Monday, April 30, 2012

MScanner

http://mscanner.stanford.edu/

MScanner
Rapid statistical classification on the Medline database of biomedical literature

Thesis writing figure captions and cross-references

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/word-help/inserting-cross-references-HA001186680.aspx

References menu > Insert Caption (Cross-reference) button

Select text (or Ctrl-A for all) then F9 to update cross-references

Happiness

"The grand essentials of happiness are: something to do, something to love, and something to hope for."--Allan K. Chalmers

Sunday, April 29, 2012

Web data visualization

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5695918/whats-the-fastest-pure-javascript-graph-visualization-toolkit

Dynamic graph network
http://mbostock.github.com/d3/
http://thejit.org/demos/

Charts e.g. pie chart, bar chart
https://developers.google.com/chart/image/docs/gallery/chart_gall

Python 2.5

try:
   ...
catch Exception, e:  # 2.6+ uses catch Exception as e
  ...


try:
    import json # only in Python 2.6+
except ImportError:
    import simplejson as json # but appengine only has Python 2.5

Goolge AppEngine Python Path

In your ~/.bash_rc

export PYTHONPATH=$HOME/Downloads/google_appengine:$HOME/Downloads/google_appengine/lib/webob:$HOME/Downloads/google_appengine/yaml

http://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine/browse_thread/thread/2d78d5c3a7e6e551?pli=1

Saturday, April 28, 2012

Multiparallel libraries in R

snow is for traditional clusters.
multicore is for single machines.

Effects of Love

"If we judge love by most of its effects, it resembles rather hatred than affection."
--Francois Duc de La Rochefoucauld

Cheap but fine tasting eats in Vancouver, Surrey, Burnaby

Food

Gurkha
http://gurkha.ca/zgrid/themes/10658/intro/index.jsp
1141 Davie St Vancouver, BC V6E 1N2


Kyo (All you can eat Japanese / Korean)
2993 Granville Street
Vancouver, BC V6H 3J6
Neighbourhoods: Fairview Slopes, South Granville
(604) 739-8868

Bistro 72 (western)
13483 72 Avenue
Surrey, BC V3W 5V9
(604) 599-1972
UBC The Loop

Hanwoori Korean Restaurant
5740 Imperial St, V5J1G2 Burnaby, BC
+1 (604) 439-0815

Ddoogaubee Restaurant (Korean / Japanese)
4501 N Rd #203, Burnaby, BC V3N 4R7, Canada 81 m SE
+1 604-422-0500

Pho Tau Bay (Vietnamese)
10872 148 Street, Surrey, BC V3R3Y3, Canada
+1 604-585-1833 ‎ 

Hon's Wun-Tun House (Chinese Dim Sum)

1339 Robson St

Vancouver, BC V6E 1C6

Neighbourhood: West End

(604) 685-0871



Midam Rice Cake House (Korean desserts)
110-4501 N Rd
Burnaby, BC V3N 4R7
(604) 568-5357


Anton's Pasta Bar (Italian pasta)
4260 Hastings St
Burnaby, BC V5C 2J6
(604) 299-6636

Sushi Plus
103 10777 University Dr
Surrey, BC V3T 5T6
(604) 588-7587

On Yuen Chinese Resturant
9014 152 Street
Surrey, BC V3R 4E7
(604) 583-3238

Deer Garden Signatures  (Chinese soup)
8580 Alexandra Road
Richmond, BC V6X 1C3
(604) 278-9229

Ninkazu Japanese Restaurant (All you can eat sushi)
4231 Hazelbridge Way
Richmond, BC V6X 3L7
(604) 279-9077

Maurya Indian Cuisine (All you can eat Indian)
1643 Broadway W
Vancouver, BC V6J 1W9
(604) 742-0622

Foundation (Nachos, vegeterian)
2301 Main St
Vancouver, BC V5T 3C9
(604) 708-0881


