It's been a long time...
What has now woken Ursula up from her long "winter torpor" (not true hibernation, it seems) was a presentation in Cambridge by Phil Bradley, President of CILIP (the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals, and thus Aidan Baker's professional body). Phil describes himself as an "information specialist and Internet consultant" and I have been following him on Twitter for a couple of years now. As I have always maintained that writers and lecturers need to be expert users of the Internet (and Web 2.0 and social media) just as much as librarians, I duly disguised myself as a librarian and went along. And it was well worth my while!
The afternoon was divided into two parts: first Phil's presentation with questions and answers, and then two sets of discussion groups. I chose a session on Internet tools and one on networking, and when volunteer live bloggers were asked for I put my name forward. On the one occasion I've done this before, at the National Cancer Research Institute conference in Liverpool last year for the online oncology journal ecancer, it meant submitting two accounts of each day's presentations, one in mid-afternoon and the other generally approaching midnight. This time, I didn't even have the luxury of a few hours to put my thoughts together: I simply recorded them as the session proceeded, and the resulting words were recorded on the CILIP East of England blog, much as they had been written.
In the rest of this brief post, therefore, I will concentrate on Phil's own presentation. This was divided into two sections: first on CILIP and the role of the President, and then on the importance of social media for information professionals (a topic on which is is not only an expert but also something of an evangelist). In the first, he discussed the challenges and changes facing the library and information professions, and the way that CILIP's role has been changing with an increased focus on advocacy.
Phil started the second part of his presentation by defining social media as much wider than just "Facebook and Twitter", rather a whole new way of looking at the Internet: a transition from expert-generated content to user-generated content. People, rather than organisations, are now in control of what is posted, and organisations - or rather, the people in them - need to realise this and engage with this new world. It is certainly possible to opt out, but opting out has consequences. People are building their own authority as professionals using their social networks. He cited an example of an employee in the US who moved companies, taking his thousands of Twitter followers with him, and he managed to prove in law that those followers belonged to him, the individual, rather than his company. Some of the newest search engines will favour sites recommended by reputable people that the searcher engages with.
His final message was that the of the social Web is "chaos" and "anarchy" but that this provides an opportunity, rather than a threat, for librarians, who are some of the best placed people to act as guides. And lecturers and writers, perhaps?
Phil Bradley's website is worth a close look. It can be found here.
Sunday, 20 May 2012
Sunday, 16 October 2011
Of pandas and other genomes
So, it's already three weeks after the ostensible end of 23 Things Cambridge, I'm still only two-thirds of the way through the Things, and this is my first blog post for a month. I do still intend to look at a few more of the Things; for one reason or another, Prezi, data visualisation, Creative Commons and QR codes hold particular appeal. But I have always had another reason for starting this blog: if it's not too self-referential, to flag up some of my own science writing and similar activities. And where else for Ursula Small to start than with a bear - although not a particularly little one?
Since 1996 (almost pre-history in Web terms) I have had a regular column in The Biochemist, the membership magazine of the Biochemical Society. This was my first piece of regular science writing, and I will always be grateful to its then editor, Frank Burnet (now emeritus professor of science communication at the University of the West of England) for giving my fledgling second career such a flying start. In my column, The Cyberbiochemist, I aim to explain a topic or issue related in some way to computational biochemistry (or bioinformatics) in a way that is relevant and interesting to bench biochemists. Each issue has a theme, and very often, but not always, my column is related to that overall theme. In October 2011, to celebrate both the centenary of the Society and its opening an office in Beijing, that theme was "Biochemistry in China".
My contribution to this "China issue" was a survey of how bioinformatics has developed in China over the last few decades. And, like so many other technologies, that development has been meteorically upwards. The first Chinese bioinformatics research centre was set up in Beijing in 1996, the year I began my Cyberbiochemist column, but only fifteen years later the country boasts some of the fastest and most sophisticated genome sequencing technology in the world.
China does, however, still see itself as a scientific leader of the so-called Third World. It is the home of genetic sequencing projects and databases for its staple crop, rice, and the iconic giant panda. The panda's Latin name, Ailuropoda melanoleuca, means literally "black-and-white cat-foot" and its classification within the mammals was unclear until the advent of molecular genetics. Now, however, it is known to fit in the family Ursidae: the true bears.
