“Quote” of the day
This is an archive of quotes from 2007, for the current version and further details see Today's Quote or search the quote archive.
- Friday 21 Dec 2007
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Freedom, fairness, openness and equality are not only the principles enshrined in the Olympic games but among the highest human values, a measure against which all nations should be held to account.
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Read the rest in The Dalai Lama urges the world to show more compassion
- Thursday 20 Dec 2007
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Open Access is the Botox of scholarly communications, a cleverly applied poison destined to keep a permanent smile on a publisher's face.
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Read the rest in The devil you don't know: The unexpected future of Open Access publishing
- Wednesday 19 Dec 2007
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Just as scientists would not accept the findings in a scientific paper without seeing the primary data, so should they not rely on Thomson Scientific's impact factor, which is based on hidden data. As more publication and citation data become available to the public through services like PubMed, PubMed Central, and Google Scholar®, we hope that people will begin to develop their own metrics for assessing scientific quality rather than rely on an ill-defined and manifestly unscientific number.
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Read the rest in Show me the data: My question is, are we making an impact?
- Tuesday 18 Dec 2007
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I'm taking my thoughts to a railway station, put them on a train just to see what's coming back.
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Read the rest in Far Gone and Out and Far Gone and Out videos
- Monday 17 Dec 2007
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I adore London. I like the language and I like the people. I also like the England fans. It's just a dream for now, but one day I will go to England. It'd be a big challenge, but I've always loved challenges and near-impossible missions.
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Read the rest in Germano Bovolenta on Fabio Capello and In Praise of Fabio Capello
- Saturday 15 Dec 2007
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The dominant business model on the internet today is making money by giving things away. Be the first to give away what others charge for.
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Read the rest in Freeconomics: Online, there really is such a thing as a free lunch and Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
- Funday 14 Dec 2007
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I've decided to really let my hair down this year, if I can photocopy my arse in the next 15 minutes I'll still make the 9.30 bus home.
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Read the rest in Guardian cartoon "A bit of a do". 2007-12-01
- Thursday 13 Dec 2007
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The rigours of physics have been torn down and replaced with impotent science media studies.
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Read the rest in An open letter to the UK Department of Education: A Physics Teacher Begs for his Subject Back, A fiasco that will destroy physics in England? and The Periodic Table of the Internet
- Wednesday 12 Dec 2007
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So really, political games have always been going on. It's always the same people wanting power. War is always about money, whether its
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Read the rest in Monthy Python's Terry Jones is not the Messiah, he's a very naughty boy getting drunk with Bob Hoskins and not believing in the afterlife and War doesn't end with the Armistice
- Tuesday 11 Dec 2007
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Many artists from my country [France] are a bit provincial, a little stagnant, unbearably narcissistic and inward-looking.
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Read the rest in American talk of the death of French culture is a savage reflection of the state of American culture itself and The Death of French Culture?
- Monday 10 Dec 2007
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We never once stopped to ask, How are we, our minds, going to change with the new internet, which has seduced a whole generation into its inanities so that even quite reasonable people will confess that once they are hooked, it is hard to cut free, and they may find a whole day has passed in blogging.
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Read the rest in Doris Lessing - Nobel Lecture: Have we forgotten how to read (and write) literature?, We live in a fragmenting culture where people read nothing and know nothing of the world, It's the Internets fault and A foolhardy lot
- Saturday 08 Dec 2007
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I'm only happy when it rains, I'm only happy when it's complicated.
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Read the rest in Only Happy When It Rains and Pour Your Misery Down On Me
- Funday 07 Dec 2007
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Hello and welcome to I'm sorry I haven't a clue. You join us this week in Manchester, the fine metropolis boasting a wealth of culture and history. As the epicentre of the industrial revolution, it was here that a phrase was coined that has survived to this day. “What happens in Manchester today, happens in the rest of the world tomorrow”.
So if you're listening rest-of-the-world, tomorrow it's going to drizzle.
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Read the rest in I'm sorry I haven't a clue from the Manchester Opera House
- Thursday 06 Dec 2007
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Computing presents us a form of description. This form is very useful for describing a great variety of phenomena of this world, but human thinking is not one of them, the reason being that human thinking basically is a matter of the plasticity of the elements of the nervous system, while computers—Turing machines— have no plastic elements. For describing human thinking one needs a very different, non-digital form.
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Read the rest in Computing versus human thinking by Peter Naur, recipient of ACM's 2005 Turing Award and Computing: A Human Activity
- Wednesday 05 Dec 2007
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Science is much more than just a body of knowledge. It's a way of doing things that lets people separated by oceans, decades, languages and ideologies build on one another's discoveries. Computers are playing an ever-larger role in research with every passing year, but few scientific programs meet the methodological standards that pioneers like
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Read the rest in Where is the Real Bottleneck in Scientific Computing? Scientists would do well to pick up some tools widely used in the software industry
- Tuesday 04 Dec 2007
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Q: Has it always been your ambition to be an actor?
A: No, when I was young I wanted to play for United and I still do.
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Read the rest in Salford Museum & Art Gallery
- Monday 03 Dec 2007
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So, here are the Top Tips for inclusion [in Who's Who], should you care to join these nabobs. First of all, it's better to be male than female. Be either reasonably bright or reasonably dedicated. Don't worry if you can't have your parents send you to Eton, although it might help.
If possible, get to Oxford or Cambridge, particularly to Trinity College. Work hard, or enter a trivial, but high-visibility trade, like fashion or the music business.
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Read the rest in The great, the good and the vainglorious: Jeremy Paxman reads between the lines of Who's Who and wonders what the 2008 intake tells us about the state of Britain today and Who's Who (UK) 2008
- Funday 30 Nov 2007 (Quote no. 1000!)
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Q: What is the correct term for an adult human being who will pitch a tent outside a shop overnight in order to be one of the first people on Earth to spend upwards of £1,200 [US $2,400 or €1,700] to own a mobile phone for 18 months, just because it is made by Apple?
A: An utter wazzock.
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Read the rest in iPhool and his money are soon parted, iPhone: Not sensible, but, oh, the iJoy of it! and Stephen Fry's “Dork Talk” technology column
- Thursday 29 Nov 2007
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Our thesis is that the current scientific literature, were it to be presented in semantically accessible form, contains huge amounts of undiscovered science. However the apathy of the academic, scientific and information communities coupled with the indifference or even active hostility and greed of many publishers renders literature-data-driven science still inaccessible.
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Read the rest in Data-driven science - a scientist's view
- Wednesday 28 Nov 2007
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While similarly popular “Web 2.0” websites like YouTube, Facebook and MySpace are valuated at billions of dollars, our annual budget is less than $5 million. Wikipedia is the only top-10 website that's operated by a non-profit organization, dedicated not to the benefit of its owners, but to the benefit of humankind.
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Read the rest in Why Wikipedia Does Not Run Adverts and Inside, Wikipedia is more like a sweatshop than Santa's workshop
- Tuesday 27 Nov 2007
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Asia offers researchers new labs, fewer restrictions and a different view of divinity and the afterlife. In South Korea, when
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Read the rest in Are Scientists Playing God? It Depends on Your Religion and John Tierney always wanted to be a scientist but went into journalism because its peer-review process was a great deal easier to sneak through
- Funday 26 Nov 2007
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The British Library strives to live up to its self-imposed title of "the world's knowledge". That knowledge, though, is an odd thing. Along with the Magna Carta and the Gutenberg Bible, it includes Everybody Poos, by Taro Gomi (to help kids over toilet phobias). Not to mention Wayne Rooney's autobiography, Jordan's novel and a book called Do Ants Have Arseholes And 101 Other Bloody Ridiculous Questions.
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Read the rest in Is the notion of a copyright library really sustainable? and Adopt a Book supports our conservation team, helping us preserve the world's knowledge for future generations.www.bl.uk/adoptabook
- Saturday 24 Nov 2007
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It doesn't matter how much money you earn, how many houses or cars you've got. When you lose, it hurts.
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Read the rest in David Beckham says Millionaire England players are “hurting” after their 3-2 defeat to Croatia
- Funday 23 Nov 2007
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The most fun I've had is blogging, or to be more precise, trying to make connections between different areas such as bioinformatics, biodiversity informatics, systematics, digital libraries, and the Semantic Web. My hope is that readers of blogs like iPhylo will get something out of it, but ultimately I don't particularly care because, hell, I'm having a ball.