Guu Garden (Japanese ramen)
888 Nelson St
Vancouver, BC V6Z
(604) 899-0855

Kintaro Ramen (Japanese)
West end
788 Denman St
Vancouver, BC V6G 2L5
Neighbourhood: West End

Vij's Railway Express (Indian)
1075 W Georgia Street
Vancouver, BC V6E 0B6
Neighbourhoods: West End, Downtown

Banana Leaf (Malaysian)
820 Broadway
Vancouver, BC V5Z 1K1
Neighbourhood: Fairview Slopes

Donair affair (Turkish donair wraps)
10786 148 Street, 
Surrey, BC V3R3X6, Canada
+1 604-584-3839 ‎ 


Posh (Japanese / Chinese all you can eat hotpot)
6402 Kingsway
Burnaby, BC V5E
(604) 434-7674


Benkei Ramen (Japanese ramen)
1741 Robson St
Vancouver, BC V6G 1C9
(604) 688-6790

Burgoo (Traditional Canadian)
4434 10th Ave W
Vancouver, BC V6R 2H9
(604) 221-7839


Gargoyles Bar & Grill (Bars, Canadian)
3357 Broadway W
Vancouver, BC V6R 2B1
(604) 733-1159

Golden Great Wall (Chinese Szechuan)
705 Broadway W
VancouverBC V5Z 4K5

(604) 872-0328

Harambe Ethiopian restaurant
2149 Commercial Dr, 
Vancouver BC V5N 4B3
(604) 216-1060

Tomokazu Japanese Restaurant  (Japanese AYCE)
1128 West Broadway, #201
Vancouver, BC V6H1G5
Tel: (604) 677-0434 

U and I Thai
3364 Cambie Street
Vancouver, BC V5Y 2A1
Neighbourhoods: South Cambie, Riley Park
(604) 875-6999

Ta-Ke Japanese Restaurant
http://www.ta-kesushi.ca/menu_01.html  #104-15335,10Hwy,
Surrey, B.C.
Tel : (604) 576-0145 

Five Guys Burger
2002 Park Royal South
Suite 510

West Vancouver, BC V7T 2W4
(604) 925-3483

Friday, April 27, 2012

Bioinformatics Sequence and Genome Analysis


David W. Mount

Bioinformatics
Sequence and Genome Analysis

Tours

http://www.tourismvancouver.com/travel-trade/vancouver-info/tours-transportation/
http://www.charmingholidays.net/tour_details2.php?code=RYWB6/RWYB7&loc=157
http://www.kiecan.com/toronto/index_e.htm
http://www.iletours.com/english/peru-tour-options/christmas-new-year-machupicchu-galapagos.php
http://www.westtrek.com/specials
http://www.rainbowtravelonline.com/vacations/
http://vacationpack.his-usa.com/city/yzf/
http://vco.sax.softvoyage.com/cgi-bin/resultspackage.cgi
http://www.bonvoyagetravel.com/best-buys/all-inclusive-vacations/
http://www.nexusholidays.ca/Series.aspx?sid=14
http://oti.bc.ca/TasteofGreece.html
http://www.estar-travel.ca/Vacation_Shopping_Centre.htm#VacationsCentre
http://www.redtag.ca/vacation-packages.php

Vancouver events

http://vancouver.getofftheinternet.ca/

Get off the internet, is a community-based website that categorizes events and things to do in Vancouver based upon price. Users can post their own events and vote up others that spark their interest. Events with the most votes rise to the top. I suppose the main idea is to organize everything there is to do in Vancouver on a single website in an easy and accessible way. By voting an posting events, users can help filter out the most interesting things going on in Vancouver.

