We have free tickets to Musselburgh Racecourse tomorrow. Here are my selections:
2.20 Pontius Pilate (result – last)
2.50 Grand Design (result – 2nd)
3.20 Northern Dance (result – 5th)
Sharp Shoes (e/w) (result – 7th)
3.50 Chilledtothebone (result – 6th)
Peppercorn Rent (e/w) (result – 7th)
4.20 Guest Book (result – 2nd)
4.50 Calypso Magic (result – 1st)
5.20 Ravi River (e/w) (result – 2nd)
I invited Fat Mac to the races, but he said he couldn’t spare the time away from his beer.
I’ve added the following Open Access journals to JournalTOCs, where you can find the latest Tables of Contents from over 15,000 scholarly journals, including over 1,600 Open Access journals.
Previous journals added are listed here. Unfortunately, many other OA journals do not produce TOC RSS feeds – see my post on why they should. See also why any journal, OA or otherwise, should produce a TOC RSS feed.
If you know of any OA journals with TOC RSS feeds which are not already included in the JournalTOCs service, please let me know: macleod.roddy [at] gmail.com
Engineering Journal -
Latest Table of Contents via JournalTOCs
African Journal of Primary Health Care & Family Medicine -
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HTS Teologiese Studies / Theological Studies -
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Política y sociedad -
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Revista Catalana de Dret Públic -
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Advances in Bioscience and Biotechnology -
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Advances in Chemical Engineering and Science -
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Australasian Journal of Peer Learning -
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Sciences Eaux & Territoires : la Revue du Cemagref -
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BMC Biophysics -
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i-Perception
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Indian Journal of Endocrinology and Metabolism -
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Australasian Accounting Business and Finance Journal -
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We seem to need many cards, nowadays. In a few years time, something more convenient will take their place, and they will appear ridiculously out-of-date, but in the meantime they fill up our wallets or purses.
I previously mentioned my Government Gateway card.
Gateway card
I was sent that card when I applied for a new driving licence because the old one was paper and had almost fallen apart. So, then I was sent a new driving licence.
Driving llicence
Then, I needed a new European Health Insurance card, because the old one was more than 5 years old.
European Health Insurance Card
Information about why we need EHIC cards is available.
And then I applied for a prepaid Caxton FX card. I used it as a debit card the other day, to make sure it was working OK, and the charge was £1.50 which I wasn’t expecting.
Caxton FX card
And I have an NHS Donor Card, and a Nectar card, and so on, and so on.
This happened in 1977, or maybe it was 1978 – well, anyway, the mid-to-late-seventies-or-so, when I was working in the library at Chambers Street, which was then still a part of Heriot-Watt University (it’s now the Sheriff Court).
One Friday afternoon I was walking down the main corridor outside the library towards the toilets when a man stopped me. He explained that he was a detective and was looking for volunteers to take part in an identity parade the following day, Saturday. The suspect in the case in question had a beard and spectacles, so he’d come to the university to try to find suitable looking volunteers, and had noticd my beard and spectacles. He explained that for taking part you got a couple of quid. I thought this sounded quite interesting, so on the Saturday morning I pitched up at the Police Force Headquarters in Fettes Avenue.
There was a bit of milling around with various people arriving, and eventually I and a couple of other volunteers were shown into a room, to wait. As I entered the room I looked at the sign on the door and saw ‘Murder Squad’. Prior to that, I hadn’t known what the whole thing was about, but seeing ‘Murder Squad’ in writing was suddenly very sobering. Strewth…what had I got involved in?
Eventually, we were shown into the place where the identity parade was to take place. There were various solicitors in attendance, and two policeman came in accompanying a third man – the suspect. He was a bit younger than me, but he had a beard and spectacles.
All the volunteers were asked to line up with our backs against a wall. There weren’t enough volunteers, so a detective with a beard also joined us, was given a pair of spectacles, and stood beside me, on my right. The suspect was asked to choose a place in the line-up.
