On Saturday, October 11th, 2008 between 12:01AM and 6:00AM (BST) our hosting provider will be moving our servers to a new data centre, so Mendeley Servers will be down for a couple of hours during this time. It shouldn’t take longer than 3 or 4 hours. Apologies!
One of the people I admire the most is James Nachtwey, ever since seeing “War Photographer“, the documentary about him. I have watched it four or five times by now, and each time I’m deeply moved both by his photographs and his refusal to become cynical despite the atrocities and suffering he has witnessed.
“Reticent about discussing his own life beyond the basic facts, he’s clearly one of those rare characters who focus singularly on their work with a missionary-like sense of purpose.”
- Salon.com
In 2007, he was the recipient of the TED Prize, which grants $100,000 and “one wish to change the world”:
His wish was for TED to help him “share a vital story with the world”. The story he chose to cover is the growing epidemic of an extremely drug resistant strain of tubercolosis. His pictures have just now been posted on TED:
You can help by visiting XDRTB.org, signing the petition, and spreading the word. There is no donation link on the XDRTB site, but on Action.org. If you’re a microbiologist, perhaps you can do even more!
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.
Firstly, thanks to all of you who have filed feature requests or flagged up bugs on our bug tracker, your feedback has been really useful.
After thinking about how to best accommodate your needs we’ve deciding to do a rewrite of some of the internal Mendeley code in order to get it running snappier and work better with larger libraries.
As a result of some work Fred has done on his music player we’ve decided that using Qt’s MVC framework maps extremely well to our needs and should bring us far greater performance when dealing with large libraries as well as keeping the code cleaner, better separated and making it much easier to write unit tests with decent coverage levels.
So where are we with this at the moment? Currently we have implemented most of the new non-GUI code with just our local/remote database code to finish. For those interested in this sort of thing, we are 100% documented with Doxygen (both private and public members) and have every class’s method unit-tested with around 85% test coverage.
Without revealing too much you should be excited about this and some of the new features that will see the light of day around the same time as the new, better-performing internal code. This will hopefully mean we can feasible support much larger collections than currently with a slimmer/faster application and quicker bug turnaround with less regressions than our previous releases.
Get excited, I am! 
My jetlag is in full swing as I’m writing this from my room at the lovely Walper Terrace Hotel in Kitchener/Waterloo, Ontario. The local time is 10pm, but my inner clock (still set to GMT) tells me it’s 3 in the morning, thus lending incredible appeal to the hotel bed behind me. But I’ve decided to grim up and write about the conferences and workshops I’ve been attending in the past week, because everything whizzes by so fast that the backlog of blogworthy events is just getting bigger and bigger.
So, to start off, I participated in the Science Blogging 2008 Conference that was held on the 30th of August at the Royal Institution in London. More on that later; the conference was preceded by a “London Science Tour” on the 29th of August, led by Matt Brown, Editor at Nature Networks, writer for The Londonist and genuinely nice guy. Matt took us (a group of science bloggers + me) on a day’s walk to a number of scientific points of interest, exhibitions at the Wellcome Collection and behind-the-scenes tours the Linnean Society of London, and the Darwin Centre at the Natural History Museum. I could sit here all night enthusing about the incredible wonders nature on display there, but I’ll just say that - if you get the chance - you should see it for yourself. Here are some of the pictures I took:
Wellcome Collection - Malaria info booth
Wellcome Collection - Creepy crawlies that spread diseases
Linnean Society - Butterfly specimens collected almost 240 years ago
Linnean Society - Coleoptera of 1772, pleased to meet you
Linnean Society - 17th century books on horticulture
Darwin Centre - 8.6m squid “Archie” (Architeuthis dux)
Darwin Centre - A “really big-headed fish in a tube” (excuse my ignorance)
Darwin Centre - A “really poor, cute beaked guy in a glass” (belonging to the Tachyglossidae family? Excuse my ignorance)
Darwin Centre - Snake specimens
During the walk, I got to know some very nice people such as Heather Etchevers, Yaroslav Nikolaev, Martin Fenner (who by now has posted an interview with me on his blog), and Mo Costandi, author of the brilliant Neurophilosophy blog.
The funniest moment came later that night at a pub in Soho. Mo had just introduced me to some guy named Vaughan, and we were standing there with a pint of beer, talking about this and that. Up to that point, I had only exchanged about two sentences with Vaughan, and instead had started telling Mo about how my favourite neuroscience/psychology blog was Mind Hacks and how great Mind Hacks was - and Mo pointed over to Vaughan and said: “That’s Vaughan’s blog!”.