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Read the rest in Rod Page interview
- Thursday 22 Nov 2007
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Computers are fascinating machines, but they're mostly a reflection of the people using them. In the art of software development, studying code isn't enough: you have to study the people behind the software, too.
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Read the rest in All About Jeff Atwood and Human Computation
- Wednesday 21 Nov 2007
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Funding must instead be directed toward finding this generation's
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Read the rest in Rethinking the Semantic Web, part 1 and Rethinking the Semantic Web, part 2
- Tuesday 20 Nov 2007
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There is a solid physics reason why we are so hooked on gasoline. It has huge energy per gram (10 kilocalories), much more than TNT (0.6 kilocalories). TNT is not used because of the high energy density it delivers, but because it can deliver it quickly.
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Read the rest in What every president should know: If you want to lead the free world, you'd better know your physics, Climate change quiz (without answers), Climate change quiz (with answers), Physics for Future Presidents: The Science Behind the Headlines
- Monday 19 Nov 2007
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I wish he hadn't done it, I have to explain to people it was a joke. I'm an atheist, but I have an uneasy feeling that playing around with names like that could be unnecessarily offensive to people who are religious.
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Read the rest in Peter Higgs: The God of Small Things, Searching for the elusive “God particle” at CERN and Peter Higgs: Father of the 'God Particle'
- Saturday 17 Nov 2007
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Googling signals simple and intuitive surfing, rather than planned researching, and quick answers to difficult questions. The costs and consequences of students entering this digital shopping mall for research, scholarship and interpretation require attention.
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Read the rest in Google (the verb), The University of Google, Beware of people who deem librarians redundant and confuse information with knowledge and Is Print Dead? Books in our Digital Age
- Funday 16 Nov 2007
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I find it kind of funny, I find it kind of sad, the dreams in which I'm dying are the best I've ever had.
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Read the rest in When people run in circles its a very very Mad World
- Thursday 15 Nov 2007
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Mathematics thrives on ideas that harness ambiguity. There's ambiguity everywhere. Zero, for instance, captures both the notion of nothingness, or absence, and the idea that nothing is something.
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Read the rest in What do mathematicians do?
- Wednesday 14 Nov 2007
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I think in my deepest recesses I've always been a scientist.
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Read the rest in Martin Evans interview
- Tuesday 13 Nov 2007
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Simple algorithms plus immense computing power often outperform human intelligence.
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Read the rest in Automated Digital Libraries: How Effectively Can Computers Be Used for the Skilled Tasks of Professional Librarianship?
- Monday 12 Nov 2007
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These pavement cracks are the places where poets pack their warrior words.
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Read the rest in Warrior Words and Rebel Without Applause
- Funday 09 Nov 2007
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When you are up to your ass in alligators, it is difficult to remember that your initial objective was to drain the swamp.
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Read the rest in the law of unintended consequences
- Thursday 08 Nov 2007
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What a mysterious and complicated process good writing really is, not just a way of recording what one is thinking, but rather a way of thinking itself.
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Read the rest in I see blog people and Writer's block? The pleasure and pain of writing
- Wednesday 07 Nov 2007
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One of the Web's distinguishing features is that there's a big gaping hole where the metadata ought to be.
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Read the rest in On Search: Metadata and On Search: The Series
- Tuesday 06 Nov 2007
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It's very easy to declare victory, there are big chunks of the software world that depend on free software.
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Read the rest in Bringing Free Software Down to Earth: Mark Shuttleworth believes open-source is not just for geeks
- Monday 05 Nov 2007
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Today databases violate essentially every lesson we have learned from the Web.
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Read the rest in The Web has taught us many lessons about distributed computing, but some of the most important ones have yet to fully take hold, Web Services considered harmful? and A conversation with Adam Bosworth
- Funday 02 Nov 2007
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I refuse to belong to any club that will accept me as a member.
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Read the rest in Microsoft makes Farcebook a club you don't want to join, Social graphiti: There's less to Farcebook and other social networks than meets the eye, It is 75 years since Groucho Marx first appeared on the radio in the United States and Google and friends Gang Up on Farcebook
- Thursday 01 Nov 2007
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I work on projects aimed at accelerating research in designing new materials, developing future energy sources, studying global climate change, improving environmental cleanup methods and understanding physics from the tiniest particles to the massive explosions of supernovae and finding a cure for cancer. Though I play a very small role in the actual science aspect of these projects, I, nevertheless, am honored to be part of them.
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Read the rest in Ravi Madduri
- Hallowe'en 31 Oct 2007
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It took two decades of research and development for RDBMS technology to go from concept to realisation in robust, scalable technology. Will it take two decades to realise the Web Services vision?
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Read the rest in Illuminating the Dark Side of Web Services and A relational model of data for large shared data banks
- Tuesday 30 Oct 2007
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I don't understand why I'm called a dictator. What is a dictator? It's someone who makes arbitrary, unilateral decisions, who acts over and above institutions, over and above the laws, who is under no restraint but his own desires and whims. And in that case, Pope
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Read the rest in Fidel Castro interviewed in 2007 and My Life by Fidel Castro
- Monday 29 Oct 2007
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I know that getting a paper in Nature or Science is a very limited and even misleading measure of anything.
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Read the rest in Is it any good? Measuring scientific merit, Nature, Science or PNAS? and Does the h-index have predictive power?
- Funday 26 Oct 2007
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Shut Up You Hippy!
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Read the rest in The Young Ones and It revolutionised sitcoms but The Young Ones' influence didn't last long
- Thursday 25 Oct 2007
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I hope the field of computer science never loses its sense of fun. Above all, I hope we don't become missionaries. Don't feel as if you're Bible salesmen. The world has too many of those already. What you know about computing other people will learn. Don't feel as if the key to successful computing is only in your hands. What's in your hands, I think and hope, is intelligence: the ability to see the machine as more than when you were first led up to it, that you can make it more.
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Read the rest in this book is dedicated, in respect and admiration, to the spirit that lives in the computer
- Wednesday 24 Oct 2007
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It's a bit like an album - you've got to live with it for the rest of your life, so you want it to be perfect.
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Read the rest in Queen star Brian May has gained his doctorate in Astronomy - 36 years after starting his thesis and A Survey of Radial Velocities in the Zodiacal Dust Cloud, a thesis submitted to Imperial College London for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Brian May.
- Tuesday 23 Oct 2007
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We understand the commercial value of what Google is doing, but we want to be able to distribute materials in a way where everyone benefits from it.
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Read the rest in Libraries Shun Deals to Place Books on Web and You won't get thrown out of the Open Library
- Monday 22 Oct 2007
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There is no evidence that race is even a scientific concept, it's a social concept, it's a social definition.
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Read the rest in Start The Week, A Life Decoded: My Genome, My Life, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory suspends James Watson for racist remarks, The elementary DNA of James Watson, From the Genome, “Jimome”, and “Craigome” to systems biology, James Watson's folly and The Broken Double Helix
- Funday 19 Oct 2007
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My name is Kay. I am a rather unremarkable physical chemist-turned biochemist-turned bioinformatician, who is currently using computers to answer the most fundamental questions in life science: where does all stuff come from, what does it all mean, and how can I possibly get a high-impact journal to accept one of my manuscripts.
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Read the rest in All about suicyte
- Thursday 18 Oct 2007
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The goal of education is to make up for the shortcomings in our instinctive ways of thinking about the physical and social world.
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Read the rest in The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature and Steven Pinker on language and thought
- Wednesday 17 Oct 2007
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Whereas we now have a fairly detailed knowledge of the myths and circumcision rituals of exotic tribes, we remain relatively ignorant of the details of equilvalent activity among tribes of scientists, whose work is commonly heralded as having startling, or at least, extremely significant effects on our civilisation.
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Read the rest in Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts
- Tuesday 16 Oct 2007
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Robustness principle: TCP implementations will follow a general principle of robustness: be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others.
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Read the rest in Transmission Control Protocol, DARPA Internet Program Protocol Specification
- Monday 15 Oct 2007
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A good diagram is an invaluable aid to clear reasoning, whereas a bad one can seriously mislead. But it is not often that a diagram is good enough to suggest fresh avenues of inquiry altogether...
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Read the rest in Cogwheels of the Mind: The Story of Venn Diagrams and Picturing the genetic code
- Thursday 04 Oct 2007
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I am annoyed to see the computer science literature being polluted by more and more papers of less and less scientific value.
