Editorial: Live blogging - not so easy

I am now back from two weeks in Italy where I experimented with live blogging. You have probably noticed that some presentations from the meeting at CoSBi in Trento were covered on Buried Treasure within a matter of minutes of them ending. Also, quite a number of pictures were posted in the associated Picasa web album while the presentations were still ongoing. Here is a brief explanation of how I planned to pull this off and how it worked in practice.

My original plan was to use WordPress through the web browser on my smartphone together with a foldable bluetooth keyboard. This was how I first imagined that my live-blogging platform would look:

It seemed a good idea at the time, but there were a couple of “minor” problems:

• The mobile web interface for WordPress does not enable you to upload pictures.
• The full web interface for WordPress works neither in Microsoft Internet Explorer Mobile nor in Opera Mobile.

I thus started looking around for alternative clients for WordPress and eventually found ShoZu, which allows you to upload pictures from your phone to a variety of services including WordPress blogs and Picasa web albums. However, it is not a true blogging tool and only enables you to write a short description for each picture. I thus accepted to the real blog posts would be written on my laptop, whereas the following platform would be used for live blogging in the form of images with short descriptions:

This seemed like an even better idea at the time, but again I ran into a few technical problems:

• Due to strange combinations of firewalls, HTTP proxies, and complex login web pages, I never managed to get my smartphone reliably connected to the internet.
• The camera in the smartphone was unable to take even half decent picture under the poor light conditions.

In reality, I thus ended up using my old Apple PowerBook G4 and my Lumix TZ3 camera. They got the job done in terms of covering the presentations, but live blogging from poster sessions was practically impossible.

I have now put on my thinking cap to come up with a live-blogging platform that would work for poster sessions. You generally have too little time for too many posters, so it has to be very fast to snap a photo and post it. The light is often poor and people tend to use too small fonts on their posters, so you need a good camera to get a readable result. Finally, the lack of space and tables prevents you from using a laptop. The Eye-Fi Card  might be a solution as it would enable me to upload images directly from my camera to, for example, a Picasa web album or Flickr. Please let me know if you have any ideas, experiences, or thoughts on this.

Editorial: No intelligence involved

You may have heard about the controversial movie “Expelled: No intelligence Allowed” by Ben Stein in which people behind the intelligent design movement whine about being suppressed the scientific community. The truth is obviously that intelligent design is not a falsifiable theory and hence simply does not qualify as science.

However, the movie is also controversial in other respects. To start with the producers conned both Richard Dawkins and fellow blogger PZ Myers into participating in the movie by interviewing them under false pretense.

Richard Dawkins and PZ Myers thus both registered for participating in a public screening of the movie. But while queuing up for the movie, PZ Myers was identified by security officers and told to leave the premises - immediately! Oh the irony, oh the double standard. They make a movie about suppression of views, they call it “Expelled”, and then they expel a person whom you conned into participating in the movie because you disagree with his views.

But it gets even better. The very same security officers were apparently oblivious to the fact that Richard Dawkins was standing right next to PZ Myers and thus let him enter to watch the movie. PZ Myers immediately wrote a blog post about it, while the movie was still being shown to the audience - including Richard Dawkins.

After the movie, Richard Dawkins (of course) stood up and asked why PZ Myers was not allowed to see the movie. The answer? Because he did not have a ticket and was thus a gate crasher! Very interesting explanation since it was not a ticket event - you simply had to register a seat, which PZ Myers had done.

The two gentlemen have now posted an interesting little discussion on YouTube in which they humorously describe the incident as well as just how bad the movie really is:

Richard Dawkins also reveals that Expelled includes one of the beautiful movies produced by the multimedia team at Harvard. You really have to wonder if they actually got permission for that, if they conned the people at Harvard as well, or if they just resorted to plain old plagiarism. In any case, this has to be one of the biggest PR disasters ever made by the intelligent design movement.

Expelled from Expelled: no intelligence involved.

Editorial: One month anniversary

When I launched this blog just a month ago, I wrote that it was an experiment and that I would later evaluate if it was worthwhile to continue. I am very happy to already now be able to declare the experiment a success. With over 2000 views during the first month and around 50 subscriptions to the RSS feed, Buried Treasure is certainly worthwhile writing - I hope you also find it worthwhile reading.

In the near future I plan to experiment with live blogging. The idea is to provide coverage of the conferences and meetings that I attend. To avoid polluting my blog with dozens of short posts consisting of just one or two sentences and a photo, I have setup an associated Picasa web album. This is where the main action will happen - I plan to post only highlights and summaries here on the blog. You can find the RSS feeds for the album and the blog in the sidebar.

Editorial: Why “Buried Treasure”?

I’m a computational biologist who tends to work on way too many projects at any one time. Many of these result in observations that I find interesting - but not interesting enough to bother writing up a manuscript and sending it to a peer-reviewed journal. In other cases the results were simply negative and no conclusions could be drawn. My disk may thus contain “buried treasure”.

My primary goal with this blog is to make my never-to-be-published observations openly available. As I don’t plan on continuing these projects, anyone is welcome to pick up a project and continue where I left off. I also plan on reporting negative results on this blog so that others can hopefully avoid repeating analyses that would lead them nowhere.

Please note that this blog is an experiment. Over the next few months I will try to write up a number of posts on various projects. After a test period, I will make up my mind about whether to continue or not. This depends on how many people read and comment my posts vs. how long it takes me to write the posts. Like for all other experiments, time will tell if it becomes a success.