Today Nitzan & I were citizen-scientists, sampling several locations in our home for microbial sequencing. We did this as part of Your Wild Life, a project hosted at North Carolina State University’s Biology Department. The Wild Life of Our Homes looks to sequence household microbial communities in a large number of homes. From their […]
Let’s get this clear: Tyrannosaurus rex, the best selling figurine of class reptilia is not my favorite bad-ass top-of-the-food chain predator. Come on. Did you see its arms? I mean… As a kid, I always thought the Allosaurus was much cooler. For one thing, it was on the cover of my favorite dinosaur book, “The […]
My previous post on ROSALIND, a bioinformatics learning site, got picked up by the Slashdot community. A discussion came up on careers in Bioinformatics, and the Slashdot user rockmulle made some interesting observations on career paths in bioinformatics, which I have copied here. While brief and therefore omitting many important details (research at a university […]
I just learned about this one: ROSALIND is a really cool concept in learning bioinformatics. You are given problems of increasing difficulty to solve. Start with nucleotide counting (trivial) and end with genome assembly (not so trivial). To solve a problem, you download a sample data set, write your code and debug it. Once […]
Improve wikipedia entries in computational biology, and you too can win cash prizes, a free membership to International Society of Computational Biology, or a dinner date with an ISCB officer of your choice! OK, maybe not the last one, but definitely the first two. The ISCB is announcing a competition to improve Wikipedia entries that have to […]
I recently read this post about lacunae in Bioinformatics. One complaint was: I know that documentation is a thankless task. But some parts of the Bio[Java|Perl|Python] libraries are described only as an API? This became apparent to me when I had to teach the libraries to students. What does this module do and why does it do […]
So there have been a few reactions to my latest post on accountable research software, including a Tweeter kerfuffle (again). Ever notice how people come out really aggressive on Twitter? Must the the necessity to compress ideas into 140chars. You can’t just write “Interesting point you make there, sir. Don’t you think that your laudable goal would […]
Preamble: this post is inspired by a series of tweets that took place over the past couple of days. I am indebted to Luis Pedro Coelho (@LuisPedroCoelho) and to Robert Buels (@rbuels) for a stimulating, 140-char-at-a-time discussion. Finally, my thanks (and yours, hopefully) to Ben Temperton for initiating the Bioinformatics Testing Consortium. Science is messing around with […]
“If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe, man would have only four years to live”. — Albert Einstein No, there are no typos in the title. And, no, there is no zombie outbreak towards which people are being recruited to fight. (Well, yeah, that’s what “they” always say isn’t it?) The ZomBee Watch […]
Three postdocs positions available at a great lab in Denmark. Read on: We are seeking three Postdoctoral Fellows to The Cellular Signal Integration Group (C-SIG). The group is a network biology research group located at the Department of Systems Biology at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU). Our department represents one of the […]
I chaired the Automated Function Prediction meeting at ISMB this year. The meeting, held every year (almost) deals with the latest approaches to predicting protein function from genetic and genomic data, and also discussing the Critical Assessment of Function Annotation This year we were fortunate to have Jonathan Eisen as our keynote speaker. Ever wondered […]
This is simply brilliant. The best thing since Bad Project.