Thursday, April 26, 2012

Convert orthologous homologous genes

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/homologene



#http://bogdan.org.ua/2010/10/27/batch-retrieve-entrezgene-homologs-using-ncbi-homologene-and-r.html
#source('http://bioconductor.org/biocLite.R')
#biocLite('annotationTools')
library(annotationTools)
homologene <- read.delim('../inputs/homologene-build-51.1.data', header=FALSE)

# use BioMart
# human (species ID 9606)
# mouse (species ID 10090)
mouse.entrez <- read.csv(sep='\t', 'mouse.entrez.ids.csv')

# mouse to human
mouse.ortholog <- getHOMOLOG(unlist(mouse.entrez$EntrezGene.ID), 9606, homologene)

unlist(mouse.ortholog)

ISH Database introduction

http://introhumanbrain.wordpress.com/inclass-projects-quizes/project-10-ish-database/


Wednesday, April 25, 2012

Date and Time applet missing

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1648637

$ sudo apt-get install indicator-datetime

restart

Right-click on the panel above > Add to panel > Clock

Restart gnome-panel (ubuntu taskbar)


Alt+F2
killall gnome-panel

PhD Comics - Higgs Boson

http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php?n=1489

Google app engine app.yaml

app.yaml

application: foo-app
version: 1
runtime: python
api_version: 1

handlers:
- url: /test
  script: myapp/test.py

- url: /
  static_files: myweb/index.html
  upload: myweb/index.html

# Static files cannot be the same as application code files.
# If a static file path matches a path to a script used in a dynamic handler,
# the script will not be available to the dynamic handler.
# clashes with script
- url: /
  static_dir: myweb

-------------------

folder structure:

foo-app:
  +-- app.yaml
  +-- myweb
            +--- index.html
  +-- myapp
            +--- test.py
            +--- __init__.py
            +--- json_data

------------------

test
 $ google_appengine/dev_appserver.py foo-app

deploy
 $ google_appengine/appcfg.py update foo-app

Google app engine JSON


try:
    import json # only in Python 2.6+
except ImportError:
    import simplejson as json # but appengine only has Python 2.5

# from stackoverflow somewhere ...

Tuesday, April 24, 2012

Next-generation genome sequencers compared

http://www.nature.com/news/next-generation-genome-sequencers-compared-1.10497?WT.ec_id=NEWS-20120424

Roche’s 454 GS Junior,
Illumina’s MiSeq and
Life Technologies’ Ion Torrent Personal Genome Machine (PGM)

So who won?

Each platform has strengths and weaknesses. If you want the most throughout per hour, the Ion Torrent PGM does that. If you need the highest throughput per run, the MiSeq is there. Accuracy-wise, the MiSeq is best; for generating the longest reads, the 454 is best. Both the PGM and 454 have some problems with accuracy concerning homopolymers [stretches of repeating bases]. And, of course, a user is going to want to look at cost. Part of the point of our paper is that genome sequencing is not a one-size-fits-all solution.

Monday, April 23, 2012

Android Bootcamp 2012 Free Video Tutorials

http://marakana.com/s/android_bootcamp_series_2012_video_tutorial,1017/index.html


Back by popular demand and updated for Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich), Marakana is excited to bring you Android Bootcamp 2012.
Recorded live during one of Marakana's Android Bootcamp Training sessions taught by Marko Gargenta, these video tutorials will get you developing on Android quickly.
Here are the slides from the entire Android Bootcamp Series 2012.
Remember, Android Bootcamp is based on Marko's Learning Android book, published by O'Reilly.

xkcd - webcomic

http://xkcd.com/

Sunday, April 22, 2012

Strength from distress

"I love the man that can smile in trouble, that can gather strength from distress, and grow brave by reflection." --Thomas Paine

Squeaky Wheels of Debate

Squeaky Wheels. We often talk about the importance of having a diverse network, one that includes people who think differently than you, challenge your ideas or engage you in debate. And though we may find these relationships uncomfortable at times, research by Charlan Nemeth at the University of California shows that this slight discomfort actually makes us more creative. When teams were asked to solve a problem by brainstorming--where a safe environment was created and no idea was criticized--the debaters (who challenged each other) came up with twenty percent more ideas then the brainstormers. And, when individual team members were later asked for more ideas, the brainstormers produced an average of three ideas, the debaters produced seven. According to Nemeth, "debate and criticism do not inhibit ideas but, rather stimulate them." Best advice: don't remove the squeaky wheels from you network, instead embrace them.