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Read the rest in Stop the numbers game: Counting papers slows the rate of scientific progress.
- Wendesday 03 Oct 2007
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For as little effort as half an hour a day, you can have a thriving allotment.
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Read the rest in The thirty minute vegetable patch and The Half Hour Allotment
- Tuesday 02 Oct 2007
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Recent philosophy, of
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Read the rest in Journeys in non-classical computation
- Monday 01 Oct 2007
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A wonderful new era has arrived in which amateurs can take, edit and publish pictures with an ease, and on a scale, which is still barely imaginable.
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Read the rest in The Age of the Amateur Photographer
- Funday 28 Sep 2007
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There are just two kinds of [programming] languages: the ones everybody complains about and the ones nobody uses.
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Read the rest in Bjarne Stroustrup interview: The Problem with Programming and usable technology?
- Thursday 27 Sep 2007
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Get ready for the era when collaboration replaces the corporation.
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Read the rest in Open Source Everywhere: Software is just the beginning ... open source is doing for mass innovation what the assembly line did for mass production
- Wednesday 26 Sep 2007
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I loved that computer, even though it was useless.
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Read the rest in Space tourist and billionaire programmer Charles Simonyi designed Microsoft Office. Now he wants to reprogram software, Charles Simonyi, Space Tourist #5 at Science Foo Camp (scifoo) 2007 and The BBC Microcomputer System
- Tuesday 25 Sep 2007
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How many species are there on Earth?
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Read the rest in Questions we ponder in the Green lab, If only all scientists were this cool and Why all biomedical professionals need to study evolution
- Monday 24 Sep 2007
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Of course the next bit of criticism to a development that appears to be new and important, is that it will not work. This is a point of criticism that we actually like most, because it constitutes a scientific challenge... Let us take it as the challenge for science and technology, i.e the “Grand Challenge”, that Systems Biology will enable us now to understand the molecular basis for human health, disease and therapy. This book may help get this Grand Challenge organised, by defining a little better what we need to focus on.
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Read the rest in Systems Biology: Definitions and Perspectives
- Saturday 22 Sep 2007
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The first time I heard their album Closer, I thought it was out of this world. I assumed all music was done with that level of style and intelligence. As I grew older, it was a shock to discover not everything was that amazing.
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Read the rest in Natalie Curtis, daughter of Joy Division singer, Ian Curtis, on the set of 'Control', Pictures from the film set of 'Control', I Love Joy Division and Touching from a Distance: Ian Curtis and Joy Division
- Funday 21 Sep 2007
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I have always wished for my computer to be as easy to use as my telephone; my wish has come true because I can no longer figure out how to use my telephone.
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Read the rest in Did Bjarne Stroustrup really say that? and Stephen Fry has followed too much the (telephone) devices and desires of his own heart
- Thursday 20 Sep 2007
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Few would find it acceptable for a library to arbitrarily remove pages from journal issues. We suggest that URL loss is highly analogous.
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Read the rest in Preserving the Web of Science, Informatics: Going, going, gone: lost Internet references, The decay and failure of web references and 404 not found: the stability and persistence of URLs published in MEDLINE
- Wednesday 19 Sep 2007
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Taking a piece of information off the internet is like getting food colouring out of a swimming pool. Good luck with that.
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Read the rest in The information economy is here - but governments and business are still obsessed with 'protecting' information, rather than making it more productive and Digital rights, digital wrongs
- Tuesday 18 Sep 2007
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A new platform typically enables a new set of applications that were not previously possible. Why else would there be a need for a new platform?
But: keep this in mind; look for the new applications that a new platform makes possible, as opposed to evaluating the new platform on the basis of whether or not you see older classes of applications show up on it right away.
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Read the rest in The three kinds of platform you meet on the Internet: Access API, Plug-In API and Runtime Environment, Analysing the Facebook platform, three weeks in and Internet Pioneers: Marc Andreessen
- Monday 17 Sep 2007
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The greatest irony, though, is this. The world wide web was designed in a scientific laboratory to facilitate access to scientific knowledge. In every other area of life - commerce, social networking, pornography - it has been a smashing success. But in the world of science itself? With the virtues of an open web all around us, we have proceeded to build an endless set of walled gardens, something that looks a lot like Compuserve or Minitel and very little like a world wide web for science.
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Read the rest in The irony of a web without science
- Sunday 16 Sep 2007
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Services on the Web, or “Web services”, is a vague term.
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Read the rest in Web! Services! @ Yahoo!, Web of Services for Enterprise Computing and A Web Friendly API? Surf long and prosper
- Funday 14 Sep 2007
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The term [interweb] is often used as a joke or sarcastically, to indicate inexperience using the Internet; for example, “You broke the Interweb”?!
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Read the rest in “Interweb” implies a naive confusion of “Internet” and “Web”
- Thursday 13 Sep 2007
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The english language is like London. Everytime we speak, it is a mongrel mouthful. Wether we know it or not, of Chaucer and Milton and Dryden and Pope and Shakespeare and Dickens and American south central and ghetto rap and Chicago and Australian convict talk and legal and naval and military. Every phrase we utter is an equivalent of London, it's both vulgar and processional, it's both grand and squalid, and that is is exactly what human beings are, it seems to me, it's both animal and noble.
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Read the rest in Stephen Fry 50 Not Out, Stephen Fry interviewed by Jonathan Ross and Moab Is My Washpot
- Wednesday 12 Sep 2007
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To use Long Tail terminology, Roald Hoffman and E.J. Corey are at the head of the curve - the blockbusters. They and their work are widely-recognised and discussed. Almost everyone else's work, regardless of how ground-breaking or clever, lies in the long tail of relatively obscurity. It is of great interest to a handful of people but essentially invisible to most chemists.
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Read the rest in Science and the Long Tail, The Long Tail: How Endless Choice Is Creating Unlimited Demand and The future lies in the millions of niche markets at the shallow end of the bitstream
- Tuesday 11 Sep 2007
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All things are made of atoms, and everything that living things do can be understood in terms of the jigglings and wigglings of atoms.
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Read the rest in The Feynman Lectures in Physics
- Monday 10 Sep 2007
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I don't have an eight-hour day, I have a 24-hour day, so I might be watching the telly in the evening and suddenly have an idea, nip out the back and go for it. That's what happened with the wind-up radio.
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Read the rest in Sheds: the final frontier of male privacy, Men and Sheds and The Power of the Shed
- Funday 07 Sep 2007
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Are you personally affected by this issue? Then email us. Or if you're not affected by this issue, can you imagine what it would be like if you were? Or if you are affected by it, but don't want to talk about it, can you imagine what it would be like not being affected by it? Why not email us? You may not know anything about the issue, but I bet you reckon something. So why not tell us what you reckon. Let us enjoy the full majesty of your uninformed, ad hoc reckon, by going to bbc.co.uk, clicking on 'what I reckon' and then simply beating on the keyboard with your fists or head.
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Read the rest in Wikinomics: the wiki way and wikinomics: how mass collaboration changes everything
- Thursday 06 Sep 2007
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People wishing to use the URLs, rather than the counts, that search engines provide in their hits pages face another issue: The hits are sorted according to a complex and unknown algorithm (with full listings of all results usually not permitted) so we do not know what biases are being introduced. If we wish to investigate the biases, the area we become expert in is googleology, not linguistics.
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Read the rest in Googleology is Bad Science, Bad Science, Googling Considered Harmful and Googleology: How Search Engines Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture
- Wednesday 05 Sep 2007
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Nothing is more difficult to undertake, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its outcome than to take the lead in introducing a new order of things, for the innovator has for its enemies all those who have done well under the old, and lukewarm defenders who may do well under the new.
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Read the rest in The Prince
- Tuesday 04 Sep 2007
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Technology presumes there's just one right way to do things and there never is.
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Read the rest in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Zen and the Art of Ruby Programming, Zinn and the Art of Bicycle Maintenance and A single “right” answer?
- Monday 03 Sep 2007
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When my mother gets a prompt “Do you want to download this?” she's going to say yes. It's disingenuous for Microsoft to give you all of these tools with which to hang yourself, and when you do, then say it's your fault.