He walked up and down, then turned and spoke to his solicitor. The solicitor said, “Ask all of them take off any belts and ties” which we did. Then the suspect came and stood to my left.
A door was opened and a middle-aged man in a tweed jacket entered the room followed by a policeman, who said to him, words to the effect of, “Do you see before you the person you saw on the evening of the xth of August, walking down Shandwick Place, holding what you took to be a firearm…etc…take your time, and if and when you are satisfied that you have identified the person would you please point him out by placing your right hand on his shoulder…”
The middle-aged man walked along the line, looking us all up and down – there were about eight of us in the parade – until he got to the end, then he turned round, walked back up the line, stopped, and placed his hand on my shoulder.
I was stunned! It was like someone had hit me in the face.
My heart suddenly started pounding. Boom de, boom de, BOOM DE, BOOM DE, BOOM DE, BOOM DE.
What was happening? What had I got involved in? Had I been in Shandwick Place that day? I had no idea. The witness thought I was a murderer!
BOOM DE, BOOM DE.
What had I done? Had I shot someone and couldn’t remember anything about it? Was this some kind of set-up I’d walked straight into? Would I be sent to prison? How could I get out of this place?
BOOM DE, BOOM DE.
The witness was shown out of the room.
BOOM DE, BOOM DE, my heartbeat continued. I looked around and half expected to be handcuffed. Then the detective to my right turned to me, saw how worried I looked, and said, “Don’t worry. It happens all the time. You’re only in trouble if they all finger you.” Then he smirked.
Don’t worry! You haven’t just been identified as a gunman! I have no idea where I was on the xth of August.
Then an oldish woman was shown into the room followed by another policeman who went through a similar procedure, “Do you see before you…etc”
The woman walked up the line, briefly stopped in front of me…
BOOM DE, BOOM DE, BOOM DE, BOOM DE.
Strewth, I thought, she’ll hear my heart pounding.
Then she continued up the line, turned round and walked back, hesitated as she got to me…
BOOM DE, BOOM DE, BOOM DE, BOOM DE.
and then reached out and put her hand on the shoulder of the detective volunteer to my right.
BOOM DE, BOOM DE, BOOM DE, boom de, boom de.
What kind of idiot witnesses were these? Anyway, I suddenly felt a great deal better. They wouldn’t be able to put me in the slammer without also arresting the detective.
There were a number of other witnesses, and apart from one of them, they all put their hand on the shoulder of the suspect. As was gradually revealed, the identity parade was to do with someone who’d shot the owner of a gun shop. The killer was later identified as being in the Scottish Liberation Army.
When it was all over, and after I’d been paid my two quid, I left the police headquarters and walked up the road towards Stockbridge. At Comley Bank Road something made me turn round, and there, across the other side of the road waiting at a bus stop, was the man in the tweed jacket who had put his hand on my shoulder, looking straight at me. His jaw had dropped. As far as he was concerned, the police had just let a gunman walk free.
Here’s a couple of photos from Lindsey’s birthday party. Lindsey won’t tell me how many birthdays she’s had, but I’ve seen her passport, and know when she was born.
20th March
20th March
For her present, I took her to see Orquestra Buena Vista Social Club (which features a number of Buena Vista Social Club alumni), performing with Omara Portuondo at the Playhouse. Super!
Orquestra Buena Vista
On Sunday, I ran in the Alloa Half Marathon. The weather was OK, if a little wet at the start. My time was 01:57:56 and I came 685th. Last year, my time was 02:02:36 (804th) but on Sunday I was slower than my time in the Mull Half Marathon last August (01:56:57). I put this down to not having enough time for my warmup of a cigarette and a coffee.
Those volunteeers who handed out water, and the general public who lined the route, were fantastic.
