Thursday, August 09, 2012

More on the cost of scientific and medical publications

In addition to all the other issues that keep prices artificially high and out of the reach of even professionals, scientific, technical, and medical manuals impose an additional bit of mocking formality.

The bibliography, the part of a book or article where you check the author's background information, has to be formatted differently according to standard style guides.

The Chicago Manual of Style sez (subscription required):

For a book with two authors, note that only the first-listed name is inverted in the bibliography entry.
2. Geoffrey C. Ward and Ken Burns, The War: An Intimate History, 1941–1945 (New York: Knopf, 2007), 52.
Ward, Geoffrey C., and Ken Burns. The War: An Intimate History, 1941–1945. New York: Knopf, 2007.
...
For a book with four or more authors, list all the authors in the bibliography entry.


The AMA Style Guide, meanwhile, sez something quite different  (subscription required):

Use the author's surname followed by initials without periods. In listed references, the names of all authors should be given 
unless there are more than 6, in which case the names of the first 3 authors are used, followed by “et al.”
2 authors:
Doe JF, Roe JP III.


There are other, even more insidious nuances in the style guides. So, if you want to publish your book in a medical journal, you have edit your bibliographic entries one way and use another for other journals. you get to spend hours changing names to or from initials, adding or removing et alii, all in the name of pseudoscientific writing.

GoLocal Tech: Harnessing the power of crowds

In this week's column for GoLocalWorcester, we take a look at crowdsourcing, including a couple of local KickStarter projects: GoLocal Tech: Harnessing the power of crowds

Wednesday, August 08, 2012

More on education and marketing

Online course and textbook company Kno announced that it is offering a line of K-12 textbooks. The materials are available for the iPad and web browsers. Native Windows and Android apps are in the queue.

Kno has partnered with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, one of the major textbook publishers in the world. If you browse over to the HMH web site on your iPad (because you want to see how things look), you can find the catalog for each grade and subject area:

If you click Browse, you can see what they have to offer:

Flash doesn't run on an iPad. It also does not run on Android, so that you can't browse the catalog from your Android phone or tablet.

This is not an auspicious beginning for Kno.

Tuesday, August 07, 2012

Thinking anew about technical documentation...

Thinking anew about technical documentation and apps with neil perlin 

Develop in the Cloud - Karl Hakkarainen - Documentation's New Cloud Models

Cloud-based resources can help to ensure that documentation is complete and current.

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