Comments by mndoci

Heartily agree. Godin has made me pause and think which is more than I can say for most people

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In the scientific computing world, the move away from Solaris was swift and comprehensive. It's not a question of what's better, but of what gives you the best bang for the buck at an acceptable level and Linux has more than delivered that.

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Nowhere close to prime time, but essential for the future of diagnostics, especially if we want to measure multiple analytes using very small samples. There are some systems on the market today that go in that direction (although not quite where the Health/Hood systems are)

http://www.e2v.com/applications/medical-science/biosensors.c...

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IMO the times is trying, with their APIs, which are a good start. They're just a couple of years late. If you look at their tech side (open source libraries, great election map, etc), they have the people and tech to make it happen. It's a question of management will and understanding.

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That doesn't explain why there are so much women in biology (for example) where the techniques, required skill and knowledge base change every few months or so it seems, and it isn't exactly financially rewarding.

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Poor software is a big reason bioinformaticians (or anyone for that matter) struggles with data. Too much emphasis on features, usability is an afterthought and DRY might as well not have existed.

I shall have to try out hpricot

One thing I am really beginning to appreciate in my new digs, even more than ever, is the ability to abstract away the muck, the stuff that is important, but really doesn’t help you do anything better on its own. Need more of that

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Hari's blog would be the most appropriate place . FF is always good for a good ole argument

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I don’t think refseek is that original (especially since it’s name is too close to the NCBI reference sequence database (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/RefSeq/). The quality of results though is pretty good, especially for casual scientific searches (for “expert” life science searches, I prefer something like NextBio or GoPubMed or PubMed itself).

What I liked most about RefSeek … speed!!! It’s pretty quick for this space, at least when I tried it

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The problem with a lot of life science APIs is non-standard (in the web context) data transfer. Plus most aren't RESTful.

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Great point. I've run into many people who think that humans have to examine results to trust the quality. SNPedia is actually a great example of what I am talking about, since it does take care of much of the heavy lifting as you say, while making human curation easier.

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Just the beginning

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I use a mac (officially sanctioned) at work. There are only a few times I envy my PC using colleagues and that's the functionality they have with Outlook. Nothing on my Mac gives me that kind of functionality. Sure I can hack up alternatives using a mix of apps, but it's not the same experience.

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Not quite true. I know a lot of scientists who program in Java (depends on the community) and there are any number of companies supporting scientific computing that are Java shops as well. Usually you will see a mix of Java or C++, a scripting language (python seems to be the most common) and Matlab. And yep some Fortran holdouts

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He isn't always right, but experience has taught me that he is more often right than wrong.

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Gosh this was a long time ago, but let me try and guess. The idea was to take some of the dictionaries and ontologies underlying Gnosis (now Open Calais), the network graphs in Twine and the structured knowledge in Freebase and mashing them up together. The text and data mining ideas would be along the lines of what Toby Segaran has done with Freebase

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