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!

This morning in perpetually sunny London, as I walked from my flat to the Warwick Avenue tube station, I noticed something that almost made me tremble in awe and excitement. I could barely hold my iPhone still to take a picture. I’m living around the corner from the house where Alan Turing was born! ALAN TURING! Even though I’m not a programmer myself, I find that pretty awesome. Behold and rejoice, my fellow nerds:

Alan Turing, one of the fathers of computer science, formalised the concept of the algorithm through his description of Turing machines.

At Mendeley, we’re fond of algorithms. While we strive to keep our software’s user interface as simply and appealing as possible, there are quite a lot of complex algorithms huffing and puffing and toiling away in the background.

One automatically extracts the metadata from the text of an academic paper (to spare you from typing it in manually), while another takes a fingerprint from the paper’s text and anonymously matches it against other fingerprints on the Mendeley server, with the goal of improving the metadata recognition quality - so the more people use Mendeley, the better the quality becomes.

A further not-so-simple algorithm parses the cited references in the end and turns them into a machine-readable format (so you can search them, apply citation styles, and export them). An additional one matches these extracted references to documents already in your library (to automatically capture the hidden citation network already existent on your computer). Then there’s the building of the full-text index and, coming soon, the recommendation engine.

By the way, the place where Alan Turing was born is now the Colonnade Hotel. If you’re a rich nerd, you can stay there! So did Sigmund Freud, who’s got a suite named after him.

…metaphorically speaking:

My girlfriend Irina sent me this delightful video a few days ago, and I remain mesmerized. I’ve watched it several times now - it never fails to crack me up (my favourite part starts after exactly one minute!).

You may rightfully wonder what this performance could have in common with life at our start-up. Well, for one, it’s the buzzing exuberance and enthusiasm we have for our vision of Mendeley and what it could become for the research community. When we’ve imagined, designed and specified a new feature, when there’s progress on our website, when something starts to work for the first time in our software, we go “WOW! How great is THAT! Imagine what a difference it could make if every researcher used this!”.

Then, everything happens at a breakneck pace. You’re trying to coordinate everything as best as you can and plan your next steps, but sometimes you’re still just goofily flailing your arms, juggling the myriad of tasks thrown at you all at the same time. Describe a new website functionality down to the last mouse-click and pixel placement, brainstorm about Mendeley’s strategy, design interfaces in Photoshop, find a new office, talk to beta testers, keep up with the latest research relevant to our technology, wrangle lawyers and legal affairs, find talented developers to hire, visit universities, hunt down the latest software bugs, and that’s just today before lunch.

Admittedly, I know the analogies are flimsy at best - mainly I was just looking for an excuse to smuggle this charming little video into our blog. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I do. On a side-note, Irina and I have decided that we just have to learn to dance Charleston sometime.

Same as in software development - it’s the little things which make the difference.

Some news, but no academic content in this post - it’s just about the real and hard life of a start-up called “Mendeley” and the long nights of the founders. Be advised: sad pictures inside…

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As I explained in our first post, our Mendeley software client wants to make your life as a researcher easier by automatically extracting all the metadata (authors, title, journal etc.) from your academic library - no need to type it in manually anymore! Sometimes, though, our extraction algorithm may get it wrong. Like today. Hilarity ensued.

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So true… and really similar to writing my final paper at university.