition of the Super Science Circle.

Please share this circle... for Science!

For the uninitiated, I maintain a circle of 450+ people who are active on Google+ and regularly post on Google+. In this circle you'll find scientists, journalists, astronauts, educators, and science enthusiasts. By importing this circle into your own circles, you'll immediately gain a vibrant and fascinating feed of amazing science stories.

I recognize that it might be too much science, so I suggest you create a brand new temporary circle and evaluate the people in the circle. Only transfer the keepers to your permanent circles. Then, when I update the circle next month, rinse and repeat.

Are... more »

2013-05-22 16:33:49 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

State of Nature report impresses. State of Nature itself does not.

Several UK charities have come together to produce a report on the state of nature in the UK. Their findings are that 60% of species are in decline, 30% in serious decline and 10% at threat of extinction in the UK. 

You might have heard the hedgehog population has dropped by a third since the millennium, but there's many more threats to British #wildlife . The report itself could be an important step in addressing problems in #conservation .

http://aobblog.com/2013/05/state-of-nature-report-impresses-state-of-nature-itself-does-not/

2013-05-22 12:17:40 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

#Springwatch will be at Ynys-hir near Machynlleth, next week. It's conveniently close, if you leave near Mach. http://goo.gl/maps/OgHG4

2013-05-21 23:03:49 (0 comments, 1 reshares, 6 +1s)

M13, the globular cluster in Hercules

Taken with a DLSR bolted onto a Baader Hyperion 36mm Aspheric lens on a Skywatcher 250px Dobsonian.

The image is 10 seconds at ISO 6400 and converted to black and white. It was taken before the end of twilight so the sky was very blue. 

The comet tails on the stars are probably coma, a defect common in Newtonian telescopes. They could just be poor focusing by me. I'm not sure if I want to bother with getting a coma corrector. If I were serious about #astrophotography I wouldn't be using a dobsonian in the first place.

2013-05-21 23:02:49 (5 comments, 3 reshares, 29 +1s)

M13, the globular cluster in Hercules

Taken with a DLSR bolted onto a Baader Hyperion 36mm Aspheric lens on a Skywatcher 250px Dobsonian.

The image is 10 seconds at ISO 6400 and converted to black and white. It was taken before the end of twilight so the sky was very blue. 

The comet tails on the stars are probably coma, a defect common in Newtonian telescopes. They could just be poor focusing by me. I'm not sure if I want to bother with getting a coma corrector. If I were serious about #astrophotography I wouldn't be using a dobsonian in the first place.

2013-05-21 11:21:59 (2 comments, 3 reshares, 8 +1s)

Eddie Braben has died. This sketch what he wrote still makes me laugh. Morecambe and Wise with Andre Preview Privet.

2013-05-21 11:14:22 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

The co-host of the Infinite Monkey Cage is on tour, and it's worth catching if you can.

2013-05-20 16:43:37 (3 comments, 0 reshares, 7 +1s)

Red Dacca Bananas (Musa acuminata)
They are smaller and plumper than the common Cavendish banana. When ripe, raw red bananas have a flesh that is cream to light pink in color. They are also softer and sweeter than the yellow Cavendish varieties, with a slight raspberry flavor. Many red bananas are imported from producers in Asia and South America. They are a favorite in Central America but are sold throughout the world.
https://plus.google.com/u/0/113096993341203159664/posts/M9yeLMyS56T 

2013-05-20 13:17:08 (5 comments, 1 reshares, 2 +1s)

Trying another share. I'm not sure if this will share the album or just the photo. It's a Great Tit from yesterday.

2013-05-20 12:15:41 (2 comments, 3 reshares, 7 +1s)

Dave Gorman on Perfect Numbers, Friendly Numbers and Sociable Numbers. Contains some Anglo-Saxon.

2013-05-20 10:01:53 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

10 Plants to spice up your #sex life †

The final  _Fascination of #Plants Day_ post from Saturday. I thought I'd shamelessly rip off Buzzfeed look at whether #science supports some popular claims from folk medicine.

From the spam I get in my box I thought 10 plants would be easy, But ten plants, with photos and research done on them, is quite difficult, so you can see I was getting desperate by the end.

Fans of Blackadder will recognise plant number one. Fans of Buffy might be surprised by plant eleven. 

http://aobblog.com/2013/05/10-plants-used-to-spice-up-sex/

†If you're a rat. Results in humans may vary.

