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Wikipedia, Citizendium, Frankenstein and the golem.

Published 25 October 2006

[image by fd]Everybody knows Wikipedia so no need for introduction. Let’s just say that of the many very different opinions I have heard about it – placeable everywhere in the range from most celebratory to destructive – there is a quote that I find very attractive:

Wikipedia should not work, but it does!

This quote, which I believe is attributable to one of the fathers of wikpedia, Larry Sanger, says much about the on-line encyclopedia:

    Wikipedia is an experiment. A crazy one. Most people would have thought that the wiki affair would have been a failure but in fact it is now after only few years the biggest encyclopedia available nowadays.
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Alt to Legend (v0.50)

Published 23 October 2006

Alt to Legend is a plugin for Wordpress 2.0 that allows you to display the ALT text of an image as its caption. Both the image and the caption are included in a box whose appearance is fully customizible through an option page in the admin panel; relative position of the image, position of the caption text and all characteristics of the border of the box are also customizible.

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Gattaca’s time.

Published 19 October 2006

Picture by ToNo's worldX PRIZE Foundation is a non-profit foundation based in Santa Monica, CA. They gained popularity few years ago when they listed and subsequently awarded the Ansari X Prize. They offered US$10mln to the first private institution that would be able to launch a reusable manned spacecraft into space twice within two weeks. The price was awarded in 2004 and had a lot of echo. After that success, the X-Prize fondation grew stronger so that now they can efford to offer a new batch of prizes, related to different disciplines. One of them is the Archon X Prize for Genomics that also happened to be the largest medical prize in history. The prize is described as

A multi-million dollar incentive to create technology that can successfully map 100 human genomes in 10 days. The prize is designed to usher in a new era of personalized preventative medicine and stimulate new avenues of research and development of medical sciences.

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What does it take to make a good Scientist?

Published 12 October 2006

Image by *Kazze*I just saw something on the weekly edition of Nature Jobs that made me very happy. It is something that I was waiting to see since a long time. In May 2006 Georgia Chenevix-Trench felt like sharing some of her wisdom with the youngest public of the journal Nature. In the (often embarrassing) portion of the journal called Nature Jobs, she published a Decalogue with “tips for students”; goal of the letter was to provide prospective PhD students with rules of thumbs that would help out having a successful career. Sadly enough most of them were embracing the concept of hard work and only marginally important skills such as creativity, imagination, collaborative science.

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A puzzle worth a Nobel Prize.

Published 6 October 2006

flickr image by M0nniOnce again, it’s Nobel Prize time. The first prize to be awarded, as expected, was for Physiology and Medicine and went to Craig Mello and Andrew Fire. Mello and Fire were awarded for their discovery of

a fundamental mechanism for controlling the flow of genetic information

namely what is now known as RNA interference or RNAi. Uncommonly for a Nobel Prize, this year’s award came relatively soon after the discovery to which is referred. The paper describing Fire’s and Mello’s work was published in 1998 on Nature. This has been interpreted as a sign of the outstanding importance of their discovery since usually it takes decades for a work to be recognized valuable of such an award. Now, the very fact that someone is publishing a work that is so important to inaugurate a brand new field from scratch is definitely rare and it is something that every scientist dream about. It does happen periodically and many times is, indeed, well recognized for instance with a Nobel Prize. What is very rare, though, it’s the discovery to come out of the blue, completely unexpected. Was this the case for Fire’s Work (he was the corresponding author in the paper)?

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