nodalpoint.org

Nodalpoint's DNA ?

Nodalpoint's DNA ?

A new bioinformatics blog, Bioinformatics Zen, has a nice post on one of our favorite topics: organizing yourself as a dry-lab scientist. Essentially the file system is your friend, use it to structure your projects appropriately. I recall Neil posting in a similar vein a while back ?

I think it is about time to reorganize the recommended reading list in the side bar. It would be nice to have the list populated randomly from a database of links, so as new blogs can get some more exposure. The Drupal Links Package might be the way to go here.

A crude score for benchmarking scientists

Have you ever wanted to compare different scientists by their publication record? It's not always an easy task, but here is a crude and handy way to benchmark people by their journal publications in Nature, Science or PNAS using PubMed. Let's call it the NSPNAS score, it's not the h-index and it's far from perfect, but it can be useful.

Nodalpoint DNA: Nodalpoint's DNA ?
Update: Switchover is done. Please leave comments if you notice anything amiss. Note, Drupal 5.1 includes free tagging, so when posting, look for the 'nodalpoint tags' vocabulary. Awfully blue this theme :)

Update 2: Spam filtering is now in place, so no more comment spam, archives are back, search is still broken and reoranization of the blogroll is now underway. Read more for the details.

Update 3: Search is now working, spam filtering has turned away the most recent spam comments and everything else looks good. I'm considering this a successful upgrade.

Bio-era has just released a pretty interesting, in-depth study of the current and future impacts of sequencing and synthesis technologies and the emergence of synthetic genomics on key sectors of the US economy.

Here’s the link to the press release: http://www.prweb.com/releases/2007/2/prweb503903.htm. You can also access a podcast about the report release there.

Also, here’s the link http://www.bio-era.net/research/GenomePurchaseForm.html to the form you fill out to get either or both printed copies of the report, and/or a link to allow you to download the entire .pdf file (32 MB) for free. The link to the .pdf file will be emailed to you upon submitting the form, and is free except for the inconvenience of filling out the form. Printed copies of the report are only available for purchase (sorry, but color printing is really expensive…). Personally, I recommend getting the printed version if you can afford it, since it’s such a large file.

Hi,

I would like to request to complete a small web-based survey (3-5 mins) regarding use of Bioinformatics research tools. The survey is hosted - Online...[Click on the hyperlink or you may copy paste].

The survey intends to understand the benchtop computing needs and performance (sequence data based) from research biochemists, geneticists, molecular biologists AND all biomedical research scientists alike. You may already be using some OR quite a few of them for carrying out different sequence related operations. These may include carrying out simple storing and retrieving sequences from your 'Word' files OR carrying out regular sequence manipulations (like primer design and motif structure for customized antibodies - all before doing the actual experiment), OR you may simply prefer to do them manually.

Steven Salzberg has an opinion piece in Genome Biology that talks about Wikis for managing genome annotation and the problem of bit rot in gene annotation (would that be annotation rot?).

I wrote a quick post about it. This harkens to the other gene wiki discussions on nodalpoint as well as some of the things Ian Holmes and his group are thinking about on the GbrowseAJAX mailing list.

The lone researcher, chipping away at her niche, making some breakthrough discovery... It is a nice image, but likely not true as the business of doing science requires management and interaction with many other scientists. The Howard Hughes Medical Institute publishes a free book on managing science for early career scientists called: Making the Right Moves. It is easy to dismiss management as formalized commonsense (i.e. plan a project before you start it). However I feel that the value is not in the knowledge contained in such books, but rather the fact that thinking about it helps to change your mindset from the lone researcher mentality.