Monthly Archives: July 2008

Electronic notebooks are cool, and so is RDF

Had a conversation earlier today, all about RDF and linked data. I am a big believer, which is why posts like this one by Cameron Neylon on A new way of looking at science? bring a smile. Andrew Milsted, a PhD student, enabled an RDF dump of the content in the lab notebook used by [...]
Posted in Geek, Informatics, Semantic Web, Visualization | 2 Comments

Industry watching: The serendipitous (and lean) future of pharma

Image via WikipediaMy graduate advisor’s favorite word, or at least one of the more popular ones, was serendipity. He was a firm believer in the role of serendipity in science, and personally I believe that serendipity plays a big role in discovery, of any kind. So when Richard Jones pointed to a story [...]
Posted in Business, Drug Development, Industry Watching, Pharma | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

The confusion over data rights

As a side note, I talked to a colleague who got harassed at the Ichs and Herps meeting for… gasp… downloading sequences from GenBank and using them without asking the author’s permission! Good lord, what is the world coming to? I’m surprised to hear of such active resistance to public availability of information. Paulo Nuin pointed [...]
Posted in Admin | 2 Comments

The accelerated world of molecular simulation

Image via WikipediaIt’s getting pretty clear that GPUs have a big place in the future of molecular simulation (and the cell processor). NAMD, SimTK, Gromacs via Vijay Pande’s Folding@Home, etc are all pursuing acceleration as a core part of their efforts. I have had informal discussions with a few people actively running GPU-based [...]
Posted in Computing, Modeling & Simulation | Leave a comment

Getting geeky with Ruby and Python on Friendfeed

Image via WikipediaFriendFeed might be a subject of silly Silicon Valley blogger debates, but for the life science community it’s a lot more. The Life Scientists is a poster child for microcommunity, the ISMB2008 room was a wonderful example of a group of people coming together to make a conference come to life, and [...]
Posted in Informatics, Programming, Software & Internet | Leave a comment
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