Displaying posts tagged with

“Science education”

Why scripting is not as simple as… scripting

If you haven’t read the transcript of Sean Eddy‘s recent talk “On High Throughput Sequencing for Neuroscience“, go ahead and read it. It’s full of many observations and insights into the relationships between computational and “wet” biology, and it is very well-written. I agree with many of his points, for example, that sequencing is not […]

Announcement: WikiProject Computational Biology Competition

WikiProject Computational Biology/ISCB competition announcement 2013 The International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) announces an international competition to improve the coverage on Wikipedia of any aspect of computational biology. A key component of the ISCB’s mission to further the scientific understanding of living systems through computation is to communicate this knowledge to the public at […]

Terrible advice from a great scientist

I am not inclined to write polemic posts. I generally like to leave that to others, while I take the admittedly easier route of waxing positive over various bits of cool science I find or hear about, and yes, occasionally do myself. But WSJ editorial from E.O. Wilson has irked me so much, I have […]

ROSALIND: an addictive bioinformatics learning site

  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 […]

Short note on getting students busy

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 […]

ISMB 2012 Vignettes Pt. 3: Swag

Promotional materials are part of any conference. In scientific meetings, the swag usually comes from the booths of product promoters, science publishers, and scientific societies. It was a nice surprise to see a Federal funding agency, the US Department of Energy give away decks of cards. I’m a sucker for cards, so I took a […]

Feynman uses chess to explain science

YouTube is chock-a-block with vids of Richard Feynman. I love the way he uses analogies to explain science. Here is one of my favorites, the discovery of natural laws as viewing a chess game.