An anonymous source has informed me that the ASCB has banned “replication of data” by visitors, but has presented Twitter as the poster child of conference data leaks. No word on whether ASCB attendees will be subjected to memory scans upon exit. The sign says:
Twittering and other forms of communication involving replication of data are strictly prohibited at all sessions, in the exhibit hall, and all poster sessions.
Despite all that, you’ve been a little slow lately, and I found my thoughts wandering. Earlier today, I noticed a 2collab link, and, without thinking about it, clicked over to see what has changed since last time we met. Before I knew it, I was pulling in my publications via Scopus ID, tagging papers, and joining interest groups. I’m sorry, Connotea, but the speed was just so intoxicating that I went and exported my whole library from you and went to import it to 2collab. It seems my affections weren’t returned, however, as I was slapped with the following message:
Unable to import bookmarks: org.hibernate.exception.ConstraintViolationException: Could not execute JDBC batch update
Like a bucket of cold water, that returned me to my senses, and I came back to you, ol’ Buggotea.
The NLM has published a comprehensive set of guidelines for citing email, usenet, websites. It’s great that they’re attempting to come up with some standard rules, but one has to wonder if the group coming up with the proposed rules has ever used our fine series of tubes.
There’s a number of issues with their recommendations, some egregiously bad, some just kinda funny. For example, they have one set of rules for citing websites, and a different set of rules for citing electronic mail and discussion forums. This, in itself isn’t so strange, but look at the subcategories in each case:
For example, while one might cite a part of a website with the full URL to the cited page, the rules for blogs call for only citing the front page. Never mind that blogging is responsible for the invention of the permalink as we know it today. Mention of URIs or DOIs is nowhere to be found.
That’s the seriously wrong stuff, but as I said, there’s some humor to be found as well. The content type of these sources is given as “blog on the internet” or “discussion list on the internet“.