Before the start
After the finish
We had to rush a bit in order to get to Alloa before for 10am. I hadn’t realised it took so long to get there, and had to jump out of the campervan near the race starting point whilst the support team (who wants to remain anonymous) found somewhere to park. After the finish, the support team could not remember where she’d parked the van, so I had to jog round Alloa at random until I eventually located it. These facts are disputed by the support team 
It was Lindsey’s birthday on Sunday, so on Friday evening we went to Nargile Edinburgh, 73 Hanover Street, for a meal. It was excellent! Using a coupon from Groupon, it was also reasonably priced.
By starting with Meze for two, we were able to sample several extremely interesting and unusual tastes.
Meze
My main course, the ‘Nargile Special’ was one of the most delicious dishes I’ve ever had. Here’s the description from the menu: “A layered dish of chopped pitta, pureed aubergine and thin slices of marinated lamb dressed with halep sauce and hot butter.” It may look a bit unappetising in the photo below, but boy, was it good!
Nargile Special
We had a bottle of Pinot Grigio Blush, which was OK, but a full-bodied red would have suited the lamb better. Lindsey enjoyed her Fener Balik (Oven roasted escallops of monkfish topped with tomato, basil and mozzarella cheese, served on a bed of lemon and herb scented kus kus).
When it came time to pay the bill (for the wine and coffee, because the rest was included in the £24 Groupon coupon), they hadn’t included the wine. Well, you can’t expect others to be honest with you if you’re not honest with them, so I pointed out the omission. The waitress looked very relieved.
On the bus home, this chap sat opposite us.
Chap on bus
I had an old-timer friend round on Thursday for what turned out to be virtually an update on modern living. I say ‘old-timer’, but actually he’s only sixty, yet he must have dozed off in the mid-to-late 1980s or something, and only woke up recently.
In fact, I think it was on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday that he decided to finally wake up and tackle the modern world again. Turning sixty hit him hard.
He’s an author, and obviously a good writer, with two books published, but that was a long time ago. Since then he’s continued to draft various novels, but with only an occasional sniff of interest from publishers. There’s currently a possible publishing deal on the cards, but he’s afraid that it may all fall through. That realisation, and the shock of getting his bus pass, motivated him to put one of his books on Kindle and get Blind Dave to act as his agent. Unfortunately, Blind Dave has been getting some health treatment lately, and hasn’t been feeling well enough to do much.
Although there have been a handfull of sales of the Kindle book, there haven’t been enough to set the heather alight or even get it smouldering. After finding out that Allan Guthrie had gone from 5 Kindle sales of Bye Bye Baby in November, to 12,000 sales in February and on to the UK Kindle Store Top Ten Bestseller list, and having seen Guthrie’s super website and also his excellent eBooks That Sell blog, my friend finally realised that it’s not enough, nowadays, to just write something and then sit back and wait for the royalties. If you do that, you’ll end up with nothing more than loose change. You have to promote yourself on the Internet as well, on blogs, Twitter and elsewhere, and actively network yourself.
So, a few weeks ago he showed me the new writer’s blog he’d started, and I don’t want to be harsh, but I have to say that it looked like a dog’s breakfast. Font changes half-way through sentences, typos, line-breaks where there shouldn’t be any, random spaces in the middle of paragraphs, and instead of links from words, he’d spell out the http and write things like:
“And my book is available ºn Κindle at http://…”
He’d also chosen the most boring possible Blogspot design, had no widgets, and had awful graphics and pictures. But, he did agree to come round to see what we could do to improve it.
Shortly after he arrived, I turned on the radio for some background music, and by way of conversation, said, “Quite a nice digital radio, eh?”
His response was, “What? Digital radio? Is that something new? My goodness, what will they invent next!”
When I showed him my Garmin nüvi 1490TV Sat Nav with built-in TV, he said, “Strewth! And I thought 625 lines was good.”
I began to realise that it was going to be a long haul, and I felt like getting him to stand up, wave his arms around with me and chant, “I’m not really an old person…and I want to join the modern world.”