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Read the rest in The (Fire)Fox Is in Microsoft's Henhouse (and Salivating)
- Funday 31 Aug 2007
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I believe the chance of a Hollywood-style robot uprising happening is about as likely as a Hollywood-style King Kong attack on New York City. I wrote this book [How to Survive a Robot Uprising] to make fun of all the killer robots in the popular media. I don't believe that the robots have it together enough yet for a revolution. They can barely walk, they can't throw Molotov cocktails, and most importantly, they have no berets.
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Read the rest in Daniel Wilson interview, Daniel Wilson speaks at Google on how to survive a robot uprising, How to Survive a Robot Uprising and Be nice to the robots, one day they will rule the world (yeah right!)
- Thursday 30 Aug 2007
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One can find everything on Google, given time. Is Google perhaps the modern version of 10,000 monkeys sitting at 10,000 typewriters, who, given time, will eventually produce a true copy of Hamlet? Among the one correct version there will of course be thousands with just one or two typos. So, can Mark Twain's remark “Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint” be applied to Google?
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Read the rest in Is Google like 10,000 monkeys?, Googling for a diagnosis - use of Google as a diagnostic aid: internet based study and Who's afraid of Google?
- Wednesday 29 Aug 2007
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There are no heroics; there is no winning through against adversity. There is, however, getting on with it. One takes ones opportunities where one can. There will be fights, but I certainly don't seek them out. Others might, and I'm often grateful that fights have been fought. I am, however, not the first disabled scientist working in a university and I will not be the last.
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Read the rest in A day in the life of a disabled (?) scientist: Sightless in Science by Robert Stevens, A Day In The Life Of A Visually Impaired Scientist and The Biochemist
- Tuesday 28 Aug 2007
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If this book can be said to have a message, it is that one should learn to think abstractly, because by doing so many philosophical difficulties disappear.
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Read the rest in Mathematics: a Very Short Introduction, teaching abstract vs. concrete mathematics, Lost in Abstraction and getting abstraction wrong
- Monday 27 Aug 2007
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When I scored my first goal, I went home and celebrated by drinking a Coca-Cola and eating a Kinder Egg.
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Read the rest in How Cesc Fàbregas plans to save Arsenal Football Club and Cesc Fàbregas finally exposes Manchester City frailties
- Sunday 26 Aug 2007
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We [Pirate Bay] get legal threats every day, or we used to, but we don't have a problem with them - we're just a search engine.
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Read the rest in How three Swedish geeks became Hollywood's Number One enemy
- Saturday 25 Aug 2007
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Ten heavyweight research establishments net 40 per cent of all grants [awarded by the UK research councils].
Institution Applications Awards Success rate University of Manchester 470 163 35% University of Cambridge 379 158 42% Imperial College London 405 141 35% University of Oxford 319 127 40% University College London 369 127 32% (Note above table excludes the Medical Research Council and the value, not just the number, of grants awarded.)
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Read the rest in The University of Manchester leads the cash bonanza, Top research grant winners claim aggressive applications policy pays off and So many grant applications fail
- Funday 24 Aug 2007
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British academia runs on tea.
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Read the rest in Is tea a thought facilitator or pesky distraction?, Cuppotea on Connotea: It's not e-Science, it's tea-Science and In which I utterly fail to conceptualize
- Thursday 23 Aug 2007
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What to do with more information is the great riddle of our time.
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Read the rest in An Intimate History of Humanity and a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention
- Wednesday 22 Aug 2007
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Logic is one of the most ancient philosophical disciplines, and one of the most modern. In the last half-century it has found radically new and important roles in computation and information processing. It is thus a subject that is central to much human thought and endeavour.
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Read the rest in Logic: A Very Short Introduction, The Pedantic Web: towards a more logical “machine-understandable” semantic web, Very Short Introductions (VSI)
- Tuesday 21 Aug 2007
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England and America are two countries divided by a common language.
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Read the rest in frequently attributed in this and other forms, but not found in Shaw's published writings (subscription required)
- Monday 20 Aug 2007
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Our ability to capture and store data has far outpaced our ability to process and utilise it. This growing challenge has produced a phenomenon we call the data tombs, or data stores that are effectively write-only; data is deposited to merely rest in peace, since in all likelihood it will never be accessed again.
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Read the rest in Data tombs: Read-only or Write-only?
- Sunday 19 Aug 2007
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Technology sets me free, but technology also enslaves me. Aikido thought says that the opposite of a profound truth is also a profound truth.
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Read the rest in Linda Stone visits Nature Publishing Group
- Saturday 18 Aug 2007
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I completely believe in the long-term vision of the semantic web - that we're moving towards a web of data, and sophisticated applications that manipulate and navigate that data web. However, I don't believe that the W3C semantic web activity is what's going to take us there.
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Read the rest in Data is the key to taking the world wide web on to the next level. But how near are we to realising it? and Tim O'Reilly's outdated view of the semantic web
- Funday 17 Aug 2007
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The problem with the global village is all the global village idiots.
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Read the rest in Paul Ginsparg quotes, The stupidity of crowds and Paul Ginsparg: Mad Scientist?
- Thursday 16 Aug 2007
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The thing that gets me springing out of bed in the morning and has for the last 20 years is the idea that we could have universal access to all knowledge.
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Read the rest in A conversation with Brewster Kahle and Archiving the Internet
- Wednesday 15 Aug 2007
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Winners do not want change. Those best placed to bring about reforms are the “winners” who have been supported by current peer review procedures. It is hard for them not to accept the syllogism: “I am an excellent researcher, the system recognises that I am excellent, therefore the system must be excellent”.
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Read the rest in peer review, what is wrong with peer review? and how can we prevent peer-review becoming a “cabal”
- Tuesday 14 Aug 2007
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The only time we've really had complaints was in the old days when we only had the google.com domain, and the site wasn't country specific. That meant that whenever we changed the logo the whole world would see it and you'd end up having situations where French users would take offence to seeing St George slaying the dragon on St George's Day. We also had a few emails from British users complaining because the French flag went up everywhere to celebrate Bastille Day.
--
Read the rest in Dennis Hwang: Doodling for Google, Katherine Chisnall is off to Google HQ and Rejected Google Doodles
- Monday 13 Aug 2007
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Science is organised unpredictability.
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Read the rest in Heretical thoughts about Science and Society, A Many Coloured Glass: Reflections on the Place of Life in the Universe, The Scientist as a Rebel and Martin Rees and Freeman Dyson at scifoo
- Sunday 12 Aug 2007
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I think that bioinformatics has to become a field where people without programming skills can contribute substantially. I would argue that all of the programmers in bioinformatics should be working very hard to program themselves out of their jobs (and into more satisfying jobs). Lets build software systems that take this field to the next level.
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Read the rest in Alexei Drummond interview
- Saturday 11 Aug 2007
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The impossible choice at SciFoo is whether to attend sessions on people and subjects you know, or sessions on people and subjects you don't know anything about. It's a lot like going to a new restaurant - for 11 meals in a row.
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Read the rest in scifoo 2007 photo essay, scifoo in wikipedia and what George Dyson's sister says about making mistakes
- Funday 10 Aug 2007
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I'm always an optimist and a bit of cowboy as well.
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Read the rest in Overheard at scifoo, The Semantic Chemical Web: GoogleInChI and other mashups and InChI for newbies
- Thursday 09 Aug 2007
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Personal genetics is a fascinating area, fraught with legal and ethical implications, which must be traversed carefully. That said, it will happen, and if it does, there needs to be some form of ownership system where the consumer owns his/her data and chooses where and what parts of that data go to whom.
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Read the rest in The Session I Regret Missing at Scifoo and Genome Voyeurism
- Wednesday 08 August 2007
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A big topic of conversation at Scifoo seems to be the future of scientific communication. I have renounced using the term Open Access, this term has been applied to so many different aspects of scientific publishing that it is utterly worthless. It's a buzz word. It's cool. But what does it mean?
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Read the rest in Communicating Science in the Twenty-first century and Culture of fear: How can we make young scientists less risk-averse and paranoid
- Tuesday 07 August 2007
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[Science blogging] is going to grow, especially with the younger generations who grew up online. The most popular science blogs now are the ones that delve into controversy, such as creationism and politics. I think there's going to be more and more science blogs that will stay away from that. They'll be more teaching blogs, blogs that popularise science and other types.
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Read the rest in How blogging can save your career in science and Science Blogging
- Monday 06 August 2007
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You have to be confident about what you do know, but honest about what you don't.