www.workthepond.com

Friday, April 20, 2012

Google+ API

http://blog.games.com/2011/09/19/google-games-api-social-games/

https://developers.google.com/+/discussions

Glia: Sourcing local produce

These findings provide convincing evidence that the postnatal expansion of glia is largely due to local production of astrocytes, and may have implications for our understanding of the pathophysiology of some forms of glioma, a brain tumour that originates from over-proliferation of glial cells.

Ge, W.-P. et al. Local generation of glia is a major astrocyte source in postnatal cortex. Nature 28 Mar 2012 (doi: 10.1038/nature10959)
http://www.nature.com/nrn/journal/v13/n5/full/nrn3247.html?WT.ec_id=NRN-201205

Limma linear models differential expression

http://www.bioconductor.org/help/course-materials/2005/BioC2005/labs/lab01/estrogen/

Thursday, April 19, 2012

Textfree Web for Free Unlimited Texting

http://pinger.com/textfree/


text and talk free

Pinger lets you call any phone in the US and Canada, including landlines and non-smartphones. Plus get free unlimited texts to over 35 countries.

text message
SMS

http://www.mydigitallife.info/how-to-get-us-phone-number-virtual-number-for-free/

http://receive-sms-online.com/

Name generator

http://www.rinkworks.com/namegen/

web development

http://x10hosting.com/forums/off-topic/148593-how-do-i-start-building-website-im-stuck-forum-site.html

http://www.slideshare.net/peterlind/google-app-engine-java-style
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfgO-LXGpTM
https://developers.google.com/appengine/docs/python/gettingstarted/devenvironment
  • Google App Engine (the cloud http://your_app_id.appspot.com) and Google Sites
  • x10hosting 

Nicholas Sparks

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0817023/


ORNL microscopy yields first proof of ferroelectricity in simplest amino acid

http://esciencenews.com/articles/2012/04/19/ornl.microscopy.yields.first.proof.ferroelectricity.simplest.amino.acid

The boundary between electronics and biology is blurring with the first detection by researchers at Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory of ferroelectric properties in an amino acid called glycine. A multi-institutional research team led by Andrei Kholkin of the University of Aveiro, Portugal, used a combination of experiments and modeling to identify and explain the presence of ferroelectricity, a property where materials switch their polarization when an electric field is applied, in the simplest known amino acid -- glycine.

Breast cancer study reclassifies disease into 10 new categories.

http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/article/1164311--breast-cancer-study-reclassifies-disease-into-10-new-categories?bn=1


“This is a major step forward in building the genetic encyclopedia of breast cancer and in the process we’ve learned there are many more subtypes of breast cancer than we imagined,” said Dr. Sam Aparicio, study co-lead author and professor in the department of pathology and laboratory medicine at UBC.
The 10 subtypes of breast cancer are grouped by common genetic features, which correlate with survival.

Meantime, a separate study by a team of Italian researchers has shown that the drug Herceptin, given to women who produce excess quantities of HER2 cells (human epidermal growth factor 2), reduces breast cancer mortality by one third. However, the risk of heart toxicity went up five times for women on the drug, compared with women receiving only standard therapy such as chemotherapy and radiation.

Achieving greatness

"Every study of high achieving men and women proves that greatness in life is only possible when you become outstanding at your chosen field."
--Brian Tracy


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Tracy

  • "Our mind is the most valuable possession that we have. The quality of our lives is, and will be, a reflection of how well we develop, train, and utilize this precious gift."
  • "Successful people tend to become more successful because they are always thinking about their successes."
  • "If you consistently and persistently do the things that other successful people do, nothing in the world can stop you from being a big success also."
  • "You are the architect of your own destiny; you are the master of your own fate; you are behind the steering wheel of your life. There are no limitations to what you can do, have, or be. Except the limitations you place on yourself by your own thinking.
  • "Resolve in advance that you will never give up, no matter what happens."

