605 private links
African Journals OnLine (AJOL) is the world's largest and preeminent platform of African-published scholarly journals. AJOL is a Non-Profit Organisation that (since 1998) works to increase global & continental online access, awareness, quality & use of African-published, peer-reviewed research.
Via thinkchecksubmit
This is a nice quote by Hadley Wickham:
I hope that more people continue to express visualizations in a programming language, rather than a point and click tool. That’s my hope for the next 20 years, that it becomes a given that code is the language of data science and data visualization.
And a nice interview overall.
Too bad it is now mostly obscured behind Medium's paywall.
From City University of New York, a paper on a bit of the physics relevant to the pandemic - specifically the issue of aerosolized droplets and air circulation in rooms.
The conclusion is that, based on common convection patterns, the 2 meter separation rule is not enough in the absence of a properly designed air filtration system.
Via nanoscale views
For EU citizens, you can also opt to disable all customised ads from companies using Google Ad services at youronlinechoices.com
Although I am not sure what effect this has when not logged in to Google.
(The site youronlinechoices.com is run by the European Interactive Digital Advertising Alliance.)
Fraidycat is a desktop app or browser extension for Firefox or Chrome. You can use it to follow people (hundreds) on whatever platform they choose - Twitter, a blog, YouTube, Instagram or even on a public TiddlyWiki.
So it's like a feed reader, and if you use your browser sync functionality, it will sync between your devices. Really worth trying out this concept, especially if you don't want to setup your own web-based feed reader. The built-in (and increasing) support for many non-RSS sources is also nice.
In light of current events, here's an excellent primer on the chemistry of soap.
Also available via my wallabag
Browser game.
Landsat images comparing greater Cairo (particularly the eastern half) from 1984 and 2019.
Lots of good references.
Discusses entropy as a measure of password strength, and includes two useful tables.
For example, a 30-character password using alphanumeric characters (mixing both small- and upper-case letters) achieves around 160 bits of entropy.
The article also includes guidelines for strong passwords, reproduced below:
- Use a minimum password length of 10 or more characters if permitted.
- Include lowercase and uppercase alphabetic characters, numbers and symbols if permitted.
- Generate passwords randomly where feasible.
- Avoid using the same password twice (e.g., across multiple user accounts and/or software systems).
- Avoid character repetition, keyboard patterns, dictionary words, letter or number sequences.
- Avoid using information that is or might become publicly associated with the user or the account, such as username, ancestors' names or dates.
- Avoid using information that the user's colleagues and/or acquaintances might know to be associated with the user, such as relative or pet names, romantic links (current or past) and biographical information (e.g., ID numbers, ancestors' names or dates)..
- Do not use passwords which consist wholly of any simple combination of the aforementioned weak components.
- Universitets- och högskolerådets svensk-engelska och engelsk-svenska ordbok
- KTH:s svensk-engelska ordbok, även som PDF
- Ordlista över vanliga termer (svenska till engelska), (engelska till svenska), Stockholms universitet
- Utrikes namnbok, Utrikesdepartementet
Related links
Created as a fun way to discover interesting color combinations. Palettes are hand-selected from the Twitter bot @colorschemez. The feed randomly generates color combinations as well as their descriptions, with each color being matched with an adjective from a list of over 20,000 words.
Created by Adam Fuhrer.
Level-headed 42 minute video by Tom Scott on the subject of copyright and how it works today.
Excellent piece by Ed Yong in the Atlantic.
FIFA has released the 2018 FIFA World Cup Russia™ Official Film.
1h and 20m down memory lane ;-)
https://wallabag.chepec.se/share/5e76e150d26128.44547100
A list based off of the above article, with some more I have learnt of from different sources:
- Stencila: An open source office suite for reproducible research.
- Dat project: A protocol for researcher-centric data sharing.
- JOSS: The Journal of Open Source Software (paper review as Github issues!).
- Open Citations: Open bibliographic and citation data.
- Plaudit: A browser extension that enables verified (via ORCID) endorsements of publications. A way to let other researchers know what you think is good science.
- PubPub: Collaborative writing and publishing.
- ReScience: A journal for replicated computational research.
- FlashPub: Fast micropublications.
- ReimagineReview: A whole database of peer review innovations!
- Dokieli: Decentralized articles and annotations, using linked data.
- Scite.ai: Machine learning for determining research quality.
- Scholarcy: Automatic summarisation of papers.
- BMJ Labs' mega list: Projects in scientific publishing, all of them!
- unpaywall integrations (unpaywall is one of several projects run by OurResearch).
Via kottke.org which has a nice write-up of the video.
How interconnections between national grids facilitate more renewable energy generation capacity.
Good explanation of exponential growth and how it relates to health-care capacity in light of the current SARS-CoV-2 virus outbreak.
Of course, virus transmission is in fact logistic, not exponential, but this video by Sharafestien nonetheless does a good job of driving home the main point: why it is prudent for everyone to take precautions.
Ministries have signed MoU with Saudi energy company ACWA Power.
Currently there are 76 seawater desalination plants in Egypt, that supply 831,690 cubic metres per day. The plan is to build 67 more plants, in the governorates of Matrouh, Red Sea, North and South Sinai, Ismailiyah and Suez.
https://smartwatermagazine.com/news/smart-water-magazine/egypt-looking-25-bn-finance-17-desalination-plants
All those existing plants are probably not solar-powered, right?
Plans for new, solar-powered ones: https://www.globalconstructionreview.com/egypt-plans-desalination-plants-worth-2-5bn-over-next-five-years/