Really free chemistry books #2: @bookboon

About a year ago I wrote about free chemistry books. No, not illegal copied books, but really free books (though, not necessarily Open). Actually, the books I discussed last year, those are out of copyright, as they are old. But, just today I ran into an advertisement for free books by bookboon.com (twitter:bookboon), and these are new books. I have not browsed them yet, but you can download textbook PDFs from these sections: biology, chemistry, chemical engineering, math, nanotechnology, and several more. I do not know about the quality of these books yet, and they author names do not immediately ring a bell. Does anyone have experience with these books?

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The Answer to: Are these organic molecules the same?

Ten days ago I asked my readers if two molecules were the same or not. I guessed they were not, when I was asked Are these organic molecules the same? The people who replied to my post were quite convinced they were, and Peter gave the context of the pub quiz: assumptions may not be correct.

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Cb: New Blogs #14

Just a few new blogs since #13 in July :

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Oscar text mining in Taverna

One of the goals of my project in Cambridge is to make Oscar available as Taverna plugin (source code, Hudson build). I have progressed somewhat, but still struggling with getting the update site working. The plugin actually installs into Taverna 2.2.0, but the activities do not show up. While this is work in progress, and the other project goal is refactoring, a current demo workflow looks like:

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Royce Murray and Caveat Emptor

Derek’s blog pointed me to an editorial by Royce Murray Science Blogs and Caveat Emptor (doi:10.1021/ac102628p). He is warning us, science scholars, for blogs. He is accusing bloggers for not being scholarly, not checking facts etc.

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Working on Oscar for three months

As Peter announced in his blog, and I tweeted earlier, I have started as postdoctoral research associate in Peter’s group at the University of Cambridge, to work the next three months on Oscar, a chemical text mining tool. My tasks will focus on programmatical plumbing instead of method development, and I am aiming at integration with CDK-Taverna (see doi:10.1186/1471-2105-11-159, and which is currently being ported to Taverna 2.2 by Andreas). Sam and Lezan having been working on the refactoring as well, and will help me out with the gory details of the current code.

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Are these organic molecules the same?

Cambridge pubs are not just good for the (Danish) beer, but also for the pub quizzes. Peter asked if the below molecules are the same. I did not think so, but… what do you think? He also asked if they are chiral. We got until tomorrow 20:00 BST.

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