rflrob

44 ms·

391.
ENCODE: The Rough Guide to the Human Genome(blogs.discovermagazine.com)
1 points by rflrob 14y ago|0 comments
392.
by rflrob 14y ago
> but sometimes I just have to wait. Not to sound like the whiny whipper-snapper I am, but why do we have to wait? If there were a technical reason for it, that would be one thing, but I have not been convinced that arbitrary restrict
393.
by rflrob 14y ago
What's wrong with sed and awk? This may be the Stockholm Syndrome talking, but I like awk! As for the sorting, what's wrong with using the -k flag? I only use cut when I really don't care about that field.
394.
by rflrob 14y ago
> Why administration had to grow 4x the pace of enrollment is beyond me. While I won't claim that every single administrative dollar has been well spent, between 1993 and 2007, this would cover things like on campus tech support and IT
395.
by rflrob 14y ago
There's also the possibility that the grad student who'd been working on something a lot cooler (but never got it to work) wanted to graduate, and so pushed out what s/he had.
396.
by rflrob 14y ago
The general assumption is that if you're looking for a transcript that falls below the detection threshold of RNAseq, then it's likely to be so weakly expressed as to be biologically negligible. Furthermore, with the bursty nature of gene e
397.
by rflrob 14y ago
> DNA needs to be read. If you want to identify the genetic code of something you need to sequence it. This is like being able to open the source code other people's programs to see how things work, debug your experiment and is the anal
398.
by rflrob 14y ago
It's not necessarily related. It is, however, pretty closely linked to getting into Harvard. It's debatable whether Ivy League-type schools have more successful alumni on average, and if they do, whether that's because they only take people
399.
by rflrob 14y ago
I find the claim that nobody understands multi-level file systems a hard to swallow. Inside my Documents folder, I have a folder for one of each of several organizations I work with, inside of those a set of folders for one of several dif
400.
by rflrob 14y ago
Nothing got better with Python 3? What about the print function and true division? Sure, those are both there as from __future__ import's, but I'd definitely call those improvements. I haven't switched to Py3k yet either, but I'm just waiti
401.
by rflrob 14y ago
The article raises the specter of a "1x-tax", along the lines of the "IE7 tax". The difference, of course, is that it's easy and free for people to upgrade their browsers, whereas upgrading the screen is not. As inconvenient as it is for th
402.
by rflrob 14y ago
There's certain classes of non-luxury stores that should survive OK. If I need to find a screw for my (insert doohickey here), I'll go to Ace hardware, where I can try out the different screws in their bins, then pick the one that works. Th
403.
by rflrob 14y ago
How can they possibly have up to 9 sigma? 6 sigma is a failure rate about 1 in 10 billion, whereas 9 sigma would be 1 in 10^19 or so! That's oddly similar to the number of grains of sand on the earth![1] [1] http://www.hawaii.edu/suremath/
404.
by rflrob 14y ago
One of my greatest points of irritation with the old Maps app is that there are no scale bars. People working on Google Maps have told me it's Apple's problem, and Apple employees (though granted not people directly involved with iOS) have
405.
by rflrob 14y ago
All our materials are online at: http://intro-prog-bioinfo-2011.wikispaces.com/ (for different years of the course, just change the 2011 to whatever. The current year has not yet been written. The enrollment is typically about 60% grad
406.
by rflrob 14y ago
I teach an intensive "Programming for Bioinformatics" course that, in just about a week, goes from "here's the terminal" to having people comfortable (if not completely proficient) with programming. From there, it's possible to dive into de
407.
by rflrob 14y ago
>Not to defend China on human rights here, but to those accusing China of hypocrisy: China does this to point out the hypocrisy of the US - who is too happy to accuse others of human rights abuses while running turning a blind eye to it
408.
by rflrob 14y ago
Wen plotting dense, largely unconstrained data (i.e. not on a 0-100 scale), I've found a hybrid scatter/density plot to be nice. Basically, for each point you do a kernel density estimation, then color the points according to that. For the
409.
by rflrob 14y ago
It's also worth noting that the NIH has had such a policy in effect since around 2008. It's conceivable that making it universal for federally funded research would so disrupt the business model of journals that they'd collapse, but they'r
410.
by rflrob 14y ago
For those of us who don't follow this site, is there a suggestion as to where the initial half million dollars comes from? That's not always an attainable goal for someone under about 40...
411.
by rflrob 14y ago
> What you don't want to do is to pursue a distribution channel over here [ed: the internet], where you think, well, let's go around the affiliate and we'll get a couple hundred thousand subs. But the promotional, and packaging support
412.
by rflrob 14y ago
While it's certainly bad that California is so low (and somebody does have to be at the bottom, though I'd rather it not be one of the centers of tech), I'm also surprised that even the top states only have about 44% of their students "pr
413.
by rflrob 14y ago
Of course we know that ourselves and our colleagues are a large part of the problem. The hard part is convincing enough people that there is a problem, and that we can solve it by working together. I think JMLR is something of a special ca
414.
by rflrob 14y ago
For an enthusiast, it may not be clear exactly what "Static Fire" means. While Static means non-moving, it also means the hissing noise on mis-tuned analog connections, and it's not inconceivable that it has another overloaded meaning.
415.
by rflrob 14y ago
More broadly, lots of data that doesn't lend itself to a single figure has either repositories (like the Gene Expression Omnibus) or supplemental attachments to the paper that can be included.
416.
by rflrob 15y ago
" The higher a journal’s impact factor, the two editors found, the higher its retraction rate." This is not necessarily evidence of misconduct, however. High impact journals also tend to publish new techniques and surprising results, both o
417.
Academic Publishing: Open Sesame(economist.com)
1 points by rflrob 15y ago|0 comments
418.
by rflrob 15y ago
>Why in the world does a book on Biology sell for $152? In addition to the changes in pedagogical approaches that lead to (if not require) constant changes, there's the fact that what we know about the fundamentals of biology is constan
419.
by rflrob 15y ago
Even if there aren't pre-made bibliography styles, is there a bibliography system at all, comparable to something like BibTeX?
420.
by rflrob 15y ago
Studies published in Nature typically have flashy science. Coupled with the fact that their relatively short format makes it difficult to determine what exactly was done, much less replicate it, I'm actually less inclined to believe somethi

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