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Chemistry and Physiology Toolkit


By Research Cooperative, 2022-06-06

Physiology calculators at Physiology Web include many lab-friendly tools.

For example, the Percent (%) Solutions Calculator includes not just a calculator that covers different measurement scales,it also has a nice text explaining the three different ways of calculating percentages for solutes in solutions (w/v, w/w, and v/v).

Archives toolkit


By Research Cooperative, 2022-04-10

For background, see:

1. Michael Eisenstein (2022) "In pursuit of data immortality" - https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00929-3

Summary Quote: "Data sharing can save important scientific work from extinction, but only if researchers take care to ensure that resources are easy to find and reuse". 

2. Bryn Nelson (2009) "Data sharing: Empty Archives" - https://www.nature.com/articles/461160a

For educational resources, and more, see:

GO FAIR International Support and Coordination Office (GFISCO) . https://www.go-fair.org/

"In 2016, the ‘ FAIR Guiding Principles for scientific data management and stewardship’ were published in the journal Scientific Data with the aim of improving the Findability , Accessibility , Interoperability , and Reuse of digital assets.

Society of American Archivists ( https://archivists.org ) - "North America's oldest and largest national professional association dedicated to the needs and interests of archives and archivists." Has a useful dictionary of terms often used in relation to archives and their contents.

Papagao by Naver


By Research Cooperative, 2022-03-23

Naver Corporation, a Korean company, describes its online translation service as follows:

"Papago is an automated interpretation application that is useful for traveling overseas and communicating in foreign languages. It was developed with NAVER's own technology, which integrates speech recognition, speech synthesis, machine translation, and character recognition.

The underlying core NMT (Neural Machine Translation) technology has been uniquely applied to translate sentences as a whole instead of splitting into phrases in order to provide more accurate and contextualized translation services."

My Japanese wife prefers this machine-translation service for Japanese/Korean, and the tool offers a wider range of Asian languages than similar tools provided by European companies:

Chinese (simplified and traditional), Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, Thai, Vietnamese

(alongside English and a few European languages)

The online service can translate text snippets or website pages (scroll down to enter the URL). There is also an app that can be downloaded onto a computer or phone, for most common systems.

See: https://papago.naver.com/

The service has a nice parrot image as logo.

Reference

Internet (23rd March 2022): https://www.navercorp.com/en/service/featured

Writing


By Research Cooperative, 2022-02-27

There are many writing style guides guides published by universities, academic journals, governments, publishers and others.

(1) Council of Science Editors

Scientific Style and Format guide (requires subscription)

https://www.scientificstyleandformat.org

"This manual’s recommendations on scientific style focus primarily on nomenclature and symbolization. The principles governing these topics are presented in sufficient detail to make clear the basis and rationale for appropriate style, but the manual does not include comprehensive lists of scientific terms, symbols, and abbreviations for all disciplines. Authoritative documents are available in many disciplines to guide authors who are responsible for coining new terms and symbols and those who need to use them. References for these documents, many of them now available online, are given at the end of the relevant chapters."

(2) 1Password is an internet service that has a useful guide for website developers. This may help the Research Cooperative (for example) to communicate more clearly with site users in its technical documentation, and in automatically generated messages. See: https://support.1password.com/style-guide/

Posted in: Writing | 0 comments

The Universal Internet and text to speech services


By Research Cooperative, 2022-02-05

Recently the museum where I work recently held an exhibition called "UNIVERSAL MUSEUM" (National Museum of Ethnology, Japan). Th exhibition emphasized the role of touch as a sense that can be used and enjoyed by all people, not just people with sight disabilities.

The Internet, like most museums, depends mainly on visual representation. Nevertheless, IT designers have developed many ways to make the internet more accessible for all people - working towards a universal internet that of course will never be completely universal (just as I wish for a rewilding of the world, with the " Half-Earth Project " for example, I would like at least half of my life to be Internet-free!).

For example there are now many ways to convert text to speech. Here are three examples.

DeepL - a high-quality online translation tool, for many language pairs, that can read aloud both the source text and the translation.

ReadAloud - a text to speech (TTS) service that supports 40+ languages, and multiple kinds of voice.  It works on many kinds of website and document, including university course materials. For example, it can read PDFs, Google Docs, and various online book formats.

TTS Reader - This supports plain text, pdf & epub (ebooks) files, and auto saves between sessions, so we can stop and continue any time. It claims to use natural-sounding voices, which is nice.

Personally, I am most interested in using TTS to read back my own written drafts when I am writing papers. Having an always-available reader and speaker to help with writing, revision and proofreading will be useful.

Posted in: IT toolkit | 0 comments

I have been using Photographers Direct for my own research on the distribution of a certain plant that is sometimes visible in photographs taken in scenic wet locations (especially waterfalls). For me, it is worthwhile to pay the photographer concerned for use rights, because there is little chance I will reach the location myself.

The company running this service has a good system for photographers based in less wealthy regions of the world.

In its own words, the company has "pioneered the concept of Fair Trade Stock Photography" This makes the range of photography more interesting than at many commercially-orientated sites. The company currently has 2,302,523stockimages in its search engine.

Stock photo collections online


By Research Cooperative, 2021-10-07


AGPix ( http://www.agpix.com ) - an online community of 350+ image providers, mostly freelance/independent photographers.

An Amish village ( Amishphoto.com ) - the work of one photographer in one community, over a period of four decades.

Arctic Photo ( http://www.arcticphoto.com ) - pictures of polar regions, by various photographers who travel frequently to Siberia, Greenland, Alaska, Canada, Arctic Scandinavia and Antarctica.

Buiten-Beeld ( http://www.buiten-beeld.nl/ ) - Dutch nature/outdoor photography; online picture archive with about 100,000 images; best nature photographs by renowned wildlife photographers; young and talented photographers.

Corbis Corporation ( http://www.corbis.com ) - a comprehensive selection of photography, illustration, footage, typefaces and rights clearance services; based in North America with offices in Europe, Asia, and Pacific.

Images and Stories ( http://www.imagesandstories.com )- an Istanbul-based agency that supplies feature articles and stock images to magazines, book publishers, and others. Specialists for Turkey, Middle East, and Asia.

iStockphoto ( http://www.istockphoto.com ) - offers photos, illustrations, video and audio; based in Canada.

National Geographic Image Collection ( http://www.nationalgeographicstock.com ) - one of the largest online collections, global in scope.

Our Place ( http://www.ourplaceworldheritage.com ) - photographic records of World Heritage locations registered by UNESCO.

Photographers Direct ( http://www.photographersdirect.com/ ) , a pioneer of "Fair Trade Stock Photography" ; offers a range of photography more interesting than many commercially-orientated sites ; has more than 2,300,000 stockimages.

Photo Library Group ( http://www.photolibrary.com ) - represents leading stock brands and photographers around the world; provides access to images, footage, and music.

Randall Hyman ( http://www.randallhyman.com ) - environment, culture, and travel photos from over three decades, covering natural history and travel topics from Northern Europe to South America to Asia to Africa.

Tranz International Image Library ( http://www.tranz.co.nz ) - international and New Zealand photography on historical, news, studio, life-style themes.





The World Heritage Collection (photographic archive)


By Research Cooperative, 2021-10-07

There are more than one thousand World Heritage sites recognised by the UNESCO World Heritage Committee. These are places of both natural and cultural importance. OUR PLACE in partnership with UNESCO   is building an online photographic archive and interactive website to record these sites. Any photographer can contribute to the project.

This could be a good model for many kinds of image archiving projects.

See Our Place - The World Heritage Collection : http://www.ourplaceworldheritage.com/index.cfm

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