Welcome to Things we read this week, a weekly post featuring articles from around the internet recommended by BMJ Labs.
Publishing
- Alice Meadows looks at Mixed Realities, Virtual Reality, and Augmented Reality in Scholarly Publishing in An Interview with Markus Kaindl and Martijn Roelandse on The Scholarly Kitchen.
- The New York Times launches a flash audio briefing and other voice stuff for Alexa
“We’re trying to create an engaging experience that feels more narratively driven, not just like someone reading some headlines for a few minutes.” - Kyle Chayka on How content-management systems will shape the future of media businesses big and small.
“CMSs are like digital printing presses: They determine how journalism gets published online. But unlike the printing press, CMSs also increasingly influence not just how stories look but how they are produced, discovered, read, and monetized.” - WordPress.com is launching a new toolkit, called Newspack, for small and mid-sized publishers to streamline their technical decisions — and make choices that add to the potential of finagling a business model. More here.
Open Data
- Viviane Callier writes about the Open Data Explosion in The Scientist (H/T: @ScholarlyChickn)
- SPARC report on the US Open, Public, Electronic and Necessary (OPEN) Government Data Act, a government-wide mandate requiring U.S. federal agencies to publish all non-sensitive government information – including federally-funded research – as open data.
- Ryan Regier on the Open Citations movement
Medicine
- Eric Topol on the convergence of human and artificial intelligence in medicine.
Technology
- John Thornhill talks to Vivienne Ming, a theoretical neuroscientist, entrepreneur and artificial intelligence guru about her work in trying to make technology work for the benefit of humans on the FT Tech Tonic podcast.
- The blockchain backlash begins, McKinsey on Blockchain’s Occam problem and its struggle to move projects out of Proof of Concept mode. We’re looking forward to what ALPSP have to say in their upcoming blockchain seminar.
- Screens might be as bad for mental health as… potatoes “In the latest issue of Nature Human Behavior, Przybylski and coauthor Amy Orben use a novel statistical method to show why scientists studying these colossal data sets have been getting such different results and why most of the associations researchers have found, positive and negative, are very small—and probably not worth freaking out about.”
