In no particular order or context. No personal stuff and by no means a complete list: WordPress (like, duh). Wikipedia (default for looking up new stuff) Wikis in general (great lab management tool. Don’t need LIMS) Open Access Publishing and Creative Commons licensing. FLOSS licensing (90% of the software I use, and 100% of what […]
I didn’t write this one, but I wish I did. I found it on Science after Sunclipse. I guess that a CC license can be safely applied to anonymous chain letters. Today CBSG continues with its pointers for budding scientists with the second part on serving as a peer reviewer for papers and grants. Okay, […]
One problem that I am facing is convincing colleagues of the utility of an Open Access publication. The usual arguments: more visibility, retention of the right to re-use material, the Greater Good, taxpayer access to taxpayer-funded research and so on don’t stick very well when faced with a $1500-$2500 or higher publication fee. These can […]
(Full disclosure before I start: I am an academic editor in PLoS ONE. I have no financial stake in PLoS, and as far as I know, they have none in me. They’d better not, if they know what’s good for them). PLoS have come up with yet another cool mechanism for scientific communication: PLoS Currents. […]
So… yours truly, EssOh, OhOne and OhToo are relocating from San Diego, CA to Oxford, OH where I will be starting a lab at the Microbiology department of MUOhio. Therefore, Byte Size Biology is going on the road. Over the next 10 days or so this space will be filled as much as I can […]
(Thanks to F.B. for the inspiration). Sigh… people don’t seem to learn. It’s been almost 22 years (yikes!) since a distinguished group of scientists published a letter in Cell calling for a responsible use of the word “homology”. If you were born when that letter was published, then in the US you can already drink […]
Intelligent Systems in Molecular Biology (ISMB) is a large international gathering of computational biologists, mostly from the bioinformatics side: genomics, structural bioinformatics, computational genomics, etc. This year there is a friendfeed room for microblogging ISMB 2009. So if you are not in Stockholm, or also if you are, look it up. Most of the microbloggers […]
eMusic, a subscription-based indie music estore has hiked its prices and concurrently signed a deal with Sony BMG to sell their back catalog. What’s wrong with this? Well, a lot. Read my previous post for details. It seems like the reaction on the intertubes has been less than joyful, with phrases like “corporate sellout” and […]
Harvard University has removed from YouTube the video I embedded in my Leonardo Da Vinci and the F0-F1 ATPase post, due to copyright concerns. It is a pity. I believe the main sufferer from this step is the lab that actually created this video, and now has one outlet less to publicize its work. One […]
Shirley Wu has penned a beautiful open letter to Oprah Winfrey explaining why Oprah should not provide a soapbox to Jenny McCarthy. McCarthy is the unofficial spokesperson for the anti-vaccination movement, a dishonorable position at best. Given yet another podium, more people will listen and take McCarthy’s bad advice, resulting in more deaths and preventable […]
Jonathan Eisen started something nice in his blog: a review of children’s science books. So I think I’ll follow suit, especially since my first review will combine two of Jonathan’s faves: Microbiology and Open Access. The book is “Bacteria Galore by Sunday at Four” by Mel Rosenberg, a Professor of Microbiology at Tel-Aviv University who […]
Wordle is a toy for creating word clouds from text. Each word’s size is correlated with its frequency in the input text. Every three months or so I will generate a Wordle from the RSS feed of this blog, to see whether this blog has any direction, theme change, and just because Wordles are cool. […]
Hypatia (b. ~360CE d. 415CE) was a mathematician, philosopher, astronomer and teacher in Roman Alexandria. She was also quite probably the last librarian of the famous Library of Alexandria. Note that at the time, the definition of Philosophy was much broader, and encompassed what we term today the natural and exact sciences; and yes, she […]
From Abstruse Goose
When the Moon is in the Seventh House, and Jupiter aligns with Mars, a bunch of people gather for their “Bioinformaticians anonymous” group therapy. There they metaphorically gather, commiserating about how bioinformatics is dead (or was it bioinformaticians?), just smells funny or suffers from identity theft, probably because it got drunk at the last ISMB, […]
