My confidence level with OWA ("Outlook Web Access") is increasing gradually, but there is one little thing I tend to have forgotten when needed: How can I convert a message to a task in order to follow-up an email conversation at a later point in time?
Here is the answer:
On the "Mail": Click the little flag icon next to the item in the list of messages. The flag turns red, indicating that the message is marked for follow-up.
On the "Tasks": Double click the task to open the detailed view.
From the flag drop-down (see screen shot below), select "Set Date and Reminder" to adjust the dates and reminders for the follow-up according to your requirements.
… and I discovered some interesting new features in ResearchGate today…
… and thought somebody could be interested as well, without exactly knowing who.
That’s you? Perfect, here are my discoveries (you may need to login to ResearchGate to see them):
"Self Archiving Restrictions" for publications and journals (example for a green policy, example for a white policy).
I was not able to clarify if ResearchGate is reusing information from the SHERPA/RoMEO database or not, but doubt it because there is no attribution to this project in the ResearchGate help. So it looks like ResearchGate is planning to maintain this information locally which requires continuous efforts. But I find it very interesting and commendable how prominently ResearchGate is promoting self archiving to the scientists.
"Impact Points" for researchers (example). As far as I can see, ResearchGate is currently not providing any information about how these impact points are calculated which I find very distracting. How to evaluate the significance of a count if you neither know the data base nor the algorithm? However, they just need to add another sort option to the result screen and we finally would have a measure to find the most influential scientist in the Max Planck Society with one click .
Scheduling a conference call with participants from all over the world is sometimes more than a group can afford. I got regularly confused by emails like:
I just received the meeting request from X w/a 6:00am CT mtg time. Looking at Y’s email below shouldn’t that be a 7:00am mtg time instead. That is an hour earlier than 9a NY would be 8a NY which is 7a west texas/ central time.
Hm, what exactly does this mean for me participating from beautiful Munich? Problems like this can be avoided, e.g. by
activating the "time zone support" when setting up a new event in Doodle (please!)
More than a week ago, I noticed that my Thunderbird installation wasn’t showing all folders available via one of our shared accounts any longer (Outlook Exchange via IMAP). First I thought this could be a weird caching problem which would magically dissolve after some time. But this theory feels pretty lame after the week passed by. Help was found at http://www.crazysquirrel.com/computing/general/thunderbird-imap-new-folder.jspx.
After re-subscribing to all relevant folders via “File -> Subscribe” I’m happy to have them back, but still wonder why the setup has been corrupted in first place?
Nice to see the data from WOLD being picked up and put to use so quickly: Anatol Stefanowitsch has a good post on his Sprachlog (in german) about loanwords in german.
Now i don’t think he accessed the data using the linked data mechanisms (but rather scraped the HTML table from the vocabulary index), but making this possible and easy is an achievement as well.
As second step in our cross-linguistic database platform project, we released yesterday – without much ado (official announcements to come) – the World Loanword Database.
Have a look, surf around (thereby warming up the cache ) and report any problems you encounter to robert.
While activity in this blog has slowed down a bit, the mpdl’s wordpress μ installation is alive and kicking.
After the launch of the soap project website some days ago, hyperspace@aei went public on october 2. This was an interesting experiment, because there’s always room for surprise when you send out emails to roughly 1300 people telling them to visit a site.
But all in all the launch went well, although we might never be able to top the initial spike of interest. Talking about spikes: I eventually got around to hacking together some sort of access statistics for the blogs. It’s pretty raw – just number of HTTP requests per blog and day – but also pretty much in line with what i think access logs can tell us.
What I learned some weeks ago: You require a DNS entry to resolve a specific blog hosted by WordPress MU, i.e. there is no option to request a blog via any combination of IP address plus path and/or query string (right?). This requirement is a problem if you haven’t finished the domain registration process, but would like to preview your blog already.
Good news for all users with appropriate rights: You can map hostnames to IP addresses yourself by adding an entry to the hosts file stored on your local computer. Windows users may access their hosts file under
/Windows/system32/drivers/etc/
and provide a mapping like
130.183.249.20 hyperspace.blogs.mpdl.mpg.de
Bad news? It looks like you require administrator rights to modify this file on Windows (sorry!)
He does a good job of explaining why a plethora of tools for communication is still a good thing (before the wave). But I also think each organization that has grown a djungle of communication patterns would do good to have an explanation like the one he’s giving – or just adopting his officially.
Well, let’s see if the MPDL internal blog has enough pull to mint an acronym. Anyway, for quite some time I’ve been a fan of Linked Data; and I also think it’s the right way to publish research data on the web.
But this has mostly been a blurry idea, something that appealed to me for abstract reasons. While preparing my talk about WALS Online at the Berlin Open ‘09 conference, I came across an actual use case!
In his chapter Hand and Arm in WALS Cecil H. Brown reports the following correlation:
The presence of tailored clothing covering the arms greatly increases the distinctiveness of arm parts and renders more likely their labeling by separate terms.
and goes on to say
Another potentially fruitful investigatory strategy would be to cross-tabulate values against the tailoring technologies of peoples who speak each of the 620 languages of the sample – an enormous research effort this author must leave to future investigators.
Now if anything that does sound like a case for the semantic web to me! I’d hope that in some years time this “enormous research effort” should boil down to a SPARQL query over the combined data of DBpedia and WALS Online. In any case, that’s all the motivation I need to make WALS Online spit out Linked Data.
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