House episode and SPF note

Hulu says that the BCI episode of House will be up April 7. Pirate Bay says it's been up since a year before it aired. :D No, I'm not encouraging pirating, but ya see the problem here? Eh, I can't stay mad at Hulu. They just added all the episodes of Voltron. Activate interlocks! Dynatherms up! Megathrusters go!

I wanted to get SPF out today/yesterday but I have been swamped with work. I will probably do one final change to the rss feeds (I know, I know, sorry). I can't keep track of which tag I'm supposed to use for papers, so I will add a Papers feed and just put all of them under the Papers tag. No papers in any other feeds unless they are very important/interesting. In the meantime, you could just search the feeds for "Pubmed" or "journal" and be able to get the bulk of what I will be aggregating into SPF.

BCI on House

If you love House, that great TV show starring Hugh Laurie as the cantankerous Dr. Gregory House, you should have noticed that they used a BCI in the most recent episode (season 5 episode 19). I was waiting for Hulu to have it up, but got enough emails and calls that I thought I would mention it today. Typical TV BCI, EEG-ish and mystical in operation, but the episode was pretty well done, with internal dialogue from the patient and no spelling of words as fast an able-bodied person could say them, but got a little cheesy. Still, this is an example of where an EEG system would make more sense than an implanted one. Cursor up for yes, cursor down for no.

Neuroscientists put out

I'm going to let you in on a dirty little secret: neuroscientists are total players. Ha ha, right? Ignore that sample size isn't mentioned and check it:

(thepHtest, thanks Vania)

Honda: Our in-house research can't read

Apparently, Honda has decided that they are the first to use a BCI (NIRS and EEG combo in this case) to control a robot (video here-and, oh, is it worth it). Not the first to use this technique, but the first to do it, ever. Okay, let's pretend that the Fetz 1969 experiments drove a 'device' instead of a robot (I'm not even sure how far back a device driven by surface electrode input might have been), but this is massively misleading. Sure this is just a stupid company statement, but Google "first robot controlled by a BCI" in two days and this crap will be the #1 result. *facepalm* I'm sure I can't really have an impact on such a large corporation's ridiculous press statement, so instead enjoy this video of ASIMO falling down stairs:



Thanks Katie for the heads up.

Two new Mendeley tools! Part 2

The second, and arguably the most awesome tool new to Mendeley is.... Me!
(Tool? Get it? I'm so punny!)

I was waiting for this to be posted on the Mendeley blog before saying anything, but I will be joining the Mendeley team as a Community Liaison. Victor Henning and I came up with the idea when we met for coffee during his US east coast tour. We thought that designing a reference managing program/system should really be driven by the potential users, and that this was almost a full time job in itself. Like most problems, this one could be solved with minions. Or 'Mendions', if you prefer.

What does this mean to you, dear readers?

1) First, yes I will be mentioning cool Mendeley items. And yes, I am a paid consultant, so, depending on how you want to see it, I am a little biased. BUT...

2) I am working with Mendeley because I think the program has significant potential and the folks there have the vision, resources, and talent to do great things. Also, I can't believe that after leaving academia in 2001, I came back in 2005 to find almost no change in the tools for managing information. Seriously, EndNote looks the exact same as when I used it on my Power Mac 9500/120 running System 7. Sad.

3) My job is not to 'sell'. My job is to get feedback from users, librarians, and labs on how to make Mendeley work the way they do. There is a nice feedback and bug reporting system in place, so the Community Liaisons are more the 'big picture' folks and web presence crew. Yes, we'll be 'promoting' the program and web service but, like I said, I'm doing this because I do think it's a great program. So, if you have any insights you can provide, check the feedback system (it's very easy to use) and let me of any other the other CLs know! If you think I'm being unfair or too 'rah-rah', call me on it.

I'm really excited about this, and after dealing with all the papers and other literature I've amassed with my thesis project and DNI, I have a vested interest in helping make Mendeley awesome.

Two new Mendeley tools! Part 1

Today: The awesome tool. Tomorrow: The total tool.

One of my suggestions to Mendeley has been put into action, and it totally rocks. It's a very simple idea: a bookmarklet that you can click when you are in PubMed or IEEEExplore that directly imports the publication into your paper library (they added a number of other sites, like Google Scholar, too). Well, it's a reality, and it totally rocks. Just one word of caution. There is still some wonkiness with DOI vs PMID queries that they are aware of, so just be aware of that. Once that is ironed out, I may switch Super Paper Friday over to be a shared Mendeley library. Here's the info, from the source:

It’s here! The Mendeley browser “bookmarklet” allows you to import documents from websites and academic databases into your Mendeley library with a single click. At the moment, the following sites are supported: ACM Portal, Amazon.com, arXiv.org, CiteSeer, IEEE Xplore, IngentaConnect, Google Book Search, Google Scholar, PubMed, NASA Astrophysics Data System, and ScienceDirect. We’ll be adding support for further sites continuously.

This is how it works: Say you’re on PubMed and you’ve just discovered an interesting paper. Now, all you need to do is click the “Import to Mendeley” bookmark in your browser - Mendeley does the rest: The paper is automatically added to your Mendeley Web library with metadata, abstract and (if available) the PDF. All of this happens in the background, so you don’t have to leave the PubMed page you’re on.

It also works on search results pages, so you can import multiple documents at the same time - a small pop-up allows you to choose which ones.

SPF resuming next week

No sleep makes Brandon l0o0o0o0opy.