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13 February 2004

E-Bulletin Backscatter

Laboratory culture incubator wanted

Dear SAS:

Does anybody out there have a lab incubator they no longer need?

Dolores Bentham (dbentham@citlink.net)

Thoughts on Internet collaboration

The Internet makes collaboration half a world away easier than with someone in an office two doors down. One night I was working with programmers in Christchurch, New Zealand, and Cairo, Egypt, at the same time, modifying firmware and mapping software. All three of us were watching vehicles in Christchurch being plotted on a map with less than a 10-second delay. Each of us could communicate with the vehicles or each other.

Voice over IP, Video conferencing and very fast data interchange, plus the ability to deal with things in your iwn time frame, can make collaboration much more productive.

The internet levels the field to some to degree. The quality of the argument is separated from the face and stature of the person delivering it.

Mail lists can be a real asset to research. I am active in the Yahoo microscope list. The other day Zeiss announced a Differential Inference Contrast DIC microscope that can be use with birefringent plastic containers (http://www.zeiss.de/de/micro/home_e.nsf/Contents-FrameDHTML/816EBA287FE083B1C1256DD30038521D). Within 24 hours someone reported it gave a greater depth of field than normal DIC scopes, and that it worked with reelected light as well.

Well behaved lists are a gold mine of information on expertise, parts, equipment, collaboration and advice. I expect the average age of the Microscope list is close to 55, so it is pretty mature. We do have our young and eager members, but as long as politics, junk science, religion and discussion of spam are kept down, the list stays on topic.

The Internet makes new connections for me almost daily and spreads information much faster than any other way possible. It is a place where one person can make a contribution without a large expense. I have spare disk space on a server, and www.science-info.org is an archive for obsolete microscope documentation that many people over the world have contributed to as a distribution point. The copyright holders are satisfied with the arrangement, as long as there are no charges.

I collect microscopy links and documentation posted at http://www.couger.com/microscope/links/gclinks.html and http://www.science-info.org/
Attributed and anonymous contributions welcome.

Gordon Couger