Professional master's degree

http://www.nature.com/nbt/journal/v30/n4/full/nbt.2180.html?WT.ec_id=NATUREjobs-20120419


Many PhDs are finding out the hard way how challenging it is to obtain that first position out of the academic laboratory. The skills learned as a PhD student or postdoctoral scientist do not always translate into industry and are often not enough to impress employers. All things being equal, employers will always hire the PhD with additional business administration training.

The reality is now setting in for many PhDs that they need additional training. Professional master's degrees have a proven record of benefitting individuals trained in science, reorienting their career towards nontraditional fields. The monetary and time investment that goes into obtaining a professional master's degree, although significant, is in the end worthwhile.

Wednesday, April 18, 2012

How to get unique data frame rows in R

struct.uniq <- aggregate(struct, by=list(struct$structure_id), unique)


No shame

The handling of results suggesting faster-than-light neutrinos was a model of fitting behaviour.

Physicists saw plenty of reasons to doubt OPERA's extraordinary claim, and Ereditato and Auterio did not disagree. Even as they presented the result, they invited their colleagues to comment, and encouraged others to try to reproduce their results. Within months, CERN had sent a new beam of neutrinos to Italy and a second experiment found neutrinos travelling at the expected speed. After a great deal of searching, members of the OPERA group eventually traced the discrepancy to a cable that was not fully screwed in.

“The message here is that scientists are not afraid to question the big ideas.”

Ereditato and Auterio acted responsibly when speaking publicly by sticking close to their data and avoiding over-interpretation.

Some Italian journalists aside, the press responsibly reported the initial result as simultaneously incredible and very possibly wrong.

The no-confidence vote and resignations are a matter for the collaboration's internal processes, and have no bearing on the quality of the collaboration's science.

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v484/n7394/full/484287b.html?WT.ec_id=NATURE-20120419

School days

"It is indeed ironic that we spend our school days yearning to graduate and our remaining days waxing nostalgic about our school days." -- Isabel Waxman

Tuesday, April 17, 2012

Children of the 90s: Coming of age

http://www.nature.com/news/children-of-the-90s-coming-of-age-1.10396?WT.ec_id=NEWS-20120417

“It's the deepest phenotyping and biobank resource of any large birth cohort.”

Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents And Children (ALSPAC)
http://www.bristol.ac.uk/alspac/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avon_Longitudinal_Study_of_Parents_and_Children

This library is the harvest from an unusual study of humanity. In 1990, researchers started to collect tissues and detailed information from more than 14,500 pregnant women in this western British city and its surrounding region of Avon. The women filled in more than 100 pages of questionnaires about their health, relationships, work and home. After birth, researchers tracked the children's development through surveys, clinical examinations and biological samples. They know what the kids ate, when they first talked, how often they fell sick and when a parent read to them — or deserted them. They know when the children started to hit puberty, drink alcohol, have sex and leave home. In that wealth of data — collected at a cost of some £42 million (US$67 million) so far — they are tracing how genetic and environmental factors in the children's early years affect their later ones.

One showed that eating oily fish during pregnancy was associated with better eye and cognitive development in children5, 6. Another helped to cement advice that babies should be put to sleep on their backs to reduce the risk of cot death, by showing that this sleeping position did not cause any developmental delays7. A third showed the first association between peanut allergy — an emerging epidemic in Western countries — and peanut oil in baby lotions8. Manufacturers soon started identifying the ingredient on labels.

ROC curves with pROC

http://web.expasy.org/pROC/

pROC: display and analyze ROC curves in R and S+


pROC is a set of tools to visualize, smooth and compare receiver operating characteristic (ROC curves). (Partial) area under the curve (AUC) can be compared with statistical tests based on U-statistics or bootstrap. Confidence intervals can be computed for (p)AUC or ROC curves.

