My work at the museum is a constant series of distractions that interfere with my work at the museum... editing tasks for the museum that have little to do with the research writing and editing that I should be doing. Yet the museum as a whole is important, and I am happy if I can help the museum fulfil its role in public education.

So, here I am about to leave Japan for a short period of holidays in my home country, New Zild, and my bag is heavy with the research papers that I most urgently need to edit.

Holidays?

Holidays.

But... if can actually make time to relax, I am sure that my editing efforts will be much better as a result. I need the holidays, and the editing needs holidays too.

The website of Science (31st August 2014) has a good article introducing the ups and downs of trying to model the Ebola outbreak.

At the end of the news article, Science offers the following:

*The Ebola Files: Given the current Ebola outbreak, unprecedented in terms of number of people killed and rapid geographic spread, Science and Science Translational Medicine have made a collection of research and news articles on the viral disease freely available to researchers and the general public.

This is good, but I would also like to see collections of information on how communities can respoind themselves,with and without the help of professional health services... and the information should be

(a) in all the languages of the people who are affected, or likely to be affected soon, and

(b) appear in written, audio and video formats that can be transmitted freeely through mobile phones, local radio, TV, and so on.

I would be grateful if members of our network who live in Africa can tell us more about what they are seeing in their own local media.

How can local communities be empowered to deal effectively with this disease themselves, at the same time as outside efforts are made to extend help?

Please comment!

Addendum (WHO report, cited in Science Insider, online news article , 8 September 2014)

"...far greater community engagement is the cornerstone of a more effective response. Where communities take charge, especially in rural areas, and put in place their own solutions and protective measures, Ebola transmission has slowed considerably."

This week I am in Taiwan with a new student, hunting plants and meeting people to learn about plants. We have a plan, but from day to day and moment to moment we cannot predict what we will see or hear.

What appears in front of us (we are mostly traveling by car) is very engaging, but in breaks from the action, we have many good chances to think about the project aims and future work.

This kind of back and forth is useful for both of us, and is one of the pleasures of being in the field. I guess lab workers can say the same thing about being inside the lab, and breaks from the lab work.

I often wonder what the ideal search system for members of social network like ours.

Recently I heard the phrase "associative search" for the first time.

This kind of search is relevant for the museum where I work. We have public access databases, but these merely give results that exactly match the keywords entered into an in house search engine. There is no intelligence in our database search engine.

Here is a good description of how associative search works, from a blog of the Internet Archive:

" When using the new search within a single program feature, the browser dynamically refines the results with each character typed. As typing proceeds towards the final search term, unexpected 60-second segments and phrases arise, providing serendipitous, yet systematic choices, even while options narrow towards the intended results.These surprising occurrences suggest the diverse opportunities for inquiry afforded by the unique research library and encourage some playful exploration. "

https://blog.archive.org/2014/05/07/let-our-video-go/

This kind of search system is really needed for public, user-friendly, opean access search of museum archives... and it will be especially valuable for users who are not experts for particular kinds of material. Even if they only have a rough idea of what to call something, they have a chance of finding what they want through associative search.

However, this depends on rich and fully indexed content. From a friend in Australia, I heard that a "Virtual Museum of the Pacific" failed from the start because the system was unique or specialised ("designed by programmers") - i.e. too difficult to maintain and update.

It is a trap to invent new technology that is then expensive to maintain and update. In most situations, it is probably best to innovate in how we use easy-to-maintain generic systems.

I hope that someday Ning (host of the Research Cooperative) will realise that it has created an ideal test platform for testing search systems with online social networks.

Associative search might be an ideal service to provide for social networks.

While thinking about this, I also realised that even inactive members of our network can be of interest, since they have provided at least some information about themselves in each public profile page. That information in itself may have value as an archive of mini-biography, even as members inevitably lose contact with the network, by choice or otherwise. Our network can become a kind of social memory for people involved in research communication.

I need to think about this more.

Meanwhile, I recommend the following note by Thomas T. Hills and Thorsten Pachur ,

"Searching Our Cognitive Social Networks: How We Remember Who We Know"

found at

http://mindmodeling.org/cogsci2011/papers/0306/paper0306.pdf

(See also " Associative search and the Research Cooperative ")

Recently my gmail account was hacked... meaning that someone else managed to get my login details, either by testing millions upon millions of username and password combinations or by using spyware on a public computer terminal at an airport or hotel.

Many of my friends and colleagues recieved spam mails as a result (mostly easy to detect Lagos-based spam). Many members of the Research Cooperative may have received a spam mail that appeared to be sent from my account. I apologise if this happened to you. I need to be more careful about where I use public Internet access.