Chinese molecular genetics, however, has proved itself in more important areas than just in solving a controversy over the naming of bears. A consortium including many Chinese scientists was responsible for sequencing the genome of the virus that caused the outbreak of SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) in 2003, and just last year a Chinese-led consortium rapidly analysed the genome of the exact bacterial strain that caused a deadly outbreak of food poisoning (remember the killer cucumber stories?) If, God forbid (and as only one example), avian influenza were to mutate into a highly infectious strain, I predict that Chinese scientists will play a crucial role in analysing and eventually controlling it.
You can read the whole article here (freely accessible). I would love to post the gorgeous photo of a seven-month-old panda cub that the editors used there, but it's not Creative Commons. And that, as I've said already, is for another post and another time.
Since 1996 (almost pre-history in Web terms) I have had a regular column in The Biochemist, the membership magazine of the Biochemical Society. This was my first piece of regular science writing, and I will always be grateful to its then editor, Frank Burnet (now emeritus professor of science communication at the University of the West of England) for giving my fledgling second career such a flying start. In my column, The Cyberbiochemist, I aim to explain a topic or issue related in some way to computational biochemistry (or bioinformatics) in a way that is relevant and interesting to bench biochemists. Each issue has a theme, and very often, but not always, my column is related to that overall theme. In October 2011, to celebrate both the centenary of the Society and its opening an office in Beijing, that theme was "Biochemistry in China".
My contribution to this "China issue" was a survey of how bioinformatics has developed in China over the last few decades. And, like so many other technologies, that development has been meteorically upwards. The first Chinese bioinformatics research centre was set up in Beijing in 1996, the year I began my Cyberbiochemist column, but only fifteen years later the country boasts some of the fastest and most sophisticated genome sequencing technology in the world.
China does, however, still see itself as a scientific leader of the so-called Third World. It is the home of genetic sequencing projects and databases for its staple crop, rice, and the iconic giant panda. The panda's Latin name, Ailuropoda melanoleuca, means literally "black-and-white cat-foot" and its classification within the mammals was unclear until the advent of molecular genetics. Now, however, it is known to fit in the family Ursidae: the true bears.
Chinese molecular genetics, however, has proved itself in more important areas than just in solving a controversy over the naming of bears. A consortium including many Chinese scientists was responsible for sequencing the genome of the virus that caused the outbreak of SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) in 2003, and just last year a Chinese-led consortium rapidly analysed the genome of the exact bacterial strain that caused a deadly outbreak of food poisoning (remember the killer cucumber stories?) If, God forbid (and as only one example), avian influenza were to mutate into a highly infectious strain, I predict that Chinese scientists will play a crucial role in analysing and eventually controlling it.
You can read the whole article here (freely accessible). I would love to post the gorgeous photo of a seven-month-old panda cub that the editors used there, but it's not Creative Commons. And that, as I've said already, is for another post and another time.
Monday, 19 September 2011
Thing 15: Linked In
Oh dear. I'm going to have to stop counting Cam 23.0 in weeks - I'm already over a month behind, and at this rate it may be Christmas before I finish. I hope that no one's going to throw me out of the party on Thursday...
But I have finally come to Linked In - getting on for a month after its fellow "Week 8" Thing, Facebook. I have had an account on Linked In for well over four years - much longer than my Facebook account, and, in fact, so long that I can't remember when I joined. But I've come to blog about it, rather than skipping to a less familiar Thing (or even Extra Thing) because I have finally got round to updating my profile with such relative basics as a photo and a link to my Twitter account. Perhaps this post should have been named "Procrastination".
When the 2010 version of 23 Things reached social networking sites, Aidan mentioned my observation that, of the three communities I consider myself at least a part-time member of, biotech professionals choose Linked In but science communicators and educationalists congregate on Twitter. I still have little idea why. To my eye, Linked In seems more slick and professional than Twitter (let alone Facebook), less inconsequential, but also, perhaps, a teeny bit duller. It is strictly a site for professional business, with most of the updates appearing on a Linked In timeline being new connections and job changes. And I have used it for a small number of pieces of real professional business. At one end of the scale, a comment on a Linked In group led me to be invited to give a careers talk - not big money or even little money, only expenses and canapes, but something I find rather fun. At the other, I spotted a contract as the in-house science writer for an immunology company, and was almost appointed only to part amicably after realising that the required commitment of a day a week in Oxford was just too much for me
If anyone were to ask my advice on how to get to grips with Linked In - and looking at my profile this is still rather unlikely - I would recommend a guy called Will Kintish. He is a small, unassuming ex-accountant, and one of the best networkers and trainers I have ever come across. His workshops can be fairly expensive (it is possible to find subsidised ones, and I was fortunate enough to attend one such earlier this year) but the combination of entertainment with useful, and memorable, networking tips may be well worth a substantial investment. And he is an evangelist for the value of social networking ("not just for kids") and for Linked In in particular. Check out his Linked In website - it's well worth a visit. I would suggest that you start with the four-minute video.