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Read the rest in SciFoo: Science Foo Camp in the Googleplex, California and Paul Flicek on Apple Macintosh at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI)
- Sunday 05 August 2007
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The Web does more than just link information. The web links people, and through this workforce the Web scales to challenges that are insurmountable to any individual or organisation. Wikipedia, youTube and flickr are just of the three spectacular examples of this, and scientific research communities have much to learn from these endeavours. So what is the catch? Well there is no catch unless you are an individual or organisation with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. Collectively empowering individuals on the web just means we need to rethink a few things about how we create and share data. Things like copyright, authorship, expertise, peer-review, branding, identity, ethics, aesthetics, rhetorics, governance, commerce, privacy etc.
That shouldn't be too hard. Should it?
--
Read the rest in All About Vince Smith and Geeking out with Vince Smith
- Saturday 04 August 2007
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I confess, normally I pretty much hate going to meetings. I miss my kids. I hate hotels. And many meetings pretty much suck. But last years Scifoo - it was hands down the most intriguing, interesting, and worthwhile meeting I have ever been to. Needless to say I was pretty happy to get invited back - and have been eagerly awaiting this for months.
--
Read the rest in SciFoo, SciFoolery, Nature, O'Reilly, Google and More and Textbook Evolution
- Friday 03 August 2007
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...into the arms of America.
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Read the rest in Bullet The Blue Sky
- Thursday 02 August 2007
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Mountain View, California is the Times Square of Silicon Valley except that there are no lights or people and everything closes at 7:30.
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Read the rest in All About Blake Ross
- Wednesday 01 Aug 2007
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Google might not like the idea but it feels more like Microsoft by the day. A plucky upstart fewer than 10 years ago, it is now the most feared company in the internet sector. Just as Microsoft once towered above the software industry and terrified rivals whenever it entered a new area, Google now does the same.
--
Read the rest in Googlesoft? and Future scenario: Googlesoft
- Tuesday 31 Jul 2007
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Okay, so the [Computer Science] classes are HARD. That's the best part. Getting your ass kicked gives a bit of perspective into the working world of programming. There are HARD problems. HARD problems are fun.
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Read the rest in A Computer Science Degree Doesn't Hurt (Much) and “hard” vs. “easy” problems
- Monday 30 Jul 2007
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It is unfortunately very easy, and all too typical, for constructive discussions to lapse into destructive flame wars. People will say things in email that they would never say face-to-face. The topics of discussion only amplify this effect: in technical issues, people often feel there is a single right answer to most questions, and that disagreement with that answer can only be explained by ignorance or stupidity.
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Read the rest in Producing Open Source Software (OSS) and Nip Rudeness in the Bud
- Sunday 29 Jul 2007
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Everybody's concept of having a friend is different. It can definitely blur the relationships that exist between people. But in the end, I think that Facebook can only reinforce pre-existing communities. We think we have been particularly successful in strengthening those relationships that exist between people who are only “fringe friends.“
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Read the rest in Mark Zuckerberg interview and Facebook site faces fraud claim
- Saturday 28 Jul 2007
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Fame was like a drug, but what was even more like a drug were the drugs.
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Read the rest in The Simpsons and Simpsons subversion
- Funday 27 Jul 2007
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I look at comedy writing mathematically, it's sort of like a proof in which you're trying to find the ideal punchline for a setup, and when you get it it's a very elegant feeling. It's a little like the feeling I used to get on completing a proof when I was doing maths at college.
--
Read the rest in The Comedy and Science of The Simpsons
- Thursday 26 Jul 2007
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Compared to my previous life as a graduate student in Oxford, adjusting to life at CalTech was like changing to the fast lane on a freeway. Instead of Oxford being the centre of the Universe, it was evident that, to a first approximation, Europe and the UK did not exist.
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Read the rest in Memories of Richard Feynman in Feynman lectures on Computation and Tony Hey visits Nature Publishing Group
- Wednesday 25 Jul 2007
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Operating systems are some of the are some of the largest pieces of software that have yet been written. It is an excellent exercise to analyse the structure of an operating system; to identify the sort of problems that designers are faced with; to see what options are available to solve these problems; to understand the trade-offs involved in different options; and to see which solutions were adopted - and why. In this way, the study of operating systems is largely concerned with learning the lessons of others. Many of the ideas and techniques used by system designers are of general use over the whole field of software development.
--
Read the rest in Operating Systems and Teaching deadlock without a computer
- Tuesday 24 Jul 2007
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I'm fanatical about libraries, I think the book is mankind's greatest invention - far more important than the wheel.
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Read the rest in Colin St John Wilson's retrospective on the British Library, London and The Internet and the Printing Press
- Monday 23 Jul 2007
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If then I find myself writing, not mathematics, but “about” mathematics, it is a confession of weakness, for which I may be scorned or pitied by younger and more vigorous mathematicians. I write about mathematics because, like any other mathematician who has passed sixty, I no longer have the freshness of mind, the energy or the patience to carry on effectively with my proper job.
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Read the rest in A Mathematician's Apology, A programmers non-apology, The Music of the Primes and The Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium
- Sunday 22 Jul 2007
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Integrating and comparing data from multiple biological databases is difficult and tedious.
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Read the rest in Automated Querying of Genome Databases
- Saturday 21 Jul 2007
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Yes, Andrew [Keen], we are amateurs on the Web, although there's plenty of room for professionals as well. But we are not replicating the mainstream media. We're building something new. We're doing it together. Its fundamental elements are not bricks of content but the mortar of links, and links are connections of meaning and involvement. We're creating an infrastructure of meaning, miscellaneous but dripping with potential for finding and understanding what matters to us. We're building this for one another. We're doing it by and large for free, for the love of it, and for the joy of creating with others. That makes us amateurs. And that's also what makes the Web our culture's hope.
--
Read the rest in Andrew Keen and David Weinberger debate the web, Everything is Miscellaneous and Everything is Miscelleneous talk
- Funday 20 Jul 2007
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Lick My Decals Off, Baby.
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Read the rest in Lick My Decals Off, Baby
- Thursday 19 Jul 2007
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In silico experiments have hitherto required ad hoc collections of scripts and programs to process and visualise biological data, consuming substantial amounts of time and effort to build, and leading to tools that are difficult to use, are architecturally fragile and scale poorly.
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Read the rest in myGrid and UTOPIA: An Integrated Approach to Enacting and Visualising in Silico Experiments in the Life Sciences and Data Integration in the Life Sciences (DILS) 2007
- Wednesday 18 Jul 2007
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Scientists as a group are only just becoming comfortable in the blogging environment. It's one thing to air your complaints in a small room at the annual meeting of the International Society of Helminthologists. It's another to post them in a place where all of your colleagues--and anyone else with an Internet connection--can read them.
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Read the rest in When scientists go all bloggy, Give PLOS a chance and blogcan
- Tuesday 17 Jul 2007
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When the riders are passing by, I never afflict them. It's a question of respect for them. I chase them for the media, only from behind and never too close. Of course, there are riders who change the side of the road when seeing me. I don't know why they do so, but I take it as a sign not to chase them.
--
Read the rest in The Devil: Didi Senft interview and Val d'Isère to Briançon via Col De L'Iseran and Col du Galibier
- Monday 16 Jul 2007
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Assigning superlatives to the Web is easy: it's massive, it's dynamic, it's decentralised - it's unlike anything else in the world. But one of the Web's most amazing attributes is that it is arguably the largest self-organised artifact in existence.
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Read the rest in The Self-Organised Web: The Yin to the Semantic Web's Yang in Neurons, Viscose Fluids, Freshwater Polyp Hydra-and Self-Organising Information Systems and The Computational Beauty of Nature
- Sunday 15 Jul 2007
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I'm always morally torn by major biotech companies. On the one hand, they make drugs that save people's lives -- treatments for cancers and cystic fibrosis and asthma, And yet, on the other hand, they are pure evil. Companies like this are made up of dozens of people, each of whom, individually, are the sweetest guys. Nice, friendly people who just care about doing well at their work. And yet, together, they manage to pull off the most incomprehensible evils.
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Read the rest in Fear and Loathing in Biotechnology Firms
- Saturday 14 Jul 2007
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Sages have observed that society often honours its living conformists and its dead innovators.
