Next Gen Developer

Well with Women in Technology sponsoring our 5th London Girl Geek Dinner and Helen Duguid speaking, the event seems to have mushroomed out and hit London by storm!  So far we have 110 people signed up to the event and almost all of them are females.  It's amazing that so many women are in IT and are meeting up and chatting about life, technology and all things geeky!

It does make me wonder how big Girly Geek Dinners will get.  Just recently I have been in touch with someone in Nottingham who asked if they can do a Nottingham Girl Geek Dinner... Go for it!!! Look out for the details of that event here.

I do wonder if schools will start to do this sort of thing for getting younger females interested in technology.  Maybe invite an industry leader to a school and get them to talk about their experiences etc.  I think it would be great to see more women going into the sciences and technical subjects at school and university.

Well I just received some info that the Beta version of Academic search for Windows Live is now available, and I thought it would be useful to any students, lecturers or academics to know about.  Google have their verison and now Microsoft have theirs too!  It's another useful source of information but it's only in beta version.  It's worth anyone interested in it having a look and giving feedback on it as feedback shapes the way these softwares work.

The Windows Live Academic Search beta is designed to enable users to search through thousands of academic journals, serving as a powerful research aid. In addition to searching for articles, key innovations have been designed to help users find information faster and truly give them an advantage in their research efforts – especially in the areas of user interface and information sorting. Key user features include:

· Preview pane which allows customers to see the abstract of a result quickly by simply mousing over the result
· The ability to group and sort results by author, journal, conference, and date;
· Citation support in two major bibliographic formats which enables customers to quickly compile citations
· Author “Live Links” will automatically connect to the search results of articles associated with that particular author by simply clicking on the hyperlink of the author’s name .
· Support for macros and RSS which can be added to a customer’s Live.com page

The initial release will target the areas of computer science, electrical engineering and physics and will offer peer-reviewed content from leading scholarly societies such as ACM and IEEE, and leading publishers such as Elsevier and Wiley. Windows Live Academic Search can be found at http://academic.live.com and will provide English language results in select global markets.

The beta service will be available today with English versions in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, Spain, Japan, and Australia. Additional markets and content will be added throughout the beta period.

I had a quick look at it earlier today and it all seems to be working with Internet Explorer.  I am yet to find out if they are doing Firefox support for this product, from what I can see with Firefox it throws you back to the main windows live page.