This is difficult for me because I travel a lot, and do need Internet access at airports and hotels.

Perhaps I should keep a separate email account just for travel purposes.

Is this what other people do?

Luckily, I was told about the recent hacking problem by a friend who received the spam mail, very soon after my account was hacked. I was still able to log in and could change my password. All my past email had disappeared though, and I had to contact a Google support page to recover email from a backup at Google. Unfortunately, that may have only worked for relatively recent email since 2012. I am still not sure what was recovered and what was lost.

Now I am convinced that I need to backup my email independently from my email service provider.

There are many ways to do this, and today I found a useful site that explains what to do when an email account is hacked, and how to design or choose a backup system.

See: http://gmailaccountrecovery.blogspot.jp/

This blog does not provide a backup service. It only explains what to do.

Item 6 on the top page of the blog is an explanation of "How to Protect Your Account Details". This is relevant for any email system, not just gmail. The author gives a very nice review of different backup systems that can be used, and backup strategies in general.

This is important for my research and writing efforts because I use email for so much of my communication with students, colleagues, and publishers.

Perhaps every student and researcher should have basic training in email backup systems. This could be part of a general course on "Risk Management in Science".

If any members of our network have had experience of setting up a backup plan for email, please reply to this post, or describe your experience in a new blog post to our network (see "Add a Blog Post" underneath this post).

My son here in Japan is of an age when he is seriously beginning to think about what it might be like to enter university... and why he might want to do that. He doesn't have much experience of writing, and writing does not seem to be a strong concern at his mid-level, local highschool. We expect that he will face a steep learning curve if he does go to university.

Few the last few weeks though, there has been continuous daily coverage of the 'STAP cell" controversy, also known as the "Riken Affair". The affair started with publication of a paper in Nature by researchers at Japan's Institute of Physical and Chemical Research ('Riken'). One strand of the story goes back to the university training of the young researcher who was first author of the coauthored paper.

Her PhD was found to contain plagiarised elements, that were further copied into the paper published in Nature, despite there being no stated connection with the thesis in the Nature paper. Concern has been raised about standards of training and supervision at universities where some staff may have too many PhD students to give sufficient attention to their work.

In the Focus column of the Japan Times (Friday 18th April 2014), it is noted that a growing number of universities in Japan are introducing software systems to detect plagiarism in academic papers. At the same time, universities have started to publish all doctoral theses online, following introduction of a rule by the education ministry that made this mandatory.

The two systems most commonly used by universities here appear to be internationally-known products called iThenticate and Turnitin.

I hope the use of such systems to deter plagiarism does not become a substitute for teaching students how to learn, think, and write. Unexpectedly, we've been having family discussions about research, writing, and publishing. A good result of the Riken Affair has been some home schooling that may help our son think more realistically the purpose of a university education.

Over the last two weeks Sam and I have rearranged the menus, reduced the number of groups, and generally tried to simplify the navigation.

Yesterday I took the plunge and switched the site layout to a new Ning template: "Avant Garde" and using two columns instead of three.

The left-hand column is dedicated to making member contributions more obvious, and the right-hand column holds the sign-in/sign-out boc, and various kinds of network information.

Member activities are now in the front seat, not far behind the engine driver.

In our blog posts, we can change the font style and size. Here I am using the default Arial style, and 12 point size (the default is currently 10).

This is what 10 point looks like.

This is what Times New Roman looks like.

And now I would like to say adieu, it's time for me to take the train to work. I usually sit in the middle carriage.

[______]-[______]-[__&___]-[______]-[______\

................................... o o o o o o o o o o ..............................

After many months of preparation, the International Aroid Conference will soon start (tomorrow, 11th December 2013), here at the Army Hotel in the Old Quarter of Hanoi, in northern Vietnam.

In fact it seems to have already started, for two reasons...

1. Participants have started arriving, from Europe, North America, and Asia (Africa also?), including myself. Now we are wandering about in our old and cavernous hotel, wondering who is who. For some of us, it is our first time to join the Aroid conference and we know very few of the other people.

2. Since a year ago, we have built and used a small online social network in order to organise the conference and announce development of the programme.

See: aroids.ning.com

In the process, we have already started talking to each other, and have created the foundation for what could be a perpetual online conference.

We can keep this network running after the conference, until our publishing efforts are over, or perhaps until the next conference in 3-4 years time, so that the next group of organisers does not have to repeat the process of setting up a website, and network.

If we can identify organisers for the next conference, I might try to show them how to manage a our Ning network.