There's a new pre-print paper called Pinpointing the problem: Providing page numbers for citations as a crucial part of open science by Leon Y. Xiao and Nick Ballou. It's a short, easily understandable paper, and well worth a read. I think I disagree with nearly all of its conclusions! The main point, I agree with. Citing a whole paper is a lossy process. Saying "Smith, J (1963) Practical Time Travel, Gallifrey Press" is basically fine but it doesn't tell you where in the publication the bit…
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Cheques (checks if you're American) are an amazing legacy technology. Invented in the 17th Century, they immediately transformed the financial landscape. They allowed anyone to transfer both vast and trivial sums of wealth with ease. Whole industries grew up around them - one of my first jobs was programming binary loadlifters repairing computerised cheque-readers - they're an example of a technology which "just works". Which, of course, is nonsense. They're fragile, easy to forge, have…
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You know how the Democratic People's Republic of Korea is neither democratic, nor particularly for the people, nor a republic? Yeah, so it turns out the "Universal 3D" format is pretty far from Universal! A little backstory... The Europeana Carare Project has some gorgeous 3D scans of ancient monuments and heritage sites. The only problem is that the 3D files are trapped inside PDFs. Yup - did you know the PDF spec supported 3D models? Me neither. The only way to view these is with the…
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The unsurpassed guru of mobile phones, Tomi T Ahonen, has released his latest book for free! The book, "The Insider's Guide to Mobile", is an invaluable guide to anyone in the mobile industry. I've read through a few pages of it and it is smart, funny, useful and a hugely important tome for anyone in the industry. There's just one small niggle I have with it. It is released as a PDF. PDF is a terrible format for ebooks. Releasing a PDF ebook is the publishing equivalent of releasing an…
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