3 ms·

Well, I can't say much for bioinformatics, but we certainly can't discount industry and open-source projects in the fields I'm familiar with like distributed sy

by tikhonj 11y ago

Well, I can't say much for bioinformatics, but we certainly can't discount industry and open-source projects in the fields I'm familiar with like distributed systems and programming languages. I mean, I might not value PHP, Python and Go as a matter of taste, but they have their own ideas worth documenting that were not created by academic researchers. In fact, I'd be suspicious of and programming language reference that was controlled by academics or any group with specific credentials because interesting developments in PL are extremely democratic and happen everywhere. (Including some pretty self-contained bubbles like the world of Chuck Moore and colorForth.)

dalke 11y ago
Of course we can't discount them. My own field of research, chemical information as it applies to pharmaceutical research, is dominated by industry. Given that collyw works in a bioinformatics organization, my underlying question was why collyw discounted all of the cutting edge technology coming out of academic bioinformatics research. I could also have pointed out, say, cutting edge techniques in photochemistry for arene C-H amination, which came from a university (see http://www.sciencemag.org/content/349/6254/1326 http://www.sciencemag.org/content/349/6254/1326 ). By limiting "tech" to those areas of software where Google and Microsoft have a strong business interest, then of course they will have a strong presence. I wanted to highlight that possible bias.
- collyw 11y ago
  Illumina is coming up with most of the technology making the bioinformatics research possible. The bioinformaticians are generally running perl or python scripts on the data, not coming up with new technology.
  - dalke 11y ago
    I don't understand what this is supposed to mean. New methods of analyzing data, which can be implemented as a script, is also new technology. But it sounds like you are excluding it as a possibility. Again, what do you call "tech"? Intel provides most of the CPUs that Google, Microsoft, etc. use. Can't I be equally dismissive and say that Intel provides the tech and Google/MS merely run programs on top of it?
    - collyw 11y ago
      I would say that what you are describing is research not tech. But yes when I originally posted I meant IT (though someone on here told me that term sounded very dated).
      - dalke 11y ago
        Then yes, there's more new IT coming out of IT companies than from research universities.

by tikhonj 11y ago

dalke 11y ago

Of course we can't discount them. My own field of research, chemical information as it applies to pharmaceutical research, is dominated by industry. Given that collyw works in a bioinformatics organization, my underlying question was why collyw discounted all of the cutting edge technology coming out of academic bioinformatics research. I could also have pointed out, say, cutting edge techniques in photochemistry for arene C-H amination, which came from a university (see http://www.sciencemag.org/content/349/6254/1326 http://www.sciencemag.org/content/349/6254/1326 ). By limiting "tech" to those areas of software where Google and Microsoft have a strong business interest, then of course they will have a strong presence. I wanted to highlight that possible bias.

collyw 11y ago
Illumina is coming up with most of the technology making the bioinformatics research possible. The bioinformaticians are generally running perl or python scripts on the data, not coming up with new technology.
- dalke 11y ago
  I don't understand what this is supposed to mean. New methods of analyzing data, which can be implemented as a script, is also new technology. But it sounds like you are excluding it as a possibility. Again, what do you call "tech"? Intel provides most of the CPUs that Google, Microsoft, etc. use. Can't I be equally dismissive and say that Intel provides the tech and Google/MS merely run programs on top of it?
  - collyw 11y ago
    I would say that what you are describing is research not tech. But yes when I originally posted I meant IT (though someone on here told me that term sounded very dated).
    - dalke 11y ago
      Then yes, there's more new IT coming out of IT companies than from research universities.