Lab-Life

BioMed Central is one of the main Open Access publishers in the world of Science, Technology and Medicine. On a side note, that’s where I published my two articles (in Proteome Science and the Journal of Circadian Rhythms). One might think that, given their support to Open Access, they would also support Open Source software and Open Format documents. For the software side, it’s not very clear. Although they ask authors to consider releasing software described in publications under a free (or at least open source) license, they also support and advertise for a bunch of proprietary software. While it’s not a bad thing per se (it enlarges the number of potential authors), it’s sad to see they don’t cite popular free software like OpenOffice.org (to write your article), Gimp (to edit your figures) or Zotero (for reference management). These are the three main software in each category but the free software world has many more of them! ...

Being away from presentations to my dismay since a few months, I always enjoy reading the Presentation Zen blog, Garr Reynold’s blog on issues related to presentation design. Recently, Garr came back on the Ignite presentation style with a presentation from Pamela Slim. Here is a video recording: [blip.tv http://blip.tv/play/AfDpaI73Pw] I maybe liked this presentation for its content but above all for its style … At Ignite, you can have a maximum of 20 slides that automatically advance every 15 seconds (so max. 5 minutes talk). I like this kind of challenge. Unfortunately, there is no planned Ignite event in Western Europe soon where I would be able to watch this live. ...

Since I published some videos of Morris Water Maze (MWM) experiments, I received questions about the set-up of the maze and its concept in general. I tried my best to answer them. I collected them and here are the Frequently Asked Questions about the Morris Water Maze. If you have some more questions, don’t hesitate to ask!

20040 views for my Gemvid presentation at FOSDEM 2009 100451 views for my random field presentation 200418 views for my OpenOffice.org Impress presentation It’s good to be considered as a presentation rockstar (even if it’s an April fools joke).

While looking for pictures related to patents, I found these interesting ones taken by Daneel Ariantho on Flickr. They depict a virtual conference about scientific patents. It could be interesting to get more information about 1) the content of this conference and 2) the kind of conferences organized in these virtual worlds. It could also be interesting to see the social aspects of these conferences (are your contact better/different in a virtual conference?) and the “quality control” (of speakers, of posters, of advertizers, …).

Finally, a seventh scientific paper is published by the Poirrier-Falisse. After a huge batch of articles from Nandini, here is my second paper: Poirrier J.E., Guillonneau F., Renaut J., Sergeant K., Luxen A., Maquet P. and Leprince P.: " Proteomic changes in rat hippocampus and adrenals following short-term sleep deprivation" Proteome Science, 2008, 6(1):14 doi: 10.1186/1477-5956-6-14 Very briefly, in this study we show the influence of 4 hours of prolonged wakefulness in rats hippocampus and adrenals proteome. As usual, this paper is published in an Open Access journal. Here is my updated BibTeX file (and I also updated Nandini’s BibTeX file). ...

(… at least for large documents) Two week-ends ago, I spend a whole day trying to apply a consistent style to a thesis. I spent hours trying to be obeyed by a word processor because it would systematically change the style of some element, somewhere in the 100-or-so pages. Including figures was also a nightmare: we had to keep an eye on the (limited) memory of the computer (otherwise we got unexpected screen freeze, a lot of noise from the hard disk (paging), etc). Generating a bibliography was also another daunting task, even with the use of a dedicated reference manager … ...

One of the two labs where I’m working, the Center for Cellular and Molecular Neurobiology, has updated its website. You can see it here and browse its growing content. And this time, I did nothing (a company built the website for us).

In the Free Software Movement, we believe computer users should have the freedom to change and redistribute the software that they use. The “free” in free software refers to freedom: it means users have the freedom to run, modify and redistribute the software. Free software contributes to human knowledge, while non-free software does not. Universities should therefore encourage free software for the sake of advancing human knowledge, just as they should encourage scientists and other scholars to publish their work. ...

… And what about both wars against Irak? Title from F.C. Thompson’s correspondence to Nature in Nature 449, 139