In R

http://web.expasy.org/pROC/files/pROC_1.5.3_R_manual.pdf

data(aSAH)
# Build a ROC object and compute the AUC
roc(aSAH$outcome, aSAH$s100b)
roc(outcome ~ s100b, aSAH)

Saturday, April 14, 2012

Ab initio

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22163331


Protein 3D structure computed from evolutionary sequence variation


The evolutionary trajectory of a protein through sequence space is constrained by its function. Collections of sequence homologs record the outcomes of millions of evolutionary experiments in which the protein evolves according to these constraints. Deciphering the evolutionary record held in these sequences and exploiting it for predictive and engineering purposes presents a formidable challenge. The potential benefit of solving this challenge is amplified by the advent of inexpensive high-throughput genomic sequencing.In this paper we ask whether we can infer evolutionary constraints from a set of sequence homologs of a protein. The challenge is to distinguish true co-evolution couplings from the noisy set of observed correlations. We address this challenge using a maximum entropy model of the protein sequence, constrained by the statistics of the multiple sequence alignment, to infer residue pair couplings. Surprisingly, we find that the strength of these inferred couplings is an excellent predictor of residue-residue proximity in folded structures. Indeed, the top-scoring residue couplings are sufficiently accurate and well-distributed to define the 3D protein fold with remarkable accuracy.We quantify this observation by computing, from sequence alone, all-atom 3D structures of fifteen test proteins from different fold classes, ranging in size from 50 to 260 residues, including a G-protein coupled receptor. These blinded inferences are de novo, i.e., they do not use homology modeling or sequence-similar fragments from known structures. The co-evolution signals provide sufficient information to determine accurate 3D protein structure to 2.7-4.8 Å C(α)-RMSD error relative to the observed structure, over at least two-thirds of the protein (method called EVfold, details at http://EVfold.org). This discovery provides insight into essential interactions constraining protein evolution and will facilitate a comprehensive survey of the universe of protein structures, new strategies in protein and drug design, and the identification of functional genetic variants in normal and disease genomes.

Friday, April 13, 2012

Blue Brain project

http://bluebrain.epfl.ch/page-56882-en.html

Blue Brain is a resounding success. In five years of work, Henry Markram’s team has perfected a facility that can create realistic models of one of the brain’s essential building blocks. This process is entirely data driven and essentially automatically executed on the supercomputer. Meanwhile the generated models show a behavior already observed in years of neuroscientific experiments. These models will be basic building blocks for larger scale models leading towards a complete virtual brain.

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15192011
Correlation maps allow neuronal electrical properties to be predicted from single-cell gene expression profiles in rat neocortex.

http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0034786#pone.0034786-ToledoRodriguez1
Combinatorial Expression Rules of Ion Channel Genes in Juvenile Rat (Rattus norvegicus) Neocortical Neurons

Why you should consider being a jerk What you can learn from the jerks at work


Having an opinion and taking credit for your own (not other people's) ideas can make you stand out at work. Being assertive and speaking out when you have something to say can make you look like a leader.

Just remember there is a fine line between being assertive and being pushy, and the aggressive loudmouth on the team who nobody likes generally doesn't last too long. So learn from the jerks, but don't become one.

http://www.workopolis.com/content/advice/article/2178-what-you-can-learn-from-the-jerks-at-work?CID=721:19L:14946

