Posts tagged with references
“Okay. I think I’ve got a lead on the noise we’ve been troubleshooting. The noise is coming from a broadcast RF source between 2200 and 2500 MHz. Let’s check with the FCC and see what is allocated to that spectrum to get an idea of where this interference could be coming from.”
“Right.”
Here’s the full FCC allocation map– or at least a snapshot from 2011.
Oldest Reading hard copy tables of content. Pleasent, but impractical.
Older Checking out the updates for Index Medicus. Totally reasonable. In 1988.
Old Getting eTOCs emailed to you. Welcome to the year 2000.
Middle-aged Subscribing to RSS feeds for journals. Okay, but still needs filtering.
Present Automated, keyword-based filtering of RSS feeds. Better.
E.g., here are the ones for Nature journals (including the AOPs) (link)
And for Science (link).
It doesn’t take much time to find feeds for the top 20 journals in your field. Feed links shouldn’t change frequently, but they can change.
This is an early (2005) work in the field of filtering RSS feeds from journals: BaRF (Bioinformatics aggregated RSS feeds) is a tool for keeping up with bioinformatics articles across multiple journals’ RSS feeds.
Presently, there are a bunch of different ways to filter RSS feeds. Fascinatingly, they’re all inadequate. So, although this is a good approach, I’m not sure it’s worth the time to set up and maintain just yet.
At any rate, if you want to take a stab at it, here are some of the services to check out. Feed Sifter, Scraper, Superfeedr, Feed Rinse. To be honest, none of these worked completely for me. I’ve tried others as well, including the powerful Yahoo Pipes (too buggy). If you have a system worked out that you’d like to share, please let us know.
It’s also possible to set up PubMed search result updates. But there can be weeks between when an article is put online and when PubMed picks it up, so this isn’t ideal. However, it covers all of the journals that PubMed indexes, so it can bring papers to your attention that might have otherwise fallen through the cracks of your RSS feeds.
Services like Hubmed and Mendeley are trying to serve this need from a different angle, but at present don’t offer the immediacy of an RSS feed of AOPs.
The Society for Neuroscience (SfN) have compiled and are curating a large collection of online resources for neuroscience teaching. It’s called ERIN (Educational Resources in Neuroscience).
Some examples:
A Nernst-Goldman equation simulator. (link)
An animation discussing the structure and function of the cochlea. (link)
An interactive tutorial on nuclear receptor signalling. (link)
Oliver Kim puts out a nice magazine called Microbehunter. It’s a great resource for microscope nerds. I’ve listed a few blog articles below, but actually, the full PDF issues are where most of the meat is. Lots of in depth, well-written articles on the history of microscope technology, and, of course, microbes. Highly recommended.
Connecting a camera to a microscope (very thorough)
Cover glass thickness and resolution
Setting up a home lab for microscopy
Numberfactory is a very useful, clean reference site. Unit conversions, formulas, bolts, nuts, screws, and more.
More…
Bolt sizes
As previously noted, homemade cables are to be avoided. However, stock cables are not always up to spec. For example, if one wants to drive stepper motors using a 9-pin serial cable, are the individual conductors able to carry the 1 A of current required? What about high frequencies over repurposed speaker cables?
The chart above (larger version) should help you decide what gauge of wire to look for in a particular application. Note that these are relatively conservative engineering specs, so in practice you can get away with underspec’ing a bit.
The maximum current is the current that, if sustained, won’t result in too much heating. The maximum frequency is the signal frequency at which there is 100% skin depth– i.e., the entire cross section of the wire is carrying the signal. At frequencies higher than this, the effective resistance of the wire increases.
To answer to the above questions: Yes, a 9-pin serial cable will work fine for driving steppers if the duty cycle is low (i.e., the stepper motors are typically not moving). Get a heavier guage if you can (e.g., 20 or 22 AWG), but since the currents are fairly brief the wires won’t heat up much even if you underspec them. However, with high frequencies through speaker cables, there might be problems. Even with 1 MHz signals through 18 AWG wire, there will be significant signal degredation.
Recently I needed a 3.5 mm TRS (tip-ring-sleeve, aka 3-conductor) phono cable that would carry fairly high sustained currents. Typically these types of cables are used to plug iPods and similar devices into the Aux inputs of car and home stereos. In that application, fairly light gauge wire is ideal since the currents are small. However, I was able to find a heavier gauge cable assembly from an audiophile shop.
Data source file (tab-delimited text, note that gauges 00, 000, 0000 are recorded as -1, -2, -3, to get the chart to plot properly)
via
This site has a nice big list of software for visual psychophysics. It’s very extensive and includes free as well as commercial solutions: visual stimuli, analysis, teaching, hardware, and more.
On the topic of MATLAB learning materials (covered previously here and lots more MATLAB stuff here), MIT has some online courses freely available. Here’s an “aggressively gentle” intro to MATLAB, and some more MATLAB resources. (Hat tip to MH)
Also here’s a link from an older post on xcorr (Patrick Mineault’s excellent blog). This course webpage has a bunch of examples in MATLAB code. They’re great for simultaneously learning MATLAB and visual neuroscience.
Within the PubMed architecture, there are a lot of resources, visible on the pulldown list next to the search field. If you browse down a bit, you’ll see “Books”. (direct link)
These are HTML-formatted versions of textbooks, conference reports, and other items of scientific literature outside the realm of journal articles. Unlike university journal subscriptions, they’re available anywhere like PubMed itself.
Some example items of note:
In Vivo Optical Imaging of Brain Function, 2nd edition Ron D Frostig, ed.
Electrochemical Methods for Neuroscience Adrian C Michael and Laura M Borland, eds.
Methods for Neural Ensemble Recordings, 2nd edition Miguel AL Nicolelis, ed.
BTW, did you know that the NCBI software framework is online and documented? The API for BLAST, database interfaces for PubMed, etc. You can interface your own code will all of the resources at NCBI. Nice. (link)
Hat tip to BC.
When Karl Deisseroth started publishing his work on Channelrhodopsin-2, he set up a website to share the resources, including plasmid information, protocols for expression systems, and hardware details. His site, optogenetics.org, is an excellent source. However, it is focused on Deisseroth lab information.
For a more broadly focused resource, Josh Siegle (Matt Wilson lab, MIT) and others have consolidated a great deal of information in wiki format at OpenOptogenetics.org. The wiki format is ideal for this sort of information since it is changing all the time, and the relevant personnel changes over time as well.
There’s already a good amount of information on the site, but there are several opportunities to contribute and fill in the gaps as well. I encourage you to pitch in.