Even worse followed when we sat down at the laptop and I saw him in action on the computer. Why do many older people type something into the Google search box, pick up the mouse, move the cursor over to ‘Search’ and then click on it? Why not just avoid RSI and press the Enter key? Why do some older people think that there is only one way to scroll down a page – by finding the tiny down arrow with the cursor and continuously clicking the left button?
So, the first thing was to teach some basic skills. The purpose of the mouse scroll wheel, clicking on the scroll bar, etc. We also covered double-clicking to select a word, triple-clicking to select a paragraph, triple-clicking in the margin to select an entire document in Word, clicking at the beginning of selected text and then pressing the Shift key and clicking again at the end of selected text, plus the use of shortcuts such as Ctrl+v, Ctrl+z, Ctrl+c, etc.
Amazingly, this was all new to him, yet he actually picked it all up pretty quickly, apart from using Enter. Some people simply have a hatred of the Enter key, and a death-wish for RSI.
We spent two hours editing his blog, tidying it up, getting rid of spaces and different fonts. We went through some simple HTML code removal and how it got there in the first place (copy and pasting from Word into Blogspot). We covered how to insert a link, how to get some widgets and a half-decent blog design. I couldn’t persuade him to not indent every paragraph with ten spaces, though.
There’s still quite a lot to do, such as improvements to the graphics and pictures, and I think covering Twitter will necessitate another session, but in the meantime…welcome to the modern world…author of future Kindle bestsellers…John McKenzie!
I’ve added the following Open Access journals to JournalTOCs, where you can find the latest Tables of Contents from over 15,000 scholarly journals, including over 1,600 Open Access journals.
Previous journals added are listed here. Unfortunately, many other OA journals do not produce TOC RSS feeds – see my post on why they should.
If you know of any OA journals with TOC RSS feeds which are not already included in the JournalTOCs service, please let me know: macleod.roddy [at] gmail.com
Contextus – Revista Contemporânea de Economia e Gestão -
Latest Table of Contents via JournalTOCs
Fonseca : Journal of Communication -
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Pharmaceutical Methods -
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Journal of Pharmacology & Pharmacotherapeutics -
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Journal of Pharmaceutical Negative Results -
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Heart Views -
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African Journal of Business Ethics -
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Annals of Nigerian Medicine -
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Chronicles of Young Scientists -
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Indian Dermatology Online Journal -
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Indian Journal of Public Health -
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International Journal of Nutrition, Pharmacology, Neurological Diseases -
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Perspectives in Clinical Research -
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Toxicology International -
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Tropical Parasitology -
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Recently, I’ve been contributing to a bid for some JISC funding. Someone else is doing most of the work, and I’m simply contributing some ideas, suggesting text, and trying to help with the concept. This is a far cry from when I used to manage bids for JISC funding opportunities. In those days, I used to ‘live’ with the bids for several weeks, sometimes even months, and would constantly add to, and tweak, the draft submission.
This current bid has great potential, so I really hope that it is funded. One problem we’ve had is that we’re supposed to provide evidence of significant demand from an identified community for it. Yet, whilst there is very obviously a need for what the proposed project will provide, the proposal is also novel, is quite difficult to explain or understand, and connects together various strands of data and service delivery concepts. How can you give evidence of a specific demand for something which will work in a way that most people may not even thought of?
The proposal is do with creating new and better ways for researchers to keep up-to-date with the latest research outputs. Initially, it concerns newly published scholarly articles, but eventually it could extend to include new papers being deposited in institutional and subject repositories. Essentially, it proposes an intuitive and smart interface to enable researchers to read, manage and share only scientific literature that is current, relevant, reliable, personalised, and integrated with the user’s institutional library holdings or Open Access titles.
