As a recent member of the Royal Institution of Great Britain, I’m marveling at their events calendar which strikes me as hands down the best entertainment programme in London (if you’re into scientific talks, that is). Two of the four lectures I’ll be attending in the coming weeks are part of the members-only, black-tie “Friday Evening Discourses” that were started by Michael Faraday in 1826 - isn’t that amazing?

One of the talks that I’ll unfortunately have to miss (because I’m travelling to Germany) is this one next Monday, 20th October:

Murder in Mayfair

London is an epicentre of medical advancement, from Edward Jenner’s pioneering work on vaccination to the world’s first heart and lung transplant. But London is also a hotbed of disease and demise and this event will take a look at the notorious murders and strange deaths in the capital. [...].

London has a rich and gruesome history of untimely demises. From the recent past we have the murder of Alexander Litvinenko, only a few minutes’ walk from the Royal Institution, who was killed by a radioactive teapot. 18 years earlier, Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov was dispatched with a poison tipped umbrella by Waterloo Bridge.

Or how about this one on 4th November:

The Making of Mr. Gray’s Anatomy

Gray’s Anatomy is probably one of the most iconic scientific books ever published: an illustrated textbook of anatomy that is still a household name 150 years since its first edition, known for its rigorously scientific text, and masterful illustrations as beautiful as they are detailed. The Making of Mr Gray’s Anatomy tells the story of the creation of this remarkable book, and the individuals who made it happen.

Wonderful, isn’t it? So, in the spirit of peppering this blog with Edo period, medieval, and Japanese monster anatomy, here are some more highly rigorous anatomic drawings I just came across:

Via Gizmodo.

Long time no blog, indeed. I had wanted to write more about the numerous workshops and conferences I attended, but I didn’t get around to it because we’ve been very busy here at Mendeley HQ. Among other things, we’re planning a new release of Mendeley Desktop soon. Without giving too much away, it will include a few long-awaited and highly-requested new features. Stay tuned!

So I’ve been looking for a way to sum up my recent travels. With total disregard for Blaise Pascal’s famous quote “I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time”, I concluded that Haikus might be a solution. Here goes:

In Soton I sleep
on Ben’s futon which fails, my
talk is all woozy

Said futon

Listening to Yaroslav’s talk

Moving on - my Science in the 21st Century haiku:

Waterloo WiFi
breaks during the demo yet
enthusiasm wins

Chad Orzel on Newtonian vs. Galileian science - our former landlord Michael Palin making another unexpected appearance

Collective mind-mapping exercise devised by Alex Pang

Panel with Steve Weinstein, Harry Collins, David Kaiser, Lee Smolin and impressively bescribbled blackboards

In short, I had a marvelous week at the Perimeter Institute. Thanks to Sabine for organizing such a great conference, to Mark and Eva for the many inspiring conversations, to Jen and Michael for inviting me over to dinner, to Chad, Simeon, John and Cameron for the nice evening at the brewery, to Katy for offering to help us develop data visualizations, to David and Paul for sharing their insights into the current US presidential election (and Paul giving me one of his Analog SF magazines so I’d have something to read on the plane), to Gerry for sharing his thoughts on social networking (and looking like Albert Einstein), and to Hassan for inviting me to contribute an essay about reputation systems in science to his upcoming book.

We had comparatively nice weather (i.e., it didn’t rain) in London yesterday - so we seized the chance and organised a Mendeley team BBQ on the roof terrace of our office! Luckily for us, we didn’t set the building on fire, and no one fell off the roof. Here are some impressions:

Paul being happy while stealing plants for decoration:

Paul becoming even happier and pointing at things:

Smoke signals:

Pankaj, Steve and Falk discussing physics and metaphysics:

More happy Paul:

Julia, Aaron, Ben and Britton Street:

Ben apparently not moving as much as the others:

Fin!

And just in case you’re thinking, “these kids should do less BBQs and more software updates”, we’ve got you covered! Tomorrow we’ll release Mendeley Desktop beta version 0.5.8 with plenty of bugfixes, speed and stability improvements. Happy Paul will blog about it in more detail.

We are proud to introduce Robert Knight - yet another boost to our development team. It’s not that we didn’t enjoy the company of a certain other knight who said “Ni” (and from whom we rented our previous office):

Still, we think Robert is a much better fit to our team. Ni!

——

Robert Knight joins Mendeley as a software engineer working on Mendeley Desktop. He graduated with a degree in Computer Science from the University of Southampton in June 2008. In his spare time, Robert is a contributor to the KDE project and develops the Konsole terminal. In the past he also wrote the BlueIDE development environment for DarkBASIC and contributed to KSpread.

Today in our web developer Skype chat: Paul, Falk (brother-in-law of Paul) and Pankaj (freelance database expert).

