Peter Murray-Rust and I are delighted to announce that the 2016 award of the Bradley-Mason prize for open chemistry goes to Jan Szopinski (UG) and Clyde Fare (PG).
Posts Tagged ‘Peter Murray-Rust’
Internet Archaeology: Blasts from the past.
Friday, October 11th, 2013In 1993-1994, when the Web (synonymous in most minds now with the Internet) was still young, the pace of progress was so rapid that some wag worked out that one “web-year” was like a dog-year, worth about 7 years of normal human time. So in this respect, 1994 is now some 133 web-years ago. Long enough for an archaeological excavation.
A two-publisher model for the scientific article: narrative+shared data.
Sunday, September 15th, 2013I do go on rather a lot about enabling or hyper-activating[cite]10.1039/P29950000007[/cite] data. So do others[cite]10.1038/nj7461-243a[/cite]. Why is sharing data important?
150,000,000 DFT calculations on 2,300,000 compounds!
Friday, July 5th, 2013The title of this post summarises the contents of a new molecular database: www.molecularspace.org[cite]10.1021/jz200866s[/cite] and I picked up on it by following the post by Jan Jensen at www.compchemhighlights.org (a wonderful overlay journal that tracks recent interesting articles). The molecularspace project more formally is called “The Harvard Clean Energy Project: Large-scale computational screening and design of organic photovoltaics on the world community grid“. It reminds of a 2005 project by Peter Murray-Rust et al at the same sort of concept[cite]10.1007/s00894-005-0278-1[/cite] (the World-Wide-Molecular-Matrix, or WWMM[cite]10.1186/1758-2946-3-42[/cite]), although the new scale is certainly impressive. Here I report my initial experiences looking through molecularspace.org
Blogbooks, e-books and future proofing chemical diagrams.
Monday, October 31st, 2011Most of the chemical structure diagrams in this blog originate from Chemdraw, which seems to have been around since the dawn of personal computers! I have tended to use this program to produce JPG bitmaps for the blog, writing them out in 4x magnification, so that they can be scaled down for display whilst retaining some measure of higher resolution if needed for other purposes. These other purposes might be for e.g. the production of e-books (using Calibre), the interesting Blog(e)book format offered as a service by Feedfabrik, or display on mobile tablets where the touch-zoom metaphor to magnify works particularly well. But bitmap images are not really well future proofed for such new uses. Here I explore one solution to this issue.
Science publishers (and authors) please take note.
Monday, October 24th, 2011I have for perhaps the last 25 years been urging publishers to recognise how science publishing could and should change. My latest thoughts are published in an article entitled “The past, present and future of Scientific discourse” (DOI: 10.1186/1758-2946-3-46). Here I take two articles, one published 58 years ago and one published last year, and attempt to reinvent some aspects. You can see the result for yourself (since this journal is laudably open access, and you will not need a subscription). The article is part of a special issue, arising from a one day symposium held in January 2011 entitled “Visions of a Semantic Molecular Future” in celebration of Peter Murray-Rust’s contributions over that period (go read all 15 articles on that theme in fact!).
Mechanism of the reduction of a carboxylic acid by borane: revisited and revised.
Sunday, October 16th, 2011I asked a while back whether blogs could be considered a serious form of scholarly scientific communication (and so has Peter Murray-Rust more recently). A case for doing so might be my post of about a year ago, addressing why borane reduces a carboxylic acid, but not its ester, where I suggested a possible mechanism. Well, colleagues have raised some interesting questions, both on the blog itself and more silently by email to me. As a result, I have tried to address some of these questions, and accordingly my original scheme needs some revision! This sort of iterative process of getting to the truth with the help of the community (a kind of crowd-sourced chemistry) is where I feel blogs do have a genuine role to play.
Computers 1967-2011: a personal perspective. Part 1. 1967-1985.
Thursday, July 7th, 2011Computers and I go back a while (44 years to be precise), and it struck me (with some horror) that I have been around them for ~62% of the modern computing era (Babbage notwithstanding, ~1940 is normally taken as the start of the modern computing era). So indulge me whilst I record this perspective from the viewpoint of the computers I have used over this 62% of the computing era. (more…)