But I imagine that librarianship has more in common with communication and education than with biotech, but I may be wrong. If this hunch is correct, and my hunch about the three communities is correct (and these combine into a pretty big IF) then I would guess Twitter to be many librarians' network of choice. Is this true for you?
But I have finally come to Linked In - getting on for a month after its fellow "Week 8" Thing, Facebook. I have had an account on Linked In for well over four years - much longer than my Facebook account, and, in fact, so long that I can't remember when I joined. But I've come to blog about it, rather than skipping to a less familiar Thing (or even Extra Thing) because I have finally got round to updating my profile with such relative basics as a photo and a link to my Twitter account. Perhaps this post should have been named "Procrastination".
When the 2010 version of 23 Things reached social networking sites, Aidan mentioned my observation that, of the three communities I consider myself at least a part-time member of, biotech professionals choose Linked In but science communicators and educationalists congregate on Twitter. I still have little idea why. To my eye, Linked In seems more slick and professional than Twitter (let alone Facebook), less inconsequential, but also, perhaps, a teeny bit duller. It is strictly a site for professional business, with most of the updates appearing on a Linked In timeline being new connections and job changes. And I have used it for a small number of pieces of real professional business. At one end of the scale, a comment on a Linked In group led me to be invited to give a careers talk - not big money or even little money, only expenses and canapes, but something I find rather fun. At the other, I spotted a contract as the in-house science writer for an immunology company, and was almost appointed only to part amicably after realising that the required commitment of a day a week in Oxford was just too much for me
If anyone were to ask my advice on how to get to grips with Linked In - and looking at my profile this is still rather unlikely - I would recommend a guy called Will Kintish. He is a small, unassuming ex-accountant, and one of the best networkers and trainers I have ever come across. His workshops can be fairly expensive (it is possible to find subsidised ones, and I was fortunate enough to attend one such earlier this year) but the combination of entertainment with useful, and memorable, networking tips may be well worth a substantial investment. And he is an evangelist for the value of social networking ("not just for kids") and for Linked In in particular. Check out his Linked In website - it's well worth a visit. I would suggest that you start with the four-minute video.
But I imagine that librarianship has more in common with communication and education than with biotech, but I may be wrong. If this hunch is correct, and my hunch about the three communities is correct (and these combine into a pretty big IF) then I would guess Twitter to be many librarians' network of choice. Is this true for you?
Monday, 22 August 2011
Week 8, Thing 14: Facebook (and a race)
What can I say about Facebook, that hasn't already been said?
I have had an account there for about 3 1/2 years. I joined it well over a year before Twitter and I still use both more or less equally, but for different purposes. Facebook is very definitely my family-and-friends network. So, my CV (which ought to be online by now, but isn't, so I can't point to it here) gives my account details for Twitter and LinkedIn, but not for Facebook. And I post work-related stuff there rarely, and only when I reckon that it might be of general interest to at least some people who have no part in the biomedical, higher education or science communication communities.
Aidan, whose interest in Facebook has dwindled as his enthusiasm for Twitter has grown, posted in July 2010 that Facebook offers "play versions of things that thrive better in a full-sized version elsewhere". I can see the point of that, very clearly, but I can also see the point of play versions.
Take photography. I have one Facebook friend who is an enthusiastic and very able wildlife photographer. The majority of his photos of beasts have their home on his Flickr photostream; Facebook is where he keeps photos of his own wedding. Another keen photographer who is currently using the 365 Project to record a photo a day for a year, nevertheless mounts casual snaps taken at parties on Facebook. My own photography is very much of the "casual snap" variety, and I want my family and friends to see it; Facebook will do.
And sometimes Facebook does rather better than that. Does anyone else with accounts on both run "Facebook-Twitter races", just for fun? The idea is to pose the same query to both sites and see which comes up with the answer first. Today, I had just such a query. I'm going to a conference in Barcelona in September and find that I have a spare morning - no more - between arrival and the start of proceedings. I've never been to Barcelona before; what will I be able to see in that limited time? I posted the question on Facebook and Twitter, and waited. Facebook won hands down, with half a dozen useful suggestions within a few hours; my tweet sank without trace. Why? Well, perhaps because my Twitter network is still rather small, and quite a few of my followers are institutions. Perhaps because they had serious things on their minds (#Libya has been dominating my Twitter feed all day). Or perhaps because (so far) relatively few of my followers are librarians. Any ideas?