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Read the rest in ISCB Honors Temple Smith and Eran Segal and Dead Scientists Society
- Friday 13 Jul 2007
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You may be willing to allow me, on this doubly unlucky date of Friday the Thirteenth of February, to remind any superstitous among your readers that the 13th day of the month falls more frequently on a Friday than upon any other day of the week.
The distribution of the 13th day in a 400 year cycle Day of the week Occurences Monday 685 Tuesday 685 Wednesday 687 Thursday 684 Friday 688 Saturday 684 Sunday 687 --
Read the rest in Nonplussed! Mathematical proof of implausible ideas, the numbers 7 and 13: lucky or unlucky? and The number 13
- Thursday 12 Jul 2007
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Let's try to do something about this crazy situation in which so many grant applications fail, with the result that so much time is wasted for applicants, reviewers and administrators.
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Read the rest in Never had it so good?, The Tony Blair and Gordon Brown era has been a golden one for British science, Interdisciplinary research could pull cash into science and Science Funding in the UK: grant committees or rejection committees?
- Wednesday 11 Jul 2007
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If you can't know your code works before you commit/publish it, you live in a world of frightened guessing and random punishment.
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Read the rest in Three steps to successful code: source code control, testing and diagnostics
- Tuesday 10 Jul 2007
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Computational biology is, I believe, the greatest topic a computer scientist can study. It has the hardest algorithmic challenges and the most important implications, and it brings together the most fun collaborations. The main challenge, though, is asking the right question: one that is biologically relevant, mathematically clear, and algorithmically solvable.
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Read the rest in ISCB Honours Michael Waterman and Mathieu Blanchette
- Monday 9 Jul 2007
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Computer science also differs from physics in that it is not actually a science. It does not study natural objects. Neither is it, as you might think, mathematics; although it does use mathematical reasoning pretty extensively. Rather, computer science is like engineering - it is all about getting something to do something, rather than just dealing with abstractions as in pre-Smith Geology.
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Read the rest in Feynman lectures on Computation
- Sunday 08 Jul 2007
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Many important topics in computer science can be taught without using computers at all ... By avoiding the use of computers altogether, the activities avoid the computer getting in the way of learning, and also happen to work just as well in countries that don't have ready access to computers in schools. The only materials needed are things like cards, strings, crayons, and other household items.
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Read the rest in Computer Science unplugged, Google Educators, Video of Computer Science unplugged and Primary school Computer Science
- Saturday 07 Jul 2007 (07-07-07)
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The long-awaited computation revolution now envelops us. Information and computation are being discovered as fundamental processes in many fields. Computing is no longer a science of just the artificial. It is the study of information processes, natural and artificial.
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Read the rest in Computing is a Natural Science and Great Principles of Computing
- Funday 06 Jul 2007
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...it's a bit like a giant, manic, weekend-long dinner party for geeks.
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Read the rest in Timo Hannay interview
- Thursday 05 Jul 2007
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The scholarly workflow has been described as having five elements: registration, certification, awareness, archiving and rewarding. These services, while presented to authors as a unified whole, are actually a combination of capabilities provided by the publisher itself and external services where the publisher acts as an intermediary with third parties. Each of them has historically been tightly connected with journal publication, but it need not be.
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Read the rest in Peer review needs to adapt to the pace and volume of information published online and Rethinking Scholarly Communication: Building the System that Scholars Deserve
- Wednesday 04 Jul 2007
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The number of publications listed in DBLP for an author is no indication for her/his work.
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Read the rest in Prolific DBLP authors, Most prolific DBLP authors and Publications by Michael Ley
- Tuesday 03 Jul 2007
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When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind: it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely, in your thoughts, advanced to the stage of science, whatever the matter may be.
--
Read the rest in Electrical Units of Measurement
- Monday 02 Jul 2007
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Muslims go to Mecca, Christians go to Jerusalem, Darwinians go to Downe.
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Read the rest in World Heritage bid for Charles Darwin's home withdrawn
- Sunday 01 Jul 2007
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At the beginning of a project, every bit of work you put in results in something new and exciting. Nothing is more motivating (and addictive) than new and exciting stuff.
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Read the rest in Starting, quitting and finishing and The Dip: A Little Book That Teaches You When to Quit (and When to Stick)
- Saturday 30 Jun 2007
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The problem is most of today's “web services” have nothing to do with the Web. In opposition to the Web's simplicity, they espouse a heavyweight architecture for distributed object access, similar to COM or CORBA. Today's “web service” architectures reinvent or ignore every feature that makes the Web successful.
It doesn't have to be that way...
--
Read the rest in RESTful Web Services, A nightmare on SOAP street and REST or SOAP, which style of service is best for building the Web of Science?
- Funday 29 Jun 2007
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Space isn't remote at all. It's only an hour's drive away if your car could go straight upwards.
--
Read the rest in The Observer 1979-09-09 and Fred Hoyle Quotes (subscription required)
- Thursday 28 Jun 2007
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More than 1 600 000 job submissions were processed using Web Services during 2006, accounting for around 30% of all jobs run at the EBI during that period. InterProScan (1 500 000+) and Blast (120 000+) are the most used services.
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Read the rest in Web Services at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI)
- Wednesday 27 Jun 2007
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Gordon is a moron.
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Read the rest in Jilted John, Gordon Brown, texture like sun and Gordon Brown succeeds Tony Blair as British Prime Minister
- Tuesday 26 Jun 2007
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I am the antichrist of silicon valley.
--
Read the rest in Journalists Andrew Keen and Bryan Appleyard whinge about the Web, Digital narcissism, The web is dead: long live the web, The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet Is Killing Our Culture and Assaulting Our Economy, On Web Utopians and Andrew Keen on killing our culture
- Monday 25 Jun 2007
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...look at how Ruby on Rails is marketed. A big play is made of how easy it is. But if a language or framework is easy then people with low self-efficacy can't win: if they manage to do something with it then they haven't really achieved very much because if they don't manage to do something with it then they're complete idiots. I'm not saying that we should advertise languages or frameworks as being hard, because obviously that can put people off as well, but a recognition of the barriers that people might face may, in a strange way, make them more approachable.
--
Read the rest in How to get women into computing and Jeni Tennidots
- Sunday 24 Jun 2007
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There's something inherently amusing about worms. Perhaps it's just the sound of the words: 'I work on worms' which usually provoke at least the hint of a smile from the person who's just asked me what I do. It makes me think that, just perhaps, spending hours and days at a microscope discovering obscure facts about an obscure animal is not such a bad way to earn a living.
--
Read the rest in A Worm's Tale, The model organism Caenorhabditis elegans, a nematode worm and the Nobel prize winning worm
- Saturday 23 Jun 2007
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British festivals are more unhinged [than their American or European counterparts]. It's young kids having trash fires, going properly crazy.
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Read the rest in Playing the Glastonbury fields with Arcade Fire and Glastonbury quotes
- Funday 22 Jun 2007
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The quality of an institution can often be determined by the size, health and behaviour of the squirrel population on campus.
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Read the rest in Academic Squirrel Rankings, Campus squirrel ranking puts The University of California, Berkeley in the lead and Shanghai ranking of World Universities
- Midsummer Thursday 21 Jun 2007
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Why, this is very midsummer madness.
--
Read the rest in Twelfth Night
- Wednesday 20 Jun 2007
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Some say that personal web pages are passé now, but I disagree. Personal web pages are one of the profound social changes that we are witnessing - the resurrection of the political leaflet, the small business, and the individual. It's a remarkable outlet for free speech, and can fundamentally change the social fabric of the world.
--
Read the rest in Kevin McCurley's personal web page and Irritating Markup Language (ITML)
- Tuesday 19 Jun 2007
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Question: Under what conditions do you have your greatest and most inspired ideas?
Answer: Just as I am going to sleep - it causes sleepless nights.
--
Read the rest in Terry Root interview
- Monday 18 Jun 2007
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Left to our own devices, ...we are all too good at picking out non-existent patterns that happen to suit our purposes
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Read the rest in Introduction to the Bootstrap
- Saturday 16 Jun 2007
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However, one area in which the Web is still lacking is in enabling users to consume information in aggregate. Web sites are, for the most part, rigid and one-size-fits-all peepholes into the storehouses of knowledge they expose.
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Read the rest in Improving life sciences information retrieval using semantic web technology
- Funday 15 Jun 2007
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Blogorrhœa: A blog characterised by excessive commenting on irrelevant facts. We say that the blogger suffers from uncontrollable verbal discharge or “blogorrhea”.
