» An efficient journal The Occasional Pamphlet.
Excellent text on the “business model” for an open-access scientific journal. It shows how it may be possible to publish a journal with a $10 tag per page, against the “$5.000 average revenue that scholarly publishers receive.”
A must read. A must think. And certainly something useful to be learned for the “CITAR Journal“.
Thanks to George Tzanetakis for pointing this text out following a discussion on the Marsyas development/user mailing lists about my previous post on this blog on “If you want reproducible science, the software needs to be open source“.
And another interesting article, titled “Open access publishing should not favour those with deep pockets“, with a proposal on how to run an Open Access Journal without payments from readers nor authors.
Nature Editorial: If you want reproducible science, the software needs to be open source.
I couldn’t agree more with this idea of open source as mandatory for reproducible science.
:: Music Recommendation Datasets ::.
One more dataset for MIR and Music Recommendation, compiled by Oscar Celma, and based around Last.fm data and APIs.
And some more detailed info here.
Becoming an Accidental Project Manager.
Really nice article (or set of articles) with some basic info on how to manage a project.
LaTeX: Fixing Wrong Figure Numbers | Terminally Incoherent.
I can’t tell how much time I’ve lost dealing with this freaking (in lack of better term) problem in LaTeX. Stupid solution for a stupid problem, but hey… it has a solution 
Whenever you use figures, always (and I mean ALWAYS EVER FOREVER ALWAYS) put\caption first, and \label second like this:
\begin{figure}[htp]
\centering
\includegraphics{image.eps}
\caption{Some Image}
\label{fig:some-image}
\end{figure}
Just blogging about it for my future reference.
(Source: xkcd)
And a wikipedia entry that tries to explain the title of this post can be found here.
A layman description of this usual confusion can be found here.
Bill Buxton Shows Us His Favorite Tech | Show Us Your Tech | Channel 9.
Really nice interview with Bill Buxton, during CHI2011 conference, where he exhibited his impressive collection of gadgets that range from watches, to all sorts of joysticks and hand held devices.
By the way, Microsoft Research and Bill Buxton are compiling this impressive and valuable collection on a website that is a mandatory study reference for anyone studying/working on HCI, Interfaces and Interaction. The site includes detailed photos, descriptions and comments by Bill himself and videos of the working user interfaces and how some of the devices operate are being uploaded into the website.
So, before you dare to present any “novel” interface/interaction design/HCI solution to the world, just follow Bill’s advice and check first if someone else already proposed that same approach some years ago (and save yourself from some embarrassment ).
A great article about George Tzanetakis‘ 10 year work on MIR and software development: A Look at George Tzanetakis’ Innovations in Music Classification.
I feel really lucky (and proud) to know George since the early days of Marsyas (around 2003) and then to actually meet him in person here in Portugal some time later.
I ended up doing 3 research interships under his supervision at the University of Victoria, BC, Canada, during my PhD, and we currently keep a close collaboration in the scope of Marsyas and a R&D project on the topic of CASA (Computational Auditory Scene Analysis).
Congratulations George! And keep up with the good work! 
The guys at Echnest just realease their Echoprint – Open source music identification service. Looks really neat. There’s even an iOS app example here.
Last.FM also recently provided a audio fingerprinting API. More about this here.
So now it’s really simple to integrate audio fingerprinting in opensource apps. Looking forward to try it out soon.