So I got to know the author of Mind Hacks by accident, which was completely awesome. As it turned out the next day, someone else shared my feelings. Ben Goldacre, famous Guardian Science Blogger, told a similar story about meeting Vaughan at the pub that night (”No way, you’re the author of Mind Hacks?! I LOVE Mind Hacks!”) during his opening keynote speech at the conference.
Well, so much for my plan to write about Science Blogging 2008, the Southampton Open Science Workshop, which I attended subsequently, and the Science in the 21st Century Conference, where I am now, in one go. It’s already 4.32am on my inner clock now, and I can’t resist the bed any longer. I guess this will be a multi-part post…
This release mainly includes bugfixes and interface changes pointed out and requested by our members. You can download Mendeley Desktop 0.5.8 here.
Current issues on Windows only
So what has been fixed exactly since version 0.5.6?
What’s new?
So quite a bit has improved in the last three weeks but there is a lot left to be done. Even though Mendeley Desktop has become more responsive and quicker - speed is still our main priority. In the coming weeks major refactoring work is taking place which will allow much faster handling of thousands of library entries and faster communication to the Mendeley server. While doing this we will try to keep on fixing major bugs and implementing features.
Thank you to everyone who has been testing Mendeley and reported bugs and requested features. It has been a great help.
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.FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
August 13, 2008
Mendeley develops software for managing and sharing research papers as well as a website for discovering research trends and connecting to like-minded academics. The founders’ vision to create a “Last.fm for research” excited Skype’s former founding engineers, who became investors, and former Last.fm executive chairman Stefan Glänzer, who is now executive chairman of the company.
London, UK - When Mendeley’s founders started writing their PhDs, they wondered why there wasn’t a more convenient way of managing and sharing their collection of research papers. So they set out to develop a free research tool themselves, which is launching into public beta today.
Mendeley Desktop, a software client application available for Windows, Mac and Linux platforms, automatically extracts metadata, full-text and cited references from PDF files, builds up a personal research library, and offers sophisticated searching, tagging, and filtering functionality. It lets researchers share, synchronize and annotate their digital libraries collaboratively. Data from Mendeley Desktop is exchanged with Mendeley Web, an online research network where users can back up and access their library database, discover the most widely read papers in their academic discipline, and connect to like-minded scientists and researchers. “As the database of Mendeley Web grows, you will be able to view statistics about emerging research topics in every academic discipline, and readership statistics for each individual paper” explains Victor Henning, one of Mendeley’s co-founders. “Soon we will also include a recommendation engine. Basically, it’s like a Last.fm for research.”
This caught Stefan Glänzer’s attention. As seed investor and executive chairman, he helped Last.fm grow into the world’s largest social music network with over 20 million users. A few years earlier, he himself had been in academia, having financed his PhD through work as a DJ. “I wish I’d had a tool like Mendeley back then” says Mr. Glänzer. “There are striking similarities between the concepts: Based on its Audioscrobbler software, which helps users share and discover music, Last.fm was able to create the world’s largest open music database. Based on Mendeley Desktop, which helps users manage, share and discover research papers, Mendeley could achieve the same for academia.”
After joining Mendeley as executive chairman, Mr. Glänzer brought the team in touch with the former founding engineers of Skype, who had recently invested in academic publisher Versita through their investment fund ASI. Mendeley’s software won them over. “There are plenty of websites that want to become ‘the Facebook for researchers’” explains Eileen Broch, ASI’s investment director. “Mendeley, however, is not just another social network. It’s a truly valuable integration of software and web technologies that solves some of researchers’ day-to-day problems – which is why we decided to invest.”
About Mendeley: Mendeley develops software for managing and sharing research papers as well as a website for discovering research trends and connecting to like-minded academics. The company was founded in 2007 by Paul Föckler, Victor Henning and Jan Reichelt and is based in London, UK.
Screenshot 1: Mendeley Desktop is free academic software for managing and sharing research papers.
Screenshot 2: Mendeley Web lets researchers access their papers online, discover research trends and connect to like-minded scholars and academics.
For further information contact Victor Henning (victor.henning@mendeley.com), Tel: +44-207-2531595, or visit www.mendeley.com.
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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!