I have had an account there for about 3 1/2 years. I joined it well over a year before Twitter and I still use both more or less equally, but for different purposes. Facebook is very definitely my family-and-friends network. So, my CV (which ought to be online by now, but isn't, so I can't point to it here) gives my account details for Twitter and LinkedIn, but not for Facebook. And I post work-related stuff there rarely, and only when I reckon that it might be of general interest to at least some people who have no part in the biomedical, higher education or science communication communities.
Aidan, whose interest in Facebook has dwindled as his enthusiasm for Twitter has grown, posted in July 2010 that Facebook offers "play versions of things that thrive better in a full-sized version elsewhere". I can see the point of that, very clearly, but I can also see the point of play versions.
Take photography. I have one Facebook friend who is an enthusiastic and very able wildlife photographer. The majority of his photos of beasts have their home on his Flickr photostream; Facebook is where he keeps photos of his own wedding. Another keen photographer who is currently using the 365 Project to record a photo a day for a year, nevertheless mounts casual snaps taken at parties on Facebook. My own photography is very much of the "casual snap" variety, and I want my family and friends to see it; Facebook will do.
And sometimes Facebook does rather better than that. Does anyone else with accounts on both run "Facebook-Twitter races", just for fun? The idea is to pose the same query to both sites and see which comes up with the answer first. Today, I had just such a query. I'm going to a conference in Barcelona in September and find that I have a spare morning - no more - between arrival and the start of proceedings. I've never been to Barcelona before; what will I be able to see in that limited time? I posted the question on Facebook and Twitter, and waited. Facebook won hands down, with half a dozen useful suggestions within a few hours; my tweet sank without trace. Why? Well, perhaps because my Twitter network is still rather small, and quite a few of my followers are institutions. Perhaps because they had serious things on their minds (#Libya has been dominating my Twitter feed all day). Or perhaps because (so far) relatively few of my followers are librarians. Any ideas?
Monday, 15 August 2011
Week 7, Thing 12: Bookmarking tools (Delicious)
I start this post with a confession. I had a Delicious account before, once.
The least part-time, and longest-lived, of my several part-time jobs is as a lecturer at Birkbeck College, where I teach on an Internet based distance learning MSc course in structural biology. (You don't need to know anything about structural biology to understand this post - essentially it involves the techniques that are used to discover the three-dimensional structures of proteins and other molecules and to understand how these relate to their biological function.)
A random(-ish) protein structure
This one's myoglobin, found in red blood cells, and the first protein structure to be solved.
In 1958.
Back in 2007, I was awarded a small grant from London University's Centre for Distance Education to explore introducing various Web 2.0 based tools into that course. Some of the tools I tried worked very well. I still maintain the course blog, which manages a rather higher hit rate than this one. But Delicious... no. I set up an account, shared it with the students, and asked them to save bookmarks of structural biology research sites they liked (there are lots to choose from... like this one...) But I don't think a single link was saved. Maybe I should have set it as an assessed exercise.
Maybe, also, I should have set up my own Delicious account before I started using it in teaching. At that time, I couldn't think of anything I, personally, would want to do with delicious (or any other social bookmarking tool) that I couldn't do with my browser's memory and Google. I'm still not quite sure. Two things, however, have encouraged me to give this another go. The first, obviously enough, is this course. The second is reading David Weinberger's excellent book Everything is Miscellaneous, or "the power of the new digital disorder". Published in 2007, this book says nothing about Facebook or Twitter at all, but it allots five index entries, some multi-page, to the power of Delicious. The site's creator, Joshua Schachter, is quoted there as describing it as an "amplification system for your memory of websites".
So, four years and (at least) one change of ownership for Delicious later, I now have an account again. And, so far, about a dozen bookmarks with associated tags. My user name is the same as my Twitter username: Clare_Sansom.
The least part-time, and longest-lived, of my several part-time jobs is as a lecturer at Birkbeck College, where I teach on an Internet based distance learning MSc course in structural biology. (You don't need to know anything about structural biology to understand this post - essentially it involves the techniques that are used to discover the three-dimensional structures of proteins and other molecules and to understand how these relate to their biological function.)
A random(-ish) protein structure
This one's myoglobin, found in red blood cells, and the first protein structure to be solved.
In 1958.
