The best open source collaborative text editors and the tech behind them.…
There are awesome things happening and changing around how science is done and communicated, so I thought I'd put them in a list thingy. Let's go! Code Ocean 🌊When I first saw it used, linked from a Nature paper, I thought it was a demo and not a real, living…
Combining real-time discussion between researchers with collaborative writing and data analysis, and the ability to publish very granular findings, could result in a major leap in the scale of collaboration and velocity of research.…
First let’s take a step back and think about the definition of science: The intellectual and practical activity encompassing the systematic study of the structure and behaviour of the physical and natural world through observation and experiment. Now, when we think about what kind of experimentation goes on in…
TL;DR: Over the previous hundred years, a lot of work has gone into standardizing the way scientific data is presented. All of this knowledge has been largely forgotten. I want us to bring it back to life. Before we talk about science, let’s take a short but scenic…
TL;DR: An open API for science helps researchers discover great software. Install the Scholar Ninja extension and you’ll get recommendations (based on software citations) on-the-fly while browsing GitHub. A while back I wrote about an open distributed search engine for science, Scholar Ninja, and about how great it…
TL;DR: I’ve started building a distributed search engine for scholarly literature, which is completely contained within a browser extension: install it from the Chrome Web Store. It uses WebRTC and magic, and is currently, like, right now, used by 0 people. It’s you who can be number…
Years ago (yes, it’s been years, don’t remind me), I wrote an application for modeling the laser ablation ICP-MS mapping process. This is a thing where you make microscopic explosions with a laser and then the little bits of the stuff get blown into a blazing torch, which…
I recently asked myself if it is possible to say, based purely on tweets, whether it’s sunny in San Francisco or not. So I recorded all tweets from Tue Jan 21 12:33:21 UTC to Sat Jan 25 13:36:16 UTC, limited to a bounding box of:…
Introduction The topic “GitHub for Science” has been explored quite a few times before (1, 2, 3, 4) and with good reason: it is quite exciting to envision what breakthroughs in scientific collaboration could come from GitHub backed explorations, with substantial capital to invest and a formidable team to execute.…