Microbial Genomics, Pangenomics, and Metagenomics in Disease and in Health

http://www.vanbug.org/2012/william-hsiao/

Abstract:
As DNA sequencing technologies continue to improve, sequencing of microbial genomes can now be done routinely. We have gone from a group of researchers spending years to generated and study one bacterial genome to an individual researcher comparing tens or hundreds of similar genomes at a time with the help of bioinformatic applications. Pangenomic analysis allows us to decipher how a bacterium evolves and how certain small mutations could have a large impact on disease outcome. In recent years, we have also started to sequence the genetic material directly isolated from a microbial community (microbiota) in order to bypass culturing. The International Human Microbiome Consortium and associated efforts are trying to decipher the interactions between our bodies and our microbiotas. The metagenomics approach allows researchers to study an entire microbial community in relation to health and diseases but new challenges arise on how to assign taxonomic and functional information to incomplete and sometimes novel sequences. With the increased scale of sequencing, new bioinformatics and statistical tools are needed to facilitate data process and interpretation. In this talk, I’ll discuss the progress and challenges of microbial genomic analysis with examples drawn from my own research and from literature. Through this talk, I wish to demonstrate that microbial genomics has benefit greatly from the technological improvements over the years and there is a bright future in applying microbial genomics to improve human health.

Wednesday, April 11, 2012

Jaccard index

The Jaccard index, also known as the Jaccard similarity coefficient (originally coined coefficient de communauté by Paul Jaccard), is a statistic used for comparing the similarity and diversity of sample sets.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaccard_index

The Jaccard coefficient measures similarity between sample sets, and is defined as the size of the intersection divided by the size of the union of the sample sets:

 J(A,B) = {{|A \cap B|}\over{|A \cup B|}}.

Brain Talks

http://braintalks.wordpress.com/talks/

Talks take place monthly at Vancouver General Hospital. Wine and cheese are complimentary in a casual setting starting at 530 pm, and the speakers begin at 6 pm. Please RSVP to be updated on the location.

Tuesday, April 3, 2012

Blue sky science

Blue skies research (also called blue sky science) is scientific research in domains where "real-world" applications are not immediately apparent. It has been defined as "research without a clear goal"[1] and "curiosity-driven science." It is sometimes used interchangeably with the term "basic research."[2]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_skies_research

Phil Bourne - Professor, Department of Pharmacology and Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences, University of California San Diego

*Featured speaker*:  Philip Bourne, Professor, Department of Pharmacology and Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences, University of California San Diego
Associate Director, RCSB Protein Data Bank and Adjunct Professor, Burnham Institute

Title:  What Really Happens When We Take a Drug?

This is a question which, after generic clinical trials, is still very much answered by observing patient outcomes. Methods from bioinformatics and systems biology are making some inroads into answering this question more systematically through integration of a variety of data sources and important algorithmic developments. I will dig in to some of our work in this area, but if you cant wait refer to Xie et al. (2012) Annual Review of Pharmacology and Toxicology 52: 361-379. I’ll also describe the importance of open science to this collective effort.

http://www.vanbug.org/talk_ppts/2011-12/201204_PhilBourne.pdf

http://www.vanbug.org/talk_ppts/2011-12/201204_PhilBourne/201204_PhilBourne.html

http://www.sdsc.edu/~bourne/

Monday, April 2, 2012

Academy Award for Best Picture

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academy_Award_for_Best_Picture#2010s

doMC: Foreach parallel adaptor for the multicore package

doMC: Foreach parallel adaptor for the multicore package


The doMC package is a “parallel backend” for the foreach package. It provides a mechanism needed
to execute foreach loops in parallel. The foreach package must be used in conjunction with a
package such as doMC in order to execute code in parallel. The user must register a parallel backend
to use, otherwise foreach will execute tasks sequentially, even when the %dopar% operator is used.1

Antibody cell markers

http://www.antibodybeyond.com/reviews/cell-marker-reviews.htm

Sunday, April 1, 2012

Enjoy life now

Learn to enjoy every minute of your life. Be happy now. Don’t wait for something outside of yourself to make you happy in the future. Think how really precious is the time you have to spend, whether it’s at work or with your family. Every minute should be enjoyed and savored. – Earl Nightingale

Helping hand


"Remember, if you ever need a helping hand, it's at the end of your arm, as you get older, remember you have another hand: The first is to help yourself, the second is to help others."

--Audrey Hepburn