Back in 2007, I was awarded a small grant from London University's Centre for Distance Education to explore introducing various Web 2.0 based tools into that course. Some of the tools I tried worked very well. I still maintain the course blog, which manages a rather higher hit rate than this one. But Delicious... no. I set up an account, shared it with the students, and asked them to save bookmarks of structural biology research sites they liked (there are lots to choose from... like this one...) But I don't think a single link was saved. Maybe I should have set it as an assessed exercise.
Maybe, also, I should have set up my own Delicious account before I started using it in teaching. At that time, I couldn't think of anything I, personally, would want to do with delicious (or any other social bookmarking tool) that I couldn't do with my browser's memory and Google. I'm still not quite sure. Two things, however, have encouraged me to give this another go. The first, obviously enough, is this course. The second is reading David Weinberger's excellent book Everything is Miscellaneous, or "the power of the new digital disorder". Published in 2007, this book says nothing about Facebook or Twitter at all, but it allots five index entries, some multi-page, to the power of Delicious. The site's creator, Joshua Schachter, is quoted there as describing it as an "amplification system for your memory of websites".
So, four years and (at least) one change of ownership for Delicious later, I now have an account again. And, so far, about a dozen bookmarks with associated tags. My user name is the same as my Twitter username: Clare_Sansom.
A few bookmarks
I'm still not sure exactly what I will come to use Delicious for, or how much use it will be to me in my professional life, but I'm finding it rather fun to explore.
Monday, 25 July 2011
Pre-Reflection: Catching Up
I seem to have got way behind with Cam 23 already - here we are in Week 6, and here I am still climbing out of the foothills of Week 3. But, fortunately, I have a fair amount of experience of the Things that we have covered since then. So I have decided just to write about my experiences with these. I'd be interested to know if they ring any bells with others.
Week Four was Doodle, to fix appointments, and Google Calendar, to keep track of them once fixed. I have been using both these for a couple of years now, and I am pretty well pleased with both. Like Aidan (as he explains in a post from June 2010) the first online calendar I used was the late and, initially, bitterly lamented Mosuki. When Mosuki closed down in April last year I chose Google reluctantly, because "everyone else" had already done so (starting with my brother-in-law). Since then, however, I have come to appreciate Google Calendar's many virtues, even when compared to my memories of Mosuki. Besides the fact that each calendar has its colour, and the site's very ubiquity [yes, I know, the same excuse I use for staying with Windows when I could move to Linux or save up for a Mac] I particularly value the fact that, when a calendar is viewed a month at a time, each day's entries appear chronologically.
Aidan pointed this out last year, but let me explain why that matters so much to me. Ever since I was a raw post-doc (when men were real men and disks were 5.25" wide) I have printed out monthly schedules to go on my (later our) and on my parents' kitchen walls. These started off in Microsoft Outlook, which worked quite well. When I tried to migrate to Mosuki, however, I found that each day's items appeared in the order they were posted, which led to oddities such as the train home from a meeting appearing before the meeting itself. Google Calendar's order is more logical, and that alone has made it more useful.
I've been using Doodle for a couple of years, too. The only similar tool I've tried is Meet-o-matic, which does much the same thing. I greatly prefer Doodle, mostly because it lets me see others' responses before posting. Whether you are trying to arrange a meeting (when participants will congregate towards the most popular slots) or to fill spaces on a rota (when the reverse applies), making people post blind feels very second best.
I did say that, if I came across a week where I knew the Things well, I would jump straight in to the Extra Thing. In Week 4, however, the Extra Thing was the Cambridge Libraries Widget, and I can't think what I, as a non-Cambridge non-librarian, might use it for. ["So what are you doing on this course, impostor!?" The explanation is here]
Onwards to Week 5, and we come first to Google Docs, which I have used to share documents with myself (on different computers), with family, and with external collaborators on a couple of professional projects. (The most recent of these has been a project to review and catalogue open educational resources for bioscience, which I might blog about separately some time.) This tool is now a near-invaluable part of my professional life, but I've only used it for the standard docs, spreadsheets and presentations so far. I'm thinking of an excuse to try out creating a form.
I've not tried PushNote and EndNote yet, so I'll leave them - along with my reflections on the course so far - for a separate post. But at least I've caught up a bit...
