ResearchBuzz

Back in April I wrote about a site that hosted video lectures related to science and computing. There’s a new one available, launched yesterday in alpha. This one is called SciVee and is a collaboration between the National Science Foundation and the San Diego Supercomputer Center at UC San Diego. You can visit it at http://www.scivee.tv . The front page looks a bit like YouTube, with featured videos, tags, and a search box. Only instead of a video like, “Cat falls off table,” it’s “Structural Evolution of the Protein Kinase–Like Superfamily.”

Content on this site is divided into two types: Pubcasts (videos corresponding to peer-reviewed publications) and Videos (all scientific videos not belonging to a paper.) You can search or browse through a tag cloud, or review one of the many channels. (The channels are all called PLoS something-or-other; the PLoS stands for Public Library of Science.)

I picked the tag animals. I got three results, which listed a screenshot, title, and description. The descriptions are thorough but how useful they are to you depends on how much science you know. (”The protein kinase family is large and important, but it is only one family in a larger superfamily of homologous kinases that phosphorylate a variety of substrates and play important roles in all three superkingdoms of life.”)

Click on the title of the video and you’ll get a page for it. How that page looks depends on what you’re viewing. If you’re viewing a pubcast — a video that is associated with a peer-reviewed publication — you’ll get information about the paper in large format (with a link to the original paper) while the video will be a bit smaller (but still viewable, and you do have the option to enlarge it). In a plain video which is not associated with a peer-reviewed publication, the video will take center stage and be much larger. Both types of content have space for ratings, comments, and tags.

The videos varied a lot by quality. The ones that weren’t pubcasts tended to be a bit more “slick”. One or two of the pubcasts were a bit hard to hear (”Ten Simple Rules for Getting Published”) but for the most part they were easy to watch and hear. (This doesn’t mean it was easy to understand the content — most of this stuff is way over my head.)

You can register on this site, but you’re able to watch videos without registering. (You’ll have to register to provide comments and ratings for videos.) If you’re interested in uploading your own science-related content, be sure to read the site’s FAQ.

This post came from ResearchBuzz, a site with news and information about online data collections. Visit us at ResearchBuzz.com .

The Eco-Index, an online database of conservation projects in the Americas, has been online since 2001. But it recently hit a milestone of 1,000 projects, and as recently started including projects in the US and Canada. You can check it out at http://www.eco-index.org/new/index.cfm.

You can do a simple keyword search from the front page, or you can do a more extensive search that allows you to search by country, category, keyword, etc. I did a search just for the US and found 24 projects underway, from Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico Rapid Reef Assessment to Reducing Agricultural Threats in the Meso-American Reef Ecoregion.

The list of projects, which is in alphabetical order, includes a title, brief description, responsible organizations (usually multiple) and relevant categories. Clicking on the title of the project will give you a detail page including participating countries, date started, contact information, relevant Web sites (if any), project objectives, budget, etc. You know what I’d love to see here? — and I don’t even know if it’s feasible — a blog for each project. Or very overt links to progress reports. One project, for example, has field reports, but a link to these reports is not front-and-center on the project’s detail page.

While you’re at this site take a look at the sustainable tourism index and the migratory species index. Lots to see.

Thanks to reader KM for pointing me toward VideoLectures.net ( http://videolectures.net/ ), a collection of over two thousand videos related to science. It’s currently in beta and looks like it covers a variety of topics, from Web technologies to translation tools to math to logic.

The front page points to several different lectures and lists the most prolific authors. There’s a search box, but I skipped that in favor of browsing the most popular videos, which included folks like Tim Berners Lee and some dude named Noam Chomsky. Click on a video and you’ll get a page for the video and a brief description as well as a list of related videos (”The people who watched this video also watched…”) You’ll have the opportunity to leave comments as well. Click on the thumbnail to start the video. Some lectures are set up as a series of videos.

These are not the two minute videos that you might be used to from YouTube. These are lectures; all the videos I looked at were well at least an hour. Their quality varied a lot; Bettina Berendt’s discussion on Web usage mining was interesting but sometimes she was hard to hear. On the other hand, Kamal Nigam’s lecture on Text Information Extraction was extremely easy to hear and follow.

There are a couple of problems with viewing lectures this way. I could never see the slides/presentation materials to my satisfaction. As I mentioned sometimes the lecturer’s voice is hard to hear. And of course you can’t ask questions! I did like the caliber of what’s already been gathered at this site, though. Now if only all the lectures included PPT files and transcriptions…