When I first started giving lectures to students, it was the students themselves that acted as human photocopiers, faithfully trying to duplicate what I was embossing on the lecture theatre blackboard with chalk. How times have changed! Here I thought I might summarise my latest efforts to refactor the material I deliver in one lecture course on pericyclic reactions (and because my notes have always been open, you can view them yourself if you wish).
Posts Tagged ‘Microsoft’
Refactoring my lecture notes on pericyclic reactions.
Sunday, December 29th, 2013Data-round-tripping: moving chemical data around.
Saturday, November 20th, 2010For those of us who were around in 1985, an important chemical IT innovation occurred. We could acquire a computer which could be used to draw chemical structures in one application, and via a mysterious and mostly invisible entity called the clipboard, paste it into a word processor (it was called a Macintosh). Perchance even print the result on a laserprinter. Most students of the present age have no idea what we used to do before this innovation! Perhaps not in 1985, but at some stage shortly thereafter, and in effect without most people noticing, the return journey also started working, the so-called round trip. It seemed natural that a chemical structure diagram subjected to this treatment could still be chemically edited, and that it could make the round trip repeatedly. Little did we realise how fragile this round trip might be. Years later, the computer and its clipboard, the chemistry software, and the word processor had all moved on many generations (it is important to flag that three different vendors were involved, all using proprietary formats to weave their magic). And (on a Mac at least) the round-tripping no longer worked. Upon its return to (Chemdraw in this instance), it had been rendered inert, un-editable, and devoid of semantic meaning unless a human intervened. By the way, this process of data-loss is easily demonstrated even on this blog. The chemical diagrams you see here are similarly devoid of data, being merely bit-mapped JPG images. Which is why, on many of these posts, I put in the caption Click for 3D, which gives you access to the chemical data proper (in CML or other formats). And I throw in a digital repository identifier for good measure should you want a full dataset.
A Digital chemical repository – is it being used?
Tuesday, May 4th, 2010In this previous blog post I wrote about one way in which we have enhanced the journal article. Associated with that enhancement, and also sprinkled liberally throughout this blog, are links to a Digital Repository (if you want to read all about it, see DOI: 10.1021/ci7004737). It is a fairly specific repository for chemistry, with about 5000 entries. These are mostly the results of quantum mechanical calculations on molecules (together with a much smaller number of spectra, crystal structure and general document depositions). Today, with some help (thanks Matt!), I decided to take a look at how much use the repository was receiving.