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Does Toronto wall mural show a new iPad dashboard? No, it's just iPhoto for iOS
TUAW reader Jon Hung forwarded us this photo showing a wall mural that is in the progress of being painted on the side of a fire station at 260 Adelaide St. W. in Toronto, Ontario. The beautiful, super-sized mural shows what appears to be a new iPad dashboard, complete with weather, the date and a lot of photos... Well, that's what we thought for a minute, before realizing that a) we haven't seen anything like that in iOS 6 betas and b) it seemed really familiar. Sure enough, a little research showed that it's the Journals function in iPhoto, which allows you to create photo "mosaics" complete with weather and date information (see below). It's a very useful feature, perfect for sending friends an update of everything you did on a particular day on your vacation. Still, the mural is really impressive and we'd like to see other examples of painted Apple ads that may be in existence around the world. If you've taken a picture of a similar Apple mural and have a Flickr account, just tag your photo with TUAW so everyone can see what you've found. Thanks to Jon for the wonderful photo and tip!
Watson now hunting down patent trolls, plans Ken Jennings' elaborate demise
The Watson supercomputer used its speech recognition, natural language processing, machine learning and data mining abilities to crush puny human Ken Jennings' dreams of winning at "Jeopardy!", but now Big Blue has it chasing down medical patent trolls for fun. Incorporating the Strategic IP Insight Platform, IBM has now programmed Watson to scan millions of pharmaceutical patents and biomedical journals to discover, analyze, and record any info pertaining to drug discovery. SIIP can then look for the names of chemical compounds, related diagrams, the company and scientist who invented and works with the compounds and related words to determine a patent's rightful owner. The SIIP function can also highlight which patents could be targeted for acquisition by trolls looking to control a property via a lawsuit or licensing agreement. Click past the break for a video outlining the project, along with Watson's announcement of its engagement to "Skynet".
Papers 2 and Papers for the iPad: the ultimate journal reading combination
It's that time of year again: time to head back to college, grab those books and kickstart the academic term. This year, why not cut out paper from your scientific journal research workflow with the ultimate in journal management and reading for the Mac and iPad? Management Papers 2 takes journal management to the max on your Mac. Across academia and industry, Endnote is pretty much the gold standard as far as referencing goes. Yes, there are apps like Bookends, Refworks and BibTex, as well as a plethora of others including the new cross-platform offering from Mendeley, but none of them, including Thomson Reuters' offering, come close to Papers 2 when it comes to actually managing those hundreds of PDF files, importing them, sorting them, reading them, and most importantly, searching them. Papers 2 creates a database of references, grabbing their metadata from Pubmed, Google Scholar and directly from science repositories like Science Direct, and attaching the PDF files. If you have a PDF, but no citation to import, you can just import the PDF into Papers 2 by simple drag and drop. From there Papers 2 can scan your file for a match, but if it can't find it automatically, it's just a case of manually editing the reference and hitting "Match." That'll kick you into a search form where you can just drag to select text and search for the reference with it, whether it's the title, author or journal, it'll scan the science directories for the matching reference and bind all the metadata accordingly.