It has various proposed elements, some of which may change or develop before the bid is submitted, but at the present time my understanding of them is that they include:
1. A novel user-friendly, sort of enewspaper-type interface in which to view details of recently published research articles and papers. The nearest I can explain this interface is to say that it could look a little like a cross between Twunlog and paper.li
2. This interface would allow for two different types of personalisation of content. Firstly, the user would be able to control much of what was displayed – he/she could read, add and delete items, highlight items, move items around, store items, and easily export records to bibliographic management packages. Secondly, and this is a very interesting aspect of the proposal, there would be smart personalisation. Using proven technical methods that I don’t fully understand, the system would gradually learn what was of real interest to the user through the user’s normal scanning, reading and clickthrough (to the full text) activity within the interface, and would help organise the display of items accordingly, including suggesting relevant items from various journals which were not being followed by the user, and eventually possibly also items being deposited in institutional and subject repositories. For a flavour, think of how some email systems prioritise mail and get rid of spam, though there would be more to it than that.
3. Social media would be exploited by allowing the user to be alerted to new content via Twitter. I’ve written about this sort of thing before, and about how using Twitter would be a good for such alerting, but the proposal would go further than how I’ve previously described it. TocAlerts could be used, e.g.
TocAlert @[MyTwitterAccount] New TOC: Geo-spatial Information Science
http://tinyurl.com/33p68up
The tinyurl would always in fact be a link to a JournalTOCs URL (i.e.
http://www.journaltocs.ac.uk/api/journal/issn?output=articles
), but the new interface API would detect that a new tweeted TOC alert had arrived at MyTwitterAccount, and as that would be linked to ‘my new interface’ account, the new TOC would be analysed by the new interface system and used to update the user’s new interface (rather than display it within the JournalTOCs interface). However, for anyone else who didn’t have an account at the new interface, that tinyurl would link to the TOC displayed in JournalTOCs just as it does at present, and it would therefore still work. Hence the TocAlerts could be retweeted or found via Twitter Search, etc, and would work for anyone, however those who were using the new interface who clicked on it would see the TOC within their new interface personalised environment. This would, very importantly, assist researchers working within groups to share content which was of interest, within their personalised interfaces, as long as they were all users of the new interface.
4. Whilst the proposed new interface would be initially powered by JournalTOCs content and usage data, it would not simply be an extension of that existing service but rather the creation of an entirely new way to view, manage, exploit and share the latest research outputs – and all with very little effort on the part of the user.
5. The proposal would be trialled by volunteers at a limited number of institutions which are already taking advantage of the localised customisation of JournalTOCs. This would mean that the journal holdings of those volunteer users would be known to the admin system controlling the new interface, which would allow it to always indicate to the users the immediate availability, or not, of the full text of items, or alternately all content could be restricted to only journals which were available to the users through their existing institutional subscriptions.
To me, it sounds like a very cool idea, though I’m not sure if I’ve described it particularly well! Once it’s submitted, we’ll just have to keep our fingers crossed.
Writing bids can be stressful, and however much you plan in advance, things always seem to get complicated near the submission time. I remember one bid, some time ago when they had to be submitted by post. Our service co-ordinator took it up to the Post Office on the very last day that it could be submitted. Then I suddenly had a thought – had its covering letter actually been signed? I phoned the co-ordinator who was in the Post Office at the time, and had just paid for the package to be posted. Had the enclosed letter been signed? She thought maybe it hadn’t. So she had to ask for the package back from behind the Post Office counter, she opened it, saw the unsigned letter, and high-tailed it back to the university to get it signed, then resealed everything, and dashed back to the Post Office just before they closed for the day. A close call that might have cost us a lot of funding.
In the past, I’ve had input into various JISC projects. For the proposals I managed, I had a 100% funding success rate with JISC, amounting in all to over £2m, although in a couple of cases bits were lopped off the proposals. Some of the other bids were successful and some were not. Some of those unsuccessful bids were actually better than some of the successsful ones, but in the end, everything actually depends on how bids are marked and evaluated.
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