SciTech News Volume 71, No. 1 (2017)

Columns and Reports From the Editor 3 Division News Science-Technology Division 5 Chemistry Division 8 Engineering Division Aerospace Section of the Engineering Division 9 Architecture, Building Engineering, Construction and Design Section of the Engineering Division 11 Reviews Sci-Tech Book News Reviews 12 Advertisements IEEE

SciTech News Volume 71, No. 2 (2017)

Columns and Reports From the Editor 3 Division News Science-Technology Division 5 Chemistry Division 8 Engineering Division 9 Aerospace Section of the Engineering Division 12 Architecture, Building Engineering, Construction and Design Section of the Engineering Division 14 Reviews Sci-Tech Book News Reviews 16 Advertisements IEEE

Reviews

The Hutchinson Electronic Encyclopedia, First Electronic Version, Oxford, Random Century and Attica Cybernetics, 1991. ISBN: 1–873472–00–5. Price £99

The Evaluation Of Molecular Similarity And Molecular Diversity Methods Using Biological Activity Data

This paper reviews the techniques available for quantifying the effectiveness of methods for molecule similarity and molecular diversity, focusing in particular on similarity searching and on compound selection procedures. The evaluation criteria considered are based on biological activity data, both qualitative and quantitative, with rather different criteria needing to be used depending on the type of data available

Multiple representations in web-based learning of chemistry concepts

A new chemistry curriculum for secondary schools is currently under construction in the Netherlands, in which chemical knowledge will be embedded in contexts that show applications of chemistry in the society. Several research groups develop such modules and a committee appointed by the Dutch Ministry of Education advises about the chemical content and concepts.\ud A central issue in chemistry education is the relation between the real, molecular and symbolic world. Skilled chemists switch easily between these worlds, but beginning students do not. They could get better results and will be more able to solve problems if they would make better connections between the three chemical worlds. The University of Twente has developed a series of lessons about the particle model. Included in this instruction material are animations of chemical processes at the molecular level. In the lessons students are supported and stimulated to make connections between the three chemical worlds. Students are shown the importance of new chemical knowledge in society. The mental images and the knowledge schemata of the students are investigated in this research. The students were interviewed before they received instruction, and after they received about half of the instruction. At the end of the instruction they were asked to make a concept map.\ud It appeared that the links between the real, molecular and symbolic world are not strengthened after the instruction. The students make more links between the real and symbolic world, but hardly connect these world to the molecular world or vice versa. There is still a gap between the students’ mental models and scientifically accepted models as represented in animations and illustrations in the instruction. Most students liked the animations in the instruction and mentioned them as strong point. It is therefore surprising that some students could not remember the animations when they were interviewed, whilst others their representations were about the same as the animations. Clearly, the effectiveness of the animations must be enhanced and more research is needed for this

myTea: Connecting the Web to Digital Science on the Desktop

Bioinformaticians regularly access the hundreds of databases and tools that are available to them on the Web. None of these tools communicate with each other, causing the scientist to copy results manually from a Web site into a spreadsheet or word processor. myGrids' Taverna has made it possible to create templates (workflows) that automatically run searches using these databases and tools, cutting down what previously took days of work into hours, and enabling the automated capture of experimental details. What is still missing in the capture process, however, is the details of work done on that material once it moves from the Web to the desktop: if a scientist runs a process on some data, there is nothing to record why that action was taken; it is likewise not easy to publish a record of this process back to the community on the Web. In this paper, we present a novel interaction framework, built on Semantic Web technologies, and grounded in usability design practice, in particular the Making Tea method. Through this work, we introduce a new model of practice designed specifically to (1) support the scientists' interactions with data from the Web to the desktop, (2) provide automatic annotation of process to capture what has previously been lost and (3) associate provenance services automatically with that data in order to enable meaningful interrogation of the process and controlled sharing of the results