The ChemConnector Blog by Antony Williams

I’ve previously blogged about the book chapter I co-authored for a book about Beautiful Data. The book chapter is now available online at Scribd after being uploaded by Jean-Claude Bradley. Feel free to go take a gander.

I was recently privileged to co-author a book chapter entitled “Beautifying Data in the Real World” in a book called Beautiful Data, available shortly from O’Reilly. The list of authors is likely known to readers interested in Open Data and Open Notebook Science: Jean-Claude Bradley, Rajarshi Guha, Andrew Lang, Pierre Lindenbaum, Cameron Neylon, Egon Willighagen and myself.

This was a great example of “distant collaboration”. We didn’t get on the phone to talk about the manuscript. We didn’t connect via a conferencing system. Cameron brought us together as a group of interested individuals, interested in contributing to a chapter regarding the work we’d done together on crowdsourced solubility measurements and handling of the data. We collaborated via a wiki with a few emails here and there. I believe the result speaks for itself. It’s an excellent article regarding “Beautifying Data in the Real World”.

The book can be pre-ordered here. I’ve browsed through some of the articles already and I don’t think you’ll be disappointed by the contents of the book. The content is diverse “Join 39 contributors as they explain how they developed simple and elegant solutions on projects ranging from the Mars lander to a Radiohead video.”.

As I recall last Christmas I was finishing up a chapter in a book that is now on the market and called Chemical Information Mining. What’s amazing is that I just found that the first 21 pages are ALREADY on Google Books. I could’ve seen the cover there before waiting to receive a copy…hell I could’ve read UP to my Chapter…that’s where it stops.

The product description on Amazon is: “This book focuses on information extraction issues, highlights available solutions, and underscores the value of these solutions to academic and commercial scientists. After introducing the drivers behind chemical text mining, it discusses chemical semantics. The contributors describe the tools that identify and convert chemical names and images to structure-searchable information. They also explain natural language processing, name entity recognition concepts, and semantic web technologies. Following a section on current trends in the field, the book looks at where information mining approaches fit into the research needs within the life sciences.”

I’m rather proud of the contribution Andrey Yerin and I made to the book. I worked with Andrey while I was at ACD/Labs and learned all about nomenclature from him. He’s one of the nicest, most competent and focused specialists in the domain of systematic nomenclature in the world. The book chapter contents are listed below. Makes for good Xmas reading if you care about that type of thing…

I’ve reviewed the galley proofs for our book chapter in a future book. The chapter is entitled “Automated Identification and Conversion of Chemical Names to Structure Searchable Information” and was co-authored with my friend Andrey Yerin, the project manager for nomenclature products at ACD/Labs. The book is going to be an excellent contribution to this domain and the list of contributing authors includes some of the leaders in this area. I’ll continue to post informationas the book gets close to press. It is going to be a highly recommended volume in my opinion.

I seem to be surrounded by people who have developed “autoimmune diseases” (ID) over the past few years. These are commonly people around the age of 40 and are therefore my peer group. It is hard to watch my friends. and over the past few years, members of my immediate family, be severely debilitated by some form of ID whether it’s gastrointestinal in nature, thyroid function or some form of multiple chemical sensitivity.

A close personal friend of mine recently gifted me with a copy of a book called “The Autoimmune Epidemic: Bodies Gone Haywire in a World Out of Balance–and the Cutting-Edge Science that Promises Hope” and I am close to finishing it. I think the title speaks for itself. With an increasing number of “westerners” being diagnosed with autoimmune diseases, and numbers far exceeding thos with cancer, the book makes for interesting, and I would say for me personally, quite shocking reading. As a father of young children I am concerned now for what they will encounter as challenges to their bodies moving forward. A recommended read for everyone…not just scientists.