This seems to have a long tradition going even back to Plato’s republic. Sure – the demonstrated fierceness covers only the crudity of the growing identity. Continue reading Complains about the next generation
Category Archives: Software
Mirror neurons and science careers
Spiegel online has an excellent report about mirror neurons, empathy, social background and research (taking up a theme in the ZEIT 2003)
“In unserer Kultur sind am erfolgreichsten die”, sagt Gruen, “die am meisten von ihren Gefühlen, von der Fähigkeit zum Mitgefühl abgeschnitten sind.”
Why just C11orf30?
I have already seen this data in Washington and even talked to one of the two first authors (pun!) at the airport – the first genomewide scan for atopic dermatitis is now being online at the nature genetics website. The overall effects are disppointing small – my quick plot gives the cumulative (sic!) negative log p values.
I don’t want to bid for this dinner
NYT reports that Knome plans to offer its personal gene-sequencing service to the highest bidder in an eBay auction set to begin on Friday and continue for 10 days. This will include also a private dinner Continue reading I don’t want to bid for this dinner
Clickstreams
An American team believes to describe science activity by web clicks on journal pages.
Over the course of 2007 and 2008, we collected nearly 1 billion user interactions recorded by the scholarly web portals of some of the most significant publishers, aggregators and institutional consortia.
with the conclusion Continue reading Clickstreams
A better search engine for science?
New rumors say about Wolfram alpha
In this respect it is vastly smarter than (and different from) Google. Google simply retrieves documents based on keyword searches. Google doesn’t understand the question or the answer, and doesn’t compute answers based on models of various fields of human knowledge.
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or those who are more scientifically inclined, Stephen showed me many interesting examples — for example, Wolfram Alpha was able to solve novel numeric sequencing problems, calculus problems, and could answer questions about the human genome too.
I have applied for a test account as I am interested in methods how to deal with genomic and all the other pentabyte of data — we urgently need a paradigm shift as single genome prices will go down to 1000 €. Continue reading A better search engine for science?
So many advertisers
It’s a pleasant experience to write something that is being translated afterwards into so many languages afterwards. It is, however, irritating that this dissemination is irrespective of what I (and all second and third hand journalists and translators) understand of this curious world.
Pen scan it
I always wondered why it is not possible to scan just a few sentences from a book. As there are some products on the market, I ordered such an IrisPen. It took only 15 minutes to convince me, that this device is largely useless – a cheap plastic pen with a flimpsy contact but rather rigid USB cable.
What I even did not consider that syllabicated words at the end of every line can not be recognized by any OCR. So scanned words will require a lot of editing – while it may be better to invest into a typing course using all your fingers, yea, yea.
iWork Pages now supports Endnote X2
Although many journalists have been disappointed from the last MacWorld keynote, there are some good news for scientists who like the clean writing style in Pages as it supports now also MathType and EndNote (so far I am using Lyx with BibTex as Zotero and NeoOffice were a dead end). So I will have to finish my next paper within the 30 day trial period which creates some time pressure, yea, yea.
Addendum
You need an immediate patch otherwise the system is largely unusuable.
A strange survey at Slashdot
nay, nay.
First email or the driving force of science
According to Wikipedia on May 24, 1844 Samuel Morse sent his famous words “What hath God wrought” from the B&O’s Baltimore station to the Capitol Building along the wire – the first email. Continue reading First email or the driving force of science
In a perfect world
of science even computer nerds would need just one single word processor Continue reading In a perfect world
How to secure your macbook air in the library
Visiting again the British Library Humanities Reading Room last week, I had a major problem securing my laptop as it has no Kensington slot. I haven’t found anything useful for locking it except this free (car-like antitheft)Lockdown application. If you are not too much paranoid – it is a clever solution – and a lot of fun here back in the lab to watch the pictures it takes.
Addendum
Found some lock brackets here.
Electric wiring diagram as a metapher for gene-rna-protein networks
Two days ago I heard an interesting by Andreas Beyer about using wiring diagrams as a bioinformatics tool box for simulating complex biological relationships. This is something that can be found also in this recent nat gen review but even more detailed in new work on eQTLs. So far, however, there is not proof that any of these methods behave much better than others in the absence of a gold standard in bioinformatics, yea, yea.
Intranet exception
A small luxurious law here in Germany – we may further offer limited documents to limited participants according to Heise news Continue reading Intranet exception