Interdisciplinary scientists: Identity and market crisis
This is a topic which has always eluded me, I wrote sometime back on the fine line of multidisciplinary versus interdisciplinary scientists. Recently this question was raised again by Michael Andrec at Linkedin computational biology forum. The question he raised [...]
Put some breathe life in your papers with clever visualization
I often screen papers for my reading list based on their illustration appeal. I know this may be bit strange for the people who judge the papers simply based on their abstracts or conclusion section. But trust me it works [...]
Non-PhD scientists are only hope if you want to battle floods of scientific data
This post may not surprise you if you already read the latest Nature editorial Do scientists really need a PhD? Before we talk about real issues, my first advice for aspiring PhD student – don’t read too much into anti-PhD [...]
Availability decay of Bioinformatics web resources : Yes widgets can change it
Quality and availability of bioinformatics resources is always a matter of great debate. HTTP 404 not found is quite frequent phenomenon for bioinformatics researchers looking to use some published web accessible database or analysis tool. A 4-year follow-up survey on [...]
NodeXL for visualizing biological network data in Excel and some other serious Microsoft ventures in Bioinformatics
Lately Microsoft has released few interesting add-ins for their Office products. Yesterday I wrote about a Word add-in that enables the annotation of scientific documents using bio-ontologies and controlled vocabularies. Today I learned about their latest add-in for Excel, NodeXL, [...]
Bio-ontologies for everyone with new Microsoft Word Add-in
A latest paper in BMC Bioinformatics describes a Microsoft Word Add-in for ontology recognition. Tool is freely available from Codeplex portal and as prerequisite you will need Microsoft Word 2007. This add-in enables the annotation of scientific documents based on [...]
MapReduce goes evolutionary
Scientists from Texas A&M University have developed a new algorithm MrsRF (MapReduce Speeds up Robinson-Foulds) for analyzing large collection of evolutionary trees using MapReduce framework. Matthews et. al, have used their MapReduce algorithm to compute all-to-all Robinson-Foulds (RF) distance matrix [...]
After phylogenetics Microsoft patents personal data mining
I hope you remember that some time back Microsoft tried to patent clustering phylogenetics methods which was a socking news for the bioinformatics community as community used these methods for a long time without any restriction. Now Microsoft had patented [...]
Futurama of science: My Picks
In a recent issue, Scientific journal Nature ran a story about how different scientific disciplines will evolve over next ten years (for interested readers article is freely available here). Nature asked a selected groups of leading researchers and science policy [...]
Nothing wrong with synthetic biology, It's just B-I-O-L-O-G-Y and the rest is silence
Recent issue of Nature magazine has few very interesting articles about synthetic biology and one of them is “Five hard truths for synthetic biology” written by Roberta Kwok. When I first read this article my first reaction was- nothing wrong [...]