Paul Föckler, 10:46am: I added Pankaj to our web chat
Falk Kühnel, 10:46am: hiankaj
Falk Kühnel, 10:47am: damn, my eybor is bron i guess

Cracks me up!

Let’s get the bad news out of the way first. I won’t be able to travel to the AMA Summer Conference. At this time tomorrow, I should have been at the beach of San Diego with Michael and Thorsten and a nice cold beer, but it was not to be. My cough from the viral infection hasn’t completely disappeared yet, and a weeks’ travel to California would have worsened it again… what a major bummer!

However, after a month of working from home, I have returned to the office. And as promised earlier, here’s a brief guided photo tour:

Exihibit A shows a room full of software engineers.  They occupy the west wing. They’re all so talented that they have little halos around their heads, but you can’t see them in this picture due to the backlight from the window. True story!

Exhibit B: The east wing. This is where we non-software engineers gather (notice the puny monitors and machines).

Our meeting room at lunchtime. Paul’s arm stretches out inconspicously, stealing someone’s food (or so I presume).

Our kitchen. Jan.. trying to sell me a coffee machine?!

Me in my corner, trying to take a break by hiding behind a book. Fittingly, it’s titled “Hidden Dimensions: The Unification of Physics and Consciousness“. Incredibly fascinating stuff! I’ll probably write about it on this blog later.

Outside our windows, enveloping darkness has settled in, and thus the long night of bugfixing has begun. I have witnessed a mysterious phenomenon: After dark, wherever large groups of software engineers congregate, large quantities of pizza boxes spontaneously materialize out of thin air.

And now for something completely different. Do you know 14? 14 is an artist who satirizes celebrity culture on her blog Gallery of the Absurd. Here’s my favourite of her paintings:

For months the world has been anticipating the arrival of the Brangelina baby. Tabloids and bloggers have been speculating that this baby is destined to be the Most Beautiful Child Ever. New York Magazine ruffled feathers when stating “Not since Jesus has a baby been so eagerly anticipated.” What I’d like to speculate is…..what if the offspring of Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt isn’t as stunningly gorgeous as everyone assumes? What if she’s just a regular looking baby….maybe even a little goofy looking? It could happen!

Now, did you ever wonder what would happen if scientists were tabloid fodder? I actually didn’t. But 14 does:

I’ve always wondered what our culture would be like if we obsessed about the private lives and accomplishments of scientists, researchers and great thinkers the same way we obsess over celebrities. Would we follow closely the scandals of scientific study the same way we follow the scandals of Britney or Madonna? Would certain appealing scientists be given their own reality shows?

… and her answer is hilarious:

Unfortunately, my scientific achievements are not yet colossal enough for me to be included in the science tabloids. I still hope to win the Ig Noble Prize one day.

Via Gallery of the Absurd.

Dr. Felix Eggers‘ comment on my last post did remind me of something! In August 2006, Felix, Michael Paul and I were attending the AMA Summer Marketing Educators’ Conference in Chicago. All of us where in the middle of our Ph.D. theses back then, with Magdas, Shirleys and Bernies popping up left and right. Sitting at the Chicago waterfront, we wondered where we could ever publish all of our failed studies. The ingenious solution: We needed to start our own journal, aptly named The Journal of Failed Studies.

Come to think of it, it’s really not such a bad idea. Replication is one of the cornerstones of empirical research. If a study fails to replicate a previous result, or fails to confirm what theoretically should have worked, other researchers should know - assuming that your study didn’t simply fail because of sloppiness. Or maybe even then it would be useful to know which potential mistakes to look out for. However, as all researchers know, journal editors prefer to publish unusual or even counterintuitive results over failed studies (and who’d want to fault them for it) - resulting in the so-called “file drawer problem” or publication bias.

Maybe we’ll pull our Journal of Failed Studies idea out of the file drawer sometime. Here’s what Michael and Felix say about it:

“The Journal of Failed Studies?”

“Why not! Tee-hee!”

By chance, I stumbled across One Big Lab yesterday, a very interesting blog on Open Science maintained by (as far as I can tell) four Stanford bioinformatics Ph.D. students. One of the many gems to be discovered there is a series of t-shirt designs called “Worst. Result. Ever.”:

You’ve been there, done that. Spent hours, days, weeks… months?… just to discover that your hypothesis (or “hope-othesis”) is completely wrong. Finished a data analysis only to see that what you’ve just produced can only be described as the Worst. Result. Ever. [...]

Each one is named after the hapless student who had the pleasure of seeing something very much like it in their own research.

I’ve had nightmares of the Magda, and once pulled a Bernie, too. Once the shirts become available, buying them will support the PSB workshop on Open Science in… what? Hawaii?! I need to go there!