Week Four was Doodle, to fix appointments, and Google Calendar, to keep track of them once fixed. I have been using both these for a couple of years now, and I am pretty well pleased with both. Like Aidan (as he explains in a post from June 2010) the first online calendar I used was the late and, initially, bitterly lamented Mosuki. When Mosuki closed down in April last year I chose Google reluctantly, because "everyone else" had already done so (starting with my brother-in-law). Since then, however, I have come to appreciate Google Calendar's many virtues, even when compared to my memories of Mosuki. Besides the fact that each calendar has its colour, and the site's very ubiquity [yes, I know, the same excuse I use for staying with Windows when I could move to Linux or save up for a Mac] I particularly value the fact that, when a calendar is viewed a month at a time, each day's entries appear chronologically.
Aidan pointed this out last year, but let me explain why that matters so much to me. Ever since I was a raw post-doc (when men were real men and disks were 5.25" wide) I have printed out monthly schedules to go on my (later our) and on my parents' kitchen walls. These started off in Microsoft Outlook, which worked quite well. When I tried to migrate to Mosuki, however, I found that each day's items appeared in the order they were posted, which led to oddities such as the train home from a meeting appearing before the meeting itself. Google Calendar's order is more logical, and that alone has made it more useful.
I've been using Doodle for a couple of years, too. The only similar tool I've tried is Meet-o-matic, which does much the same thing. I greatly prefer Doodle, mostly because it lets me see others' responses before posting. Whether you are trying to arrange a meeting (when participants will congregate towards the most popular slots) or to fill spaces on a rota (when the reverse applies), making people post blind feels very second best.
I did say that, if I came across a week where I knew the Things well, I would jump straight in to the Extra Thing. In Week 4, however, the Extra Thing was the Cambridge Libraries Widget, and I can't think what I, as a non-Cambridge non-librarian, might use it for. ["So what are you doing on this course, impostor!?" The explanation is here]
Onwards to Week 5, and we come first to Google Docs, which I have used to share documents with myself (on different computers), with family, and with external collaborators on a couple of professional projects. (The most recent of these has been a project to review and catalogue open educational resources for bioscience, which I might blog about separately some time.) This tool is now a near-invaluable part of my professional life, but I've only used it for the standard docs, spreadsheets and presentations so far. I'm thinking of an excuse to try out creating a form.
I've not tried PushNote and EndNote yet, so I'll leave them - along with my reflections on the course so far - for a separate post. But at least I've caught up a bit...
Sunday, 17 July 2011
Thing 5: Screenshots
For quite a few years, I've been using a rather old, cut-down, non-licensed (cut-down because it's non-licensed) version of Corel Paint Shop Pro to take screen shots. This has worked fine, but it's occurred to me from time to time that it would be good to find a completely open source equivalent. I was therefore very pleased to come (eventually) to Thing 5, and find LightShot recommended there.
I found it easy enough to install as an add-on to Firefox although I do have to confess that I wasted a good thirty seconds looking in the wrong part of the screen for the purple feather.
And so, I now have a new toy. What to do with it? Well, I could do with livening up my blog with an image or two. An image, perhaps, of a little bear... Googling "little bear", however, proved embarrassing. A whole page of primary-school cartoon images, all copyright. "Bear cub" was rather more promising:
A whole screenfull of little bears
I found it easy enough to install as an add-on to Firefox although I do have to confess that I wasted a good thirty seconds looking in the wrong part of the screen for the purple feather.
And so, I now have a new toy. What to do with it? Well, I could do with livening up my blog with an image or two. An image, perhaps, of a little bear... Googling "little bear", however, proved embarrassing. A whole page of primary-school cartoon images, all copyright. "Bear cub" was rather more promising:
A whole screenfull of little bearsBut wait. I'm no wildlife photographer, and each one of those cute images is almost certainly copyrighted to someone who is. What I want - no, what I need - is an image that is firmly in the public domain. Wikimedia Commons has a few, labelled, in a most un-primary-school-like manner, as "Category: Ursidae (juvenile)".
The one I like is one up a tree. No author name is given, and it is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 3.0 Unported license and a GNU Free Documentation License. You can see the result on the left-hand side of my top page. I think it looks OK; if anyone reading this and who knows more about copyright (and copyleft) than I do suggests that I take it down, I will.
The constellation Ursa minor (Creative Commons image by BorgQueen)
The one I like is one up a tree. No author name is given, and it is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 3.0 Unported license and a GNU Free Documentation License. You can see the result on the left-hand side of my top page. I think it looks OK; if anyone reading this and who knows more about copyright (and copyleft) than I do suggests that I take it down, I will.
The constellation Ursa minor (Creative Commons image by BorgQueen)Had I stuck to my first degree subject of Physics, I might well have landed up with an image like this one
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