Splashcast and the bbgm podcast
April 30, 2007
Work and travel over the past month have kept me from recording a new podcast. However, I used some time this weekend to play with SplashCast, a rather interesting embeddable media player. SplashCast is quite cool, allowing users to create mixed media channels (video, audio, pictures) and embed them on their websites. They also released a new feature while I was playing around called MyPodcastNetwork. It allows you to collect audio/video podcasts and create channels of your favorite content (by autodetecting embedded media in a stream).
Anyway, I used this feature to create a channel for the bbgm podcast, which is now embedded in the sidebar of this blog
Next step. Use this feature to generate a channel or two which I can them embed on my start page or other websites
Technorati Tags: SplashCast, Podcasting
All in a few letters?
April 28, 2007
An interesting piece in Omics! Omics! on the limitations of degrees. The relevance of a degree has been something that has been the subject of many a discussion that I have been party to over the years. There are people who tend to put way to much weight into someone’s abilities purely on the basis of their formal educational qualifications. On the flip side, I get extremely frustrated when a degree is considered irrelevant based on a limited number of data points (what really gets my goat is when the pursuit of knowledge or the capability to think analytically is trivialized).
As Keith points out, a degree is a proxy for someones abilities. Getting a PhD should be an example of someones ability to think originally, to formulate and propose a solution to a problem, and so on and so forth, but at the same time, it is does not mean that others can’t do so as well. As Derek Lowe pointed out in a recent post, one of the problems is that getting a PhD has become a bit of a watered down process. That standards vary between countries and universities only makes the point that the degree is not a true indicator of abilities more relevant.
So where does that leave us, and perhaps more importantly, someone who needs to hire new employees? Pretty much where we started. Someone’s degree does suggest something about that persons capabilities. In my experience, capable people tend to pursue some level of higher education, since they want to acquire the extra knowledge. However, it is up to the hiring manager to make sure that the interviewee is not an exception to the rule, and more importantly, that the person is the right one for that organization. On the flip side, the lack of a degree should not rule someone out from having the appropriate capabilities. Hiring the right people, most importantly the right people for the job where they are likely to succeed is always hard, but being able to do so is a critical differentiator. Organizations that get hung up on degrees, especially those in the commercial world, or those that look at degrees with suspicion, do so at their peril.
Technorati Tags: Education, Degrees, HR
The life science hype cycle
April 27, 2007
Pedro has a cool take on the Gartner hype cycle. He has projected where certain life science technologies lie onto the Gartner hype cycle chart (reproduced below)
Figure by Pedro Beltrao
I’ve been involved in a few of these over th years (bioinformatics, structural biology, nanobiology, expression profiling). I might disagree on some of the specifics, e.g. I think nanotech in biology is probaby ahead of synthetic biology, but that reflects our personal experiences as well.
Further reading:
… hype and naysayers
Technorati Tags: Gartner, Hype Curve, Life Science, Technology
Mainframes vs. The Grid
April 26, 2007
Nick Carr has an interesting post on his blog about some new iron from IBM and Sun. What I found interesting was the comment towards the end about specialized machines of the kind IBM and Sun excel at and the large global grid of the kind Google has built. Through most of the last decade, commodity hardware has ruled the world of HPC, at least the world that I have been exposed to. Google is a classic example of a business that has built a huge infrastructure from commodity hardware. On the other hand, there are certain applications that would benefit greatly from specialized machines. Large scale numerical computing would be one of them.
So in a nutshell, does it have to be one versus the other? One sells on volume, the other fills specific niches.
Technorati Tags: High Performance Computing, Sun, IBM, Google
When a publisher loses perspective
April 26, 2007
Wiley certainly seems to have (via Pedro) and sent a cease & desist letter to Shelley Batts for using a table and graphs from a recent paper (used in support of a blog post). Shelley did comply, regenerating the graphics in excel.
I don’t have to tell you where I stand on this issue. She was not reproducing the article in it’s entirety, but rather talking about science with supporting information (and just a little) from a paper, not unlike a scientist giving a talk at a conference. It’s just a different medium. Somehow I feel that the publishing industry just doesn’t get it. A paper in a journal is not about archival. It’s about generating discussion. It’s another reason I am very leery of using figures from journals when the policies are unclear or I don’t know what they are. Someone at journals needs to really think about what the role of scientific blogging is.
Further coverage at Postgenomic
Update: Wiley have rescinded the letter, and issued an apology. Not sure whether it was the bad publicity or an honest mistake (Euan has a nice post).
Further reading:
Pedro on copyright policies
Technorati Tags: Wiley, Publishing, Open Science, Copyright