2013-05-19 22:21:04 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

...and now the video's uploaded. The edge of the #moon gets blurrier as it moves from the centre. I'm not sure if that's because I'm not using a coma corrector or because I've not done something else.

For now I think it's better to blame the bad workman and not the tools.

2013-05-19 21:36:50 (2 comments, 0 reshares, 11 +1s)

Testing a Baader 36mm Aspheric lens on the #Moon earlier. Not quite in focus which seems to be giving me some problems.

Cloud is rolling in from the north, so no more chances to test tonight.

2013-05-19 16:06:53 (0 comments, 1 reshares, 5 +1s)

Having a play with Viveza and some photos I took last year. I hadn't realised how many out-of-focus shots I had of Red Kites (Milvus milvus).

2013-05-19 12:13:29 (6 comments, 0 reshares, 3 +1s)

Will Martian cuisine have a terrifying secret surprise?

You'll not want for salad on Mars, but the range of foods might be quite limited unless there's some substantial research into offworld farming. If Mars One is serious about colonists growing their own food in the 2020s that'll need to be solved fast.

http://aobblog.com/2013/05/will-martian-cuisine-have-a-terrifying-secret/

Photo: (cc) Jan Tik/Flickr

2013-05-19 11:56:50 (0 comments, 1 reshares, 1 +1s)

I thought it was a reasonably good result last night. There wasn't a song near the top where you wonder "How the hell did that get so many votes?" I didn't like the Azeri entry, but it was the kind of song that does well regardless of who enters it. It wasn't purely voting blocs that put it up there.

There is an element of political/cultural bloc voting but the winning song is rarely the worst of the evening, so how the hell does the UK expect to win with some of their entries? Really? Eurovision Final 2007 UK - Scooch - Flying The Flag ?

The only country that can take serious umbrage is Germany. Since Eurovision 1998 Germany - Guildo Horn - Guildo hat euch lieb they've usually put in something distinctive, talented or, in the case of Texas Lightning, both. Eurovision 2006 Germany (Final) - Texas Lightning - No no never 

The Telegraph gets theimp... more »

2013-05-18 20:25:48 (1 comments, 0 reshares, 3 +1s)

2013-05-18 16:30:11 (1 comments, 0 reshares, 2 +1s)

Not sure if I'll have chance to catch the Eurovision Song Contest tonight. I'll concede a lot of it is awful, but there's usually one or two good songs in it.

2013-05-18 16:17:26 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

+Martin Zaltz Austwick and I celebrate 'International Fascination of Plants Day' 2013!

2013-05-18 16:16:07 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

Welcome to Fascination of Plants Day on AoB Blog 
http://aobblog.com/2013/05/fascination-of-plants-day/

2013-05-16 17:50:59 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

Nitrogen is an essential macronutrient for plants – i.e. they cannot complete their life cycle without it – and it is needed in relatively large amounts. But....

2013-05-16 13:51:28 (3 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

Less than 100 specimens of this tree exist in the wild, it is so old it is a veritable living fossil. http://ow.ly/l5wvp Newly published

2013-05-16 13:17:04 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

The world’s ocean of soil is one of our largest reservoirs of biodiversity

2013-05-16 12:29:16 (0 comments, 1 reshares, 2 +1s)

This week Melvyn Bragg discusses Cosmic Rays with three professors of Physics and Astronomy.

In 1912  Victor Hess discovered the Earth is constantly being bombarded from outer space. You're living in a constant rain from the heavens. Some are from the solar wind and some could be travellers from other galaxies.

The programme is available as an MP3 download from the BBC. It should be available worldwide.

2013-05-16 12:00:40 (2 comments, 0 reshares, 2 +1s)

Thoughts on the changes

It's not all bad.

Photo upload has improved and in the two-column view highlighting the best photos makes sense. Unfortunately I don't like the two-column view. Some people do, so it's not a bad thing for everyone, but I'm pleased Google+ still has one-column option.

Sadly the one-column view is very poor. It's just one column from the two-column view, so you have far more greyspace than makes sense. It would have been better to widen the single column - possibly with top photos being extra wide. The new TwentyThirteen theme for Wordpress shows more imagination for a one-column layout that can highlight photos. In single column the way the input box gets wider when you click on it shows that wider highlight posts could work.

