Wednesday, September 01, 2004

New ERIC web site. Today marks the launch of the new ERIC (Education Resources Information Center) web site. By my reckoning, ERIC is the world's oldest open-access site, tied with Medline. Coming to ERIC on October 1: "more than 107,000 full-text non-journal documents (issued 1993-2004), previously available through fee-based services only, will be available for free." [Open Access News] 3:20:53 PM      .

Mothering style and methylation. Frequent licking and grooming by rat mothers increases the number of hippocampal glucocorticoid receptors in their pups, leading to tighter regulation of stress hormone levels. A study in this issue shows that this treatment alters DNA methylation of the glucocorticoid receptor gene and acetylation of histones early in life, providing a mechanism for these permanent changes in stress responses. [Nature Neuroscience] 9:23:22 AM      Google It!.

Information routing. In last week's column, I mentioned del.icio.us, Joshua Schachter's "social bookmarking" service. Since then, I've explored the service more deeply in a series of blog entries. Using del.icio.us, I'm now able to process information in dramatically more efficient ways. ... In a March 2003 column, I wrote about the challenges of doing publish/subscribe at Internet scale. David Rosenblum, who was then CTO of messaging startup PreCache, had described to me an optimization procedure he called "filter merging." The architecture of del.icio.us lends itself to just that kind of optimization. The combination of several trusted human filters, with respect to some topic of interest, yields a powerful merged filter. [Full story at InfoWorld.com] ... [Jon's Radio] 8:44:44 AM      Google It!.