Dear Mom,

This, believe it or not, is the letter about that Network Protocol. Before you get too daunted by the alien vocabulary, this protocol is interesting to me more because of how it looks than what it is saying (though of cause it is an excellent example of a Network Protocol).

On Tuesday night, at the IgNobel prize talk at the Guardian Press office, I learnt that one of these awards had been given to two researchers at Cornell University (Kruger and Dunning) for their work entitled: Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments. I am not sure exactly whether, or to what extent this applies to me, but I certainly get a bit of a headrush when I first start learning something – in this case it is ‘movable type’ – where I feel like I am all-powerful and can do anything! (What inevitably happens is that someone more knowledgable than me will have to gently push me to the more humble, straight-and-narrow path.)

This story begins, with my starting this blog on the Nature Network and learning how to insert images.

So this is how I put a picture into my blog. I fiddle about with the image (usually first in Word/Powerpoint and then in Paint) and save it as a bitmap. I then upload it into Photobucket where it gets converted to a jpeg and gets given a web address. I then go to the blog and paste the webaddress between two exclamation marks. When I publish the blog entry, there it appears as if by magic!

So, I tried this trick in our Protocols Network submission system – and it also works there!

Of course, there were technical things to iron out – getting the text in the figures to be a reasonable size, making sure that the images were not too wide (if they are more then 438 pixels wide, then the adverts on the two sides of the protocol get shoved down to the bottom of the page, and that simply will not do!). It turns out that if you are writing in word you should use Verdana size 8 (or 7 if necessary) and set the width of the paragraph to 12 cm.

Anyway, this was all very exciting, but as it happens, it is not all that cool for figures in Nature papers to rest in Photobucket. You will notice that they now have a Nature web address (if you right click on the images and go to ‘Properties’). It turns out that I could have avoided the photobucket-step altogether and just uploaded them using the submission system. So I was a bit of an idiot really!

I will still, however, use photobucket for part of this process as I discovered that its conversion of bitmaps to jpegs gives better resolution images than the similar conversion using Paint (or anything else that I have tried that I have access to).

Thats all for now. Doesn’t it look beautiful?

Yours etc.

Bronwen