Social Media Services and Tools

It was 40 days ago when I mentioned the student license of TopSpin and other products, once pricey, that are now free for academic users. Knowing that many students prefer the MacBook and would like to run authentic Mac applications on it, I am going to write about the student promotion of iNMR . It is not free, but it is as cheap as it can possibly be. It's 39 euro (equivalent to 49 USD or 32 British pounds or 4200 Yens). What's so special about this license is that it is... perfectly normal! I mean: it INCLUDES direct customer support and this is quite valuable for a student that is learning NMR and a new software at the same time. Is this program difficult to learn? As for every NMR program, it CAN be hard if you are so familiar with TopSpin (or VNMR, or Jeol Delta) that you can't adapt yourself to anything else. The learning curve of iNMR is actually incredibly smooth if you start processing easy examples (1-D spectra or well acquired 2-D like TOCSY, HSQC...) before mo...

I want to show you a proton spectrum that has puzzled me during the last weeks. It contains something that's quite typical and something that I can't explain. I have processed the spectrum in two different ways, with zero-filling and without it. The spectrum without zero-filling is black, the spectrum with zero-filling is green (the number of points is doubled). This detail is the bottom part of the TMS signal (magnified to show the ringing effect). Where does the ringing come from? TMS is a small symmetric molecule and its protons have a long relaxation time. Their signal persists at the end of the FID. When we add the zeroes after the signal, a step is created. The FT of the step is the ringing that we see. The spectrum without zero-filling doesn't contain the step, so there is no ringing. The period of the ringing is exactly 1 point. In simpler words: odd points are positive, even points are negative. Things are not so simple, actually, because the rule is reversed on t...

In the last two years NMR software has kept evolving slowly, but the world around it is changing more rapidly. From a technical point of view nothing important happened; while from a commercial point of view we are in the middle of a revolution. Prices have dropped down considerably. The false categories, the so-called "professional", "industry-standard" programs on a side and "low-budget", "alternative" programs on the other side, have disappeared. The companies that were selling the products in the first category have realized that the true values were actually reversed and adjusted the prices accordingly. Consider TopSpin, for example. I remember its original price was in the range � 4000-5000. At the beginning of the month, I have visited an industrial lab where they had recently purchased a license for off-line processing. They told me they had paid � 3000 for TopSpin. They had also considered a solution by ACDlabs, but after receiving a quo...

Earlier in this week I cited a paper by Kobzar and Luy. It contains the statement: The coupling extraction procedure is not yet implemented in any available software. that confirms and enforces what I have always being saying: Any NMR program contains some hole and by the time it's filled another hole appears. What they have found is a kind of super-hole that is common to every program. My first thought would normally be: "If nobody cares, why should I?", but this time I was intrigued by a figure just above the cited statement. That figure resembles a picture of mine I published here a few months ago. Despite the apparent similarity, however, the two methods have little in common. Driven by curiosity, I looked on the web for anything more recent on the same subject and found this page that describes the very same "long range J" procedure. Does it mean that somebody has already filled the hole? I have contacted the PR man at nucleomatica and he explained that t...

Our machines, even when hitting an apparent performance peak, only run at one small fraction of their true potential speed. I feel that today's computers and their software are OK for routine spectra. I couldn't ask for more. Other spectra are quite large, however, and I must wait a few seconds during processing. Without going into the third dimension, consider these novel experiments to measure long range heteronuclear Js. Each row contains at least 4096 points. Quite likely we are going to see larger rows in the next few years. The time required to compute the FFT is in the order of the seconds. It would be great if we could half this time. The solution is public since 2008 and freely available. It must also be well-know, because I have initially found it on Wikipedia . What they say, in practice, is that if you use the GPU (the graphic chip) instead of the CPU (the main brain of the computer)... In this work we present a novel implementation of FFT on GeForce 8800GTX that ...

Have you already decided which conference to attend this year? Is it perhaps the Euromar ? Of all the people I know, nobody will be attending this event. I have examined the list of sponsors and exhibitors and there will be no representative of the software industry. They used to attend the past Euromars and were unhappy. I myself have no intention of registering... A Worldwide Magnetic Resonance Conference ??? Why have I chosen this apparently ignored occasion? I will not attend any conference at all this year, but I will try to be in town during that week (from July 4 to 10), so this could be a unique opportunity to meet me in person. How can you contact me? Try adding a comment to this post. Your comment will be submitted to my moderation and will not appear (automatically) in public. If you insert your email address, I will contact you. If you have submitted a poster, write here the title, so I can find you directly at the conference. Weather info: July can be very hot in Florence...

I have discovered that my room is on Street View. The room from where I am writing now, from where I have written all my posts, where I have been working for the last 44 months is this one: The next window at right leads to my bedroom.