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Read the rest in Blogorrhœa / Blogorrhea and Diarrhœa
- Thursday 14 Jun 2007
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Most of what you know about scientific communication - communication in general, really - is, or is rapidly becoming, obsolete.
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Read the rest in You say you want a revolution, well yeah, we all want to change the world and revolution
- Wednesday 13 Jun 2007
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We have pigs, which we feed our leftovers. We compost, too, and I've planted lots of trees to offset the carbon crater of my 20 years of rock'n'roll.
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Read the rest in How eco-friendly is Alex James home?
- Tuesday 12 Jun 2007
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We've had airline people here talking about climate change, admitting they realise that in 30 years' time a postcard from Bora Bora will be as unacceptable as a tiger's head on the wall is now.
--
Read the rest in Chris Rapley interviewed by Karen Gold
- Monday 11 Jun 2007
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Oxford and Cambridge should be treasured, for together they constitute the UK's only truly global academic brands. Yet it would be utterly wrong to think they represent the majority of our intellectual firepower. Many Oxbridge “stars” actually did their most innovative work elsewhere.
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Read the rest in Our stars were not born in a vaccum: Oxbridge's scientific brilliance owes a huge debt to other UK institutions, Steve Oliver: University of Manchester Cambridge and Ian Horrocks: University of Manchester Oxford
- Saturday 09 Jun 2007
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Scientists drove the early development of the World Wide Web, primarily as a means for rapid communication, document sharing and data access. They have been far slower to adopt the web as a medium for building research communities.
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Read the rest in Alzforum and SWAN: the present and future of scientific web communities
- Funday 08 Jun 2007
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It doesn't take a Rocket Scientist to be a Rocket Scientist.
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Read the rest in Advice to Rocket Scientists, Advice to Rocket Scientists: a Career Survival Guide for Scientists and Engineers and Rocket Science for Secondary and High School students (ages ~14-18)
- Thursday 07 Jun 2007
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On a clear night I still go out, particularly when I'm out in the country or near an observatory to go out and see the sky, to see the Milky Way. It reminds you of why we study all these things.
--
Read the rest in The Six Billion Dollar Experiment at CERN
- Wednesday 06 Jun 2007
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A lot of biologists don't appreciate the back-end complexity of bioinformatics work. The applications they're used to are simply black-box solutions to them. Often they think that bioinformaticians have a big red button hidden under their desks called 'Analyse' that will return the data they want in the format they want.
--
Read the rest in Advice for young bioinformaticians and Bio::Blogs 11: Tips for Computational Biologists
- Tuesday 05 Jun 2007
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DRM-free tracks do come with a catch - your name is embedded inside the MPEG-4 file so that if you decide to casually share these files around with your hundred thousand closest friends on the Net (exactly the result the DRM has tried, unsuccessfully, to prevent) then you're at some risk of getting caught and of having personal information spread around the Net with your illegally-copied files.
--
Read the rest in A glimpse of sanity in the copyright arena
- Monday 04 Jun 2007
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I would hope that anybody looking at it would get a bit of hope, and be uplifted. We need to line the world with beautiful things that give you hope.
--
Read the rest in Newsnight review Damien Hirst special and Diamonds are a skull's best friend
- Saturday 02 Jun 2007
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(To the tune of When the Saints Go Marching In )
Oh Manchester (oh Manchester),
Is wonderful (is wonderful),
Oh Manchester is wonderful,
It's full of t!ts, f@nny and United,
Oh Manchester is wonderful.--
Read the rest in Oh Manchester is wonderful! and Oh Merseyside, (oh Merseyside), is full of sh*t...
- Funday 01 Jun 2007
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Caffeine, one of the most common drugs consumed by Britons in soft drinks, tea and coffee, makes spiders incapable of spinning anything better than a few threads strung together at random.
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Read the rest in Spiders on Drugs and Sheep on Drugs
- Thursday 31 May 2007
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The reason I wrote the site was, after recently coming back to academia, I was slightly shocked by the quality of some of the tools available to help academics do their job. I found it preferable to start writing proper tools for my own use than to use existing software.
--
Read the rest in Citeulike Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ), Connotea vs. Citeulike and Citeulike: A Researcher's Social Bookmarking Service
- Wednesday 30 May 2007
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When I first met my wife she commented that whenever we went anywhere together, whenever we left the house or left a restaurant, I would always look up at the sky to see if it was clear, and to see if I could see the stars, almost a natural habit from years and years of working on mountain tops. And I think that looking at a clear sky is still one of the great joys for any observational astronomer.
--
Read the rest in The Six Billion Dollar Experiment at CERN
- Tuesday 29 May 2007
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Biology is an information science.
--
Read the rest in Is it possible to produce a complete mathematical description of complex biological systems?, Scientist at work: Leroy Hood looks at the Bigger Picture and Nature focus on computational biology
- Bank Holiday Monday 28 May 2007
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That I might drink, and leave the world unseen, And with thee fade away into the forest dim.
--
Read the rest in Ode to a Nightingale
- Funday 25 May 2007
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The human brain is divided into two sections, one verbal and logical which scientists employ when writing papers, the other visual and impressionistic which they use in writing grant applications.
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Read the rest in “Albert the experimental rat” New Scientist 1989-02-25 (via swiss-jokes on expasy), Getting Your Research Funded and Funding high-risk science
- Thursday 24 May 2007
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The scientific method is based on what I prefer to call the inquiring mindset. It includes all areas of human thoughtful activity that categorically eschew “belief”, the enemy of rationality. This mindset is a nebulous mixture of doubt, questioning, observation, experiment and, above all, curiosity, which small children possess in spades. I would argue that it is the most important, intrinsically human quality we possess.
--
Read the rest in The wrecking of British Science? and Can the Prizes Still Glitter?: The Future of British Universitites in a Changing World
- Wednesday 23 May 2007
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I enjoy looking up a the dark night sky every night, its one of the joys of living in Tucson, Arizona and it's also part of this field - the beauty of the connection of the Earth with the cosmos, it's something that you have to see to fully appreciate it.
--
Read the rest in The Six Billion Dollar Experiment at CERN
- Tuesday 22 May 2007
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The metabolic network of most living organisms, however is a complex and convoluted system. An intuitive approach to the manipulation of the network does not always yield the most efficient or desired result.
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Read the rest in Metabolic Control Analysis (MCA)
- Monday 21 May 2007
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Postdocs are expert jugglers: we constantly have multiple experiments, responsibilities and commitments up in the air. We are agile tightrope walkers: from start to finish, we have to balance our professional goals with our mentor's expectations, our family obligations and our personal priorities, sometimes without a safety net. We're capable contortionists: we demonstrate remarkable flexibility when put in a tight spot. Sometimes we're lion tamers, winning the cooperation and respect of those who can be notoriously challenging to work with. Most of all, we're dedicated performers. We know, always, that the show must go on.
--
Read the rest in The balancing act: postdocs are the ultimate circus performers and Postdoc heaven?
- Sunday 20 May 2007
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Bench science is pretty well defined. After all it's been going for near 350 years since the invention of the microscope. Bioinformatics on the other hand has only become accepted in the last two decades.
--
Read the rest in Zen and the Art of Bioinformatics and Web Tools For Scientists
- Saturday 19 May 2007
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They are all trying the best they can but, for some reason, it just doesn't seem to click. I'm sure if Steve McClaren knew what the reasons were he would try to put it right.
--
Read the rest in Paul Scholes interviewed by Daniel Taylor
- Friday 18 May 2007
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Despite what they say graffiti is not the lowest form of art. Although you might have to creep about at night and lie to your Mum it's actually one of the more honest art forms available. There is no elitism or hype, it exhibits on the best walls a town has to offer and nobody is put off by the price of admission.
A wall has always been the best place to publish your work.
--
Read the rest in Banksy: Wall and Piece and The work of Bansky
- Thursday 17 May 2007
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Tensions have occurred between the Semantic Web communities and other communities like the XML and database communities, as some people believe that the technologies being advocated by these communities cannot coexist with each other.
There are challenges to the widespread adoption of the Semantic Web in the health care and life sciences industries. Some parts of the technology are still in development and are untested at large scales.
