A lot of blogs, Belgian or not, are talking about the fact that the Belgian French-speaking press (lead by CopiePress, a Belgian rights management company) successfully sued Google in Belgium over indexing, author rights, content copying, etc. The full order is available on the Belgian Google homepage (in French). I am not a lawyer. So I read the order: CopiePress wanted the Belgian court to look at the lawfullness of Google News and Googgle Cache services, according to the Belgian law CopiePress wanted Google to remove all links to any data from CopiePress clients CopiePress wanted Google to publish the order in its first page on their Belgian website So, CopiePress won the first case (the case will be heard again in appeal). I assume that the Belgian justice department is doing its job. So, let us consider that Google broke the Belgian law with their services. If you want to know more about the legal stuff, P. Van den Bulck, E. Wery and M. de Bellefroid wrote an article about which Belgian laws Google seems to have broken (in French). ...

These last 1.5 days, I was in Maastricht (NL) for the 10th Euron PhD days. Euron is the “European graduate school of neuroscience”. I presented a poster and did an 15 minutes oral presentation of my last results. It was a good meeting in its 1st meaning: I met interesting people. I also enjoyed listening to other Ph.D. students’presentations since it always gives you i) a glimpse at what other people (in other universities) are interested in (by other means that paper/digital articles) and ii) the impression that you are not the only one to have problems with your protocol, your animals, your proteins, … The location was great ( Fort Sint Pieter), sun was there. The ULg team was very small (only 4 Ph.D. students and 2 senior scientists on a total of about 100 participants) but this gave an occasion to know other students better. ...

A media looked for someone with experience in scientific mazes. They contacted Rudy D’Hooge, from the Laboratory of Neurochemistry & Behaviour, University of Antwerp (with Prof. De Deyn, he wrote an authoritative review on the subject). He gave my name and my lab as a reference for the Morris water maze (*). Maybe he gave other names and labs but … Nearly 4 years ago, I took the train to visit his laboratory in order to see how we could install a water maze in our lab, what protocol we need to use, pittfalls to avoid, … We were nowhere, I learned from them (**) and now they cited us as a reference lab. After so much toil and trouble, it is heart warming. Thank you. ...

At least, that’s what the Thunderbird speller found ;-) OK, it was also associated with “bioscience” and “omniscience”. I just thought it was fun after a day full of experiments and reading interesting articles ( neuroscience is a real science).

Although the University of Liege ( ULg) network of libraries webpage is very old and ugly, the network is starting to use new, technologically advanced tools to allow digital access to its content (articles, books, thesis and other media). Three tools are available since a short time: Source gives access to all media currently available in libraries (it replaces the Telnet-based Liber, for those who used it before). Source is based on Aleph from ExLibris, a proprietary software. PoPuPS is a publication platform for scientific journals from the ULg and the FSAGx. PoPuPS is based on Lodel CMS, a free (GPL) web publishing software. Articles in this database seem to be Open Access although no precise licence is defined (and some articles look strange : see the second picture in this geological article). BICTEL/e is an institutional repository of Ph.D. thesis. It seems to be developed internally by the UCL With these tools, the ULg try to catch the Open Access movement. Source is already connected to other types of databases but it seems that PoPuPS and BICTEL are not (yet) connected to cross-references systems like DOI nor using standardised metadata like in Eprints. ...

This evening, I prepared a computer for the lab. Don’t blame me but it has to be under MS-Windows and with MS-Office. Knowing it’s only an Intel Pentium II MMX (“x86 Family 5 Model 4 Stepping 3”) with 64Mb of RAM and 2.4Gb of hard disk, I needed to find general software that has the smallest footprint in terms of both memory and hard disk consumption. Here is a small list of software I found interesting (mainly for me to remember): ...

Two computers are on the same network. A firewall segregates the internet from the intranet. Both computers can access everything on the intranet but only one of them is allowed to access the internet. The problem is to listen to a music stream from the computer that cannot access the internet. A possible solution is to run a stream redirection software on the computer that can access the internet. Then the computer that cannot access the internet can get the stream from the intranet (figure below). ...

Finally, a second scientific paper is published by the Poirrier-Falisse (a first paper for me): Poirrier JE., Poirrier L., Leprince P., Maquet P. " Gemvid, an open source, modular, automated activity recording system for rats using digital video". Journal of Circadian Rhythms 2006, 4:10 ( full text, doi) It is still in a provisional PDF version but already available on the web and Open Access (of course)! Here is my BibTex entry. I will upload source code tonight on the project website.

Today, I did some “spot picking”. In 2D electrophoresis, you disperse proteins in a gel according to their electric charge and mass. You obtain a kind of map of proteins and, if you stain these proteins, you have a map of spots ( example here). After some analysis, it could be good to identify some proteins of interest. The problem is that they are in the gel! So, today, I used a robot called “spot picker” that … picks spots representing proteins of interest out of the gel. You can see what a spot picker looks like in my proteomic set on Flickr.

On Friday, having to wait for a librarian to fetch the old articles I wanted to read, I spent a few minutes removing spam from the AEL wiki. This form of spam is very easy to spot because it’s always the same : HTML tags enclosing 30 links and the text linking to these sites have well-known spam, adult-oriented words in it (see the end of MsSecurity page where I didn’t had time to remove spam). ...