6 ms·

A Statistical Search for Genomic Truths

41 points by adenadel 9y ago

mangecoeur 9y ago
I initially read that is 'gnomic truths' which might have been even more interesting ;)
hprotagonist 9y ago
finally, someone with their head seemingly screwed on straight and willing to talk about it in public. while i’m not intimately familiar with her work, i agree with her underlying philosophy: biology is weird and noisy and a hard but valuable row to hoe.
- searine 9y ago
  >biology is weird and noisy and a hard but valuable row to hoe. I think this is definitely the general feeling among genomicists. We've all learned hard lessons about the difficulty of finding the ground truth. A running gag among my colleagues and I are pointing out the seemingly endless stream of CS people who claim that "biology is just software" and how they want to use "machine-learning" or "big-data" to "disrupt" medicine. While I'm sure the their heart is in the right place, move fast and break things doesn't really work well when your subject is living beings.
  - daemonk 9y ago
    Yeah, agreed. The number of times I hear tech bros giving me buzz words to "solve" my analysis...
  - hprotagonist 9y ago
    http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2007/11/06/andy_grove_rich_famous_smart_and_wrong http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2007/11/06/and... Yup. (I'm a biomedical researcher, so .. very similar observations.)
  - dekhn 9y ago
    Most genomicists don't care how the system works under the hood. They've already abstracted things to the level of base pairs and working with statistics. This Biophysicists are the people who care about the underlying physical mechanisms of those systems. The thing to understand is Barb was cross-trained- she worked in a deep statistics group (Jordan) but was embedded in a bio lab, and picked up all the necessary knowledge to understand the biological context. Most CS and stats people don't do that- they move up the chain to the convenient level of abstraction, and ignore the details below.
- onuralp 9y ago
  She is great. Check out MIA seminar series [0] featuring like-minded researchers. [0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14647070 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14647070
  - hprotagonist 9y ago
    and it's even local to me. cheers!

41 points by adenadel 9y ago

I initially read that is 'gnomic truths' which might have been even more interesting ;)

finally, someone with their head seemingly screwed on straight and willing to talk about it in public. while i’m not intimately familiar with her work, i agree with her underlying philosophy: biology is weird and noisy and a hard but valuable row to hoe.

searine 9y ago
>biology is weird and noisy and a hard but valuable row to hoe. I think this is definitely the general feeling among genomicists. We've all learned hard lessons about the difficulty of finding the ground truth. A running gag among my colleagues and I are pointing out the seemingly endless stream of CS people who claim that "biology is just software" and how they want to use "machine-learning" or "big-data" to "disrupt" medicine. While I'm sure the their heart is in the right place, move fast and break things doesn't really work well when your subject is living beings.
- daemonk 9y ago
  Yeah, agreed. The number of times I hear tech bros giving me buzz words to "solve" my analysis...
- hprotagonist 9y ago
  http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2007/11/06/andy_grove_rich_famous_smart_and_wrong http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2007/11/06/and... Yup. (I'm a biomedical researcher, so .. very similar observations.)
- dekhn 9y ago
  Most genomicists don't care how the system works under the hood. They've already abstracted things to the level of base pairs and working with statistics. This Biophysicists are the people who care about the underlying physical mechanisms of those systems. The thing to understand is Barb was cross-trained- she worked in a deep statistics group (Jordan) but was embedded in a bio lab, and picked up all the necessary knowledge to understand the biological context. Most CS and stats people don't do that- they move up the chain to the convenient level of abstraction, and ignore the details below.
onuralp 9y ago
She is great. Check out MIA seminar series [0] featuring like-minded researchers. [0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14647070 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14647070
- hprotagonist 9y ago
  and it's even local to me. cheers!