Also for photos, I've turned off auto-enhance. A quick look suggests it improves about... more »

2013-05-16 11:24:09 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 7 +1s)

Ramparts of an Iron Age Hill Fort at Wapley Hill

The hill fort dates from the #IronAge  around 500 BC according to on-site signage. That would make it one of the site that sprung up around the start of the Iron Age.

Wikipedia says there's a Bronze Age burial shaft in there, which would make mean people had been on site for longer. Bronze Age is quite a stretch from around 2500 BC to 500 BC, but there's a change in settlement and technology after 1500-1200 BC and a move in some places to uplands. It's possible that is is one of those sites that became more prominent in the Iron Age.

I don't know if there's been that much work on it, but it wouldn't be a surprise to find continuity from the Late Bronze Age to the Iron Age. This wasn't a switch that happened overnight.

The site gets used again in the #medieval  period, thisti... more »

2013-05-14 20:52:19 (3 comments, 1 reshares, 3 +1s)

Time to change my default search engine, I think.

2013-05-12 22:37:37 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

2013-05-12 10:00:15 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

2013-05-10 15:23:34 (1 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

I was surprised that it was as high as 6.8%, but it looks like completion varies a lot depending on what course you take and the assessment.

The course with the highest rate of completion was "Functional Programming Principles in Scala," from Switzerland's École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, offered on the MOOC platform Coursera. According to Jordan's research, some 19.2 percent of the 50,000 students who enrolled completed the course.

At the other end of the spectrum was "A History of the World since 1300" by Princeton University, also hosted by Coursera, which reportedly recruited 83,000 students with just 0.8 percent reaching the end.

I think if you have a practical course, particularly programming, where there's a measurable outcome then you can run a MOOC. One major problem is formative assessment and feedback. If I can't geta ... more »

2013-05-10 09:07:57 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

2013-05-09 16:23:38 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 2 +1s)

I've been looking at spending more time on Twitter again. This makes it a bit easier.

2013-05-09 12:59:14 (0 comments, 1 reshares, 4 +1s)

Alice Gorman talks about Space Archaeology and the cultural heritage value of space probes at TEDxSydney. You can follow her blog at http://zoharesque.blogspot.com

2013-05-09 12:59:33 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

Alice Gorman talks about Space Archaeology and the cultural heritage value of space probes at TEDxSydney. You can follow her blog at http://zoharesque.blogspot.com

2013-05-09 12:53:47 (1 comments, 3 reshares, 3 +1s)

Alice Gorman talks about Space Archaeology and the cultural heritage value of space probes at TEDxSydney. You can follow her blog at http://zoharesque.blogspot.com

2013-05-08 22:59:30 (3 comments, 0 reshares, 2 +1s)

I usually use Safari, but I'm trying Chrome again after reading how easy it is to create extensions. I'm not that impressed by Chrome Apps that are just links to a website, I've got bookmarks for that. But this has allowed me to roll together half a dozen feeds with Yahoo Pipes and stick it on to one easy-to-check button.

2013-05-08 09:45:51 (0 comments, 1 reshares, 0 +1s)

I find it very hard to write something about this without sounding snarky. I think a question that is seldom asked is: "Is this archaeological organisation an organisation for archaeology, or for archaeologists?" The two aren't the same thing.

2013-05-07 20:44:42 (4 comments, 1 reshares, 5 +1s)

BBC Radio has a reading of Brave New World read by Anton Lesser starting this week. You could have a really depressing conversation about who was more accurate about the future, Huxley or Orwell.

It's available worldwide, (or not, see below) but you'll need to fast forward to 3m00s to get to the start of the show.

2013-05-06 15:01:43 (0 comments, 1 reshares, 6 +1s)

It's not really typical Bank Holiday weather here.

I don't know what I've done to the ordering of the album. The spring photos should both be the last photos, but it seems not.

2013-05-05 00:14:54 (2 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

I liked this programme. The region around Chernobyl might be thriving with wildlife. Radiation seems to be a problem, but lack of humans more than compensates for that.

I don't know if you can watch this outside the UK. It's television for BBC Alba, the Gaelic language channel. It's possible that the BBC is restricting access to the programme so they can resell it to TV companies serving the Gaelic diaspora.