Technology

Jennifer Lin, Cameron Neylon and I wrote a thing.

Identify This! Identifiers and Trust.

I made several predictions in this interview, and it’s interesting to see which ones played out.

I was recently asked by somebody to speculate about generalizable application features that might help researchers in their work. I responded to them directly, but thought it might be worth repeating part of my response here. Since the early 1990s I’ve wished that the OS (any OS) would support a “Paste & Cite” feature and, now that I’m involved with CrossRef and its linking and (nascent) plagiarism detection initiatives, I am even more convinced that such a feature would be immensely valuable to anybody who does research. The basic idea behind the feature would be that the clipboard would also copy “provenance” information whenever somebody chose to copy something. Then, when the user decided to paste the content someplace else, it would offer an optional “Past & Cite” menu item. ...

I hated it in Pascal and I hate it now in del.icio.us. This might even force me to stop using del.icio.us. Of course, it isn’t the number that I really hate- its the programmers who, rather than think of the realistic use cases for a column called “notes”, just settle for the default “biggish computer number” that pops into their head. You’d think they would have at least upgraded to 512 or 1024 by now. ...