Science Next Wave’s Career Blog discusses the recent wave of
“outsourcing” of jobs in the technology sector and what it might mean
for scientists in the near future.
Archive for February, 2004
Implications of outsourcing for scientists?
Sunday, February 29th, 2004Called on the Carpet
Sunday, February 29th, 2004After years of studying the structure and function of the bacterial flagellar motor, Rowland’s bacterial motor works lab
just published new results on harnessing swarms of bacteria, with their
rotating flagella, to move fluids through microfluidic channels.
These aggregates of bacteria have been dubbed “bacterial carpets”; the
work was also commented on several months ago in Nature Science Update.
How deep is the web?
Friday, February 27th, 2004Very, according to Marcus Zillman, who provides a guide to deep web
resource sites and intelligent agents (bots) in this LLRX.com article.
These are utilities that can find sites not seen by conventional search
engines (content in databases, etc.)(Source: ResearchBuzz)
Good stuff about RSS
Friday, February 27th, 2004A Yahoo news article compares RSS favorably to e-mial, particularly given the proliferation of spam. Source: The ResourceShelf
Update: Gary also linked to an article in Forbes on the same topic.
FBI files
Friday, February 27th, 2004Michael J. Ravnitzky published a list of FBI files to faciliate
accessing them under the freedom of information act (FOIA.) The
site provides an alphabetical list and instructions for requesting
them. (Source; the Virtual Chase)
Libraries and meta search engines: meeting the challenge of Google
Friday, February 27th, 2004There’s been a lot of discussion about search engines, particularly
crowning Google king and so forth. Yet Bernie Sloan on
LIBLICENSE-L pointed to an interesting article about federated
searching – how libraries design web interfaces that can search
multiple sources at once – both proprietary sources (literature
databases) and freely available resources, some things that search
engines can’t index. The California Digital Library has been
working on this for years and Harvard has its Metalib project
underway. Stay tuned.
Update(noon): LISNews points to a New York Times article correlating Google’s popularity with internet credibility in general.
Google labs: where’s the closest pizza
Thursday, February 26th, 2004A beta product in Google labs enables one to type in a search query for
a product (e.g. pizza, vacuum cleaner) and then a location (e.g. zip
code, city, state, etc) (Source: the Virtual Chase)