--
Read the rest in Advancing translational “bench-to-bedside” research with the Semantic Web
- Wednesday 16 May 2007
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Much biomedic literature is now available in online form, but attempts to use it for computational analysis must confront the unsolved problems of natural language processing [NLP]. Hence, if we wish to reason with this information, then we must do so in the traditional way - by collating all information possibly related to the subjects of interest, reading it, and memorizing the relevant parts. In the postgenomic world, however, in which information has been gathered on tens of thousands of genes, proteins, and other potentially relevant biomolecules, the traditional method becomes increasingly difficult to put into practice.
--
Read the rest in Reactome: a knowledge base of biologic pathways and processes and Reactome: A database of biochemical reactions and metabolic pathways
- Tuesday 15 May 2007
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The habitual confusion of symbols with the things symbolized is serious enough to provide a perennial human problem.
The symbol is not the thing symbolized; the word is not the thing; the map is not the territory it stands for.
--
Read the rest in Language in Thought and Action, Mapping data and mapping reality and Map-Territory Relation
- Monday 14 May 2007
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Engineers already see deep similarities between the systems they design and live organisms.
--
Read the rest in Can a biologist fix a radio? - Or, what I learned while studying apoptosis, Injury, Suicide and Death: Apoptosis in living cells and Reverse Engineering of Biological Complexity
- Sunday 13 May 2007
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Ask me my three main priorities for government, and I tell you: education, education, education.
--
Read the rest in Key quotes from Tony Blair during his ten years as Labour leader, Education, Education, Education: The Best Bits of Ted Wragg, How will history judge Tony Blair?, Blairaq: Blair's bloody legacy in Iraq and The Blair-Brown era has been a golden one for British Science
- Saturday 12 May 2007
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“There must be some way out of here,” said the joker to the thief.
--
Read the rest in All Along The Watchtower, There are many here among us who feel that life is but a joke and There's too much confusion, I can't get no relief
- Funday 11 May 2007
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The thing that makes computers so hard to deal with is not their complexity, but their utter simplicity...a computer possesses incredibily little ordinary intelligence.
The real mystique behind computers is how anybody can manage to get such elaborate behaviour out of such a limited set of basic capabilities. The art of computer programming is somewhat like that art of getting an imbecile to play bridge or to fill out his tax returns by himself. It can be done, provided you know how to exploit the imbecile's limited talents, and are willing to have enormous patience with his inability to make the most trivial common sense decisions on his own.
--
Read the rest in Data and Reality: Basic Assumptions in Data Processing Reconsidered, Data and Reality, 2nd edition and William (Bill) Kent
- Thursday 10 May 2007
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It's really true to say that this machine is a leap into the unknown. We really don't know what will happen when we turn it on. So it's a time machine, it's an exploration machine and I can think of no better place to be actually at the moment [than CERN].
--
Read the rest in The Six Billion Dollar Experiment at CERN, Brian Cox helps bring “Sunshine” to the screen and Sunshine: Journey to the Centre of the Sun
- Wednesday 09 May 2007
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Abstraction is a funny thing - just the right amount gives you the insight to solve previously unsolvable problems but too much obscures what you are trying to accomplish thereby leading you astray.
--
Read the rest in What went wrong with GML and Lost in Abstraction? Tackle abstract problems in a concrete situation
- Tuesday 08 May 2007
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We have shown power-law-like distributions in gene annotation (measured by links to the biomedical literature) and research funding (measured by gene references in funded grants). This shows that the research community is still far from understanding the function of all mammalian genes, and instead focuses most of its effort on relatively few.
--
Read the rest in Power-law-like distributions in biomedical publications and research funding and From gene families and genera to incomes and internet file sizes: Why power laws are so common in nature
- Monday 07 May 2007
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In Europe, we are not good to our young scientists. We make them jump through hoops when they should be running. There is a hierarchical scientific system, with a very few powerful people at the top, that does not engage the creativity and enthusiasm of the young - so they vote with their feet [by giving up Science or leaving Europe].
--
Read the rest in Fotis Kafatos interview and European Research Council Deluged After First Call for Proposals (CFP)
- Sunday 06 May 2007
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I feel there is a noticeable difference in talent between Manchester United and Liverpool [Football Club].
--
Read the rest in Gennaro Gattuso taunts Liverpool ahead of their Champions League Final with A.C. Milan in Athens, Manchester United secure 2007 premiership title and Liverpool lose out in Athens
- Saturday 05 May 2007
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I definitely have God's Gift.
--
Read the rest in Kaká interview on Sky Sports, broadcast 2007-05-02, Kaká on his way to being best in the world and Milanchester: Kaká 3-0 Man Utd
- Funday 04 May 2007
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By converting genomic sequences into music, we hope to achieve several goals, which include investigating sequences by the vision impaired. Another aim is to attract young people into molecular genetics by using the multidisciplinary approach of fusing music and science. There are strong associations between music and perception.
--
Read the rest in Conversion of amino-acid sequence in proteins to classical music: search for auditory patterns, Musical Sequences, The Music of Life: Biology Beyond The Genome and Play This Gene
- Thursday 03 May 2007
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All I want to be,
is someone that makes new things.
And thinks about them.--
Read the rest in Piet Mondrian was an electrical engineer, Philosophical engineering and The Laws of Simplicity
- Wednesday 02 May 2007
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Does anybody wonder why people need training courses to use genome browsers [like Ensembl]? Does it really make full use of the web as an interactive medium?
--
Read the rest in The way we present genomic and proteomic data on the web sucks and The growth of Ensembl
- Tuesday 01 May 2007
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Question: You have in Phylip's grant webpage a “no thanks” section listing everyone that refused supporting the program along the years. What would be your advice for the young scientist that is searching for financial support for his/her research? Should s/he be vocal when a strong application is rejected?
Answer: Generally, no. I could do this because I felt confident enough in my reputation. It was fun. These granting agencies can say all sorts of fatuous things in their evaluations and they are never called on this. A web page is editor-free publication so I had fun with that.
--
Read the rest in SciView: Joe Felsenstein interviewed by Paulo Nuin
- Monday 30 Apr 2007
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For the few scientists who earn a Nobel prize, the impact and relevance of their research is unquestionable. Among the rest of us, how does one quantify the cumulative impact and relevance of an individual's scientific research output?
--
Read the rest in An index to quantify an individual's scientific research output and NSPNAS: a crude score for benchmarking scientists
- Funday 27 Apr 2007
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There's another team called Milanchester who play at the JJB [Soccer Dome in Trafford Park]. We've never played them - but they definitely nicked our name.
--
Read the rest in Milan + Manchester = Milanchester, Man Utd 3-2 AC Milan, Man Utd 7-1 Roma, AC Milan 1-0 Man Utd and Juventus 2-3 Man Utd
- Thursday 26 Apr 2007
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So what does this all mean? It means that the inevitable criticism is starting to happen that happens when a formerly cool technology goes mainstream. It's like that indie band everyone liked until they sold a million CDs. This fits right into the Gartner group's “hype cycle” - Web services are now past the peak of inflated expectations, through the trough of disillusionment, on the way toward mainstream adoption.
--
Read the rest in Web services are not cool anymore, Gartner, Inc. (formely The Gartner Group) and SOAP vs. REST is not the WS-question
- Wednesday 25 Apr 2007
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As I noted nearly two years ago in this column, many distributed integration applications, including much of the software running the Web, are based on “middleware dark matter,” which consists of dynamic languages like Python, Perl, and PHP. Not only is this phenomenon still true today but, based on the vast numbers of open-source projects revolving around these languages, it seems to still be rapidly growing.
--
Read the rest in Dark matter revisited and steve.vinoski.net
- Tuesday 24 Apr 2007
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Science is an open road. Each question you answer raises ten new questions, and even harder ones!
--
Read the rest in Meta Math! The Quest for Omega
- Monday 23 Apr 2007
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You never should trust experts. If you believe the doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require to have their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.
--
Read the rest in letter to Lord Lytton 1877-06-15 in Life of Robert, Marquis of Salisbury, Lord Salisbury (subscription required) and never trust the wisdom of crowds
- Sunday 22 Apr 2007
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Much like climbing a mountain peak, completing a PhD will always be strenuous but, depending on the weather, the difficulty in reaching the summit will vary. Before you set out, you should check the weather forecast and make sure that your guide knows the mountain - or you may suddenly find yourself on a slippery slope. You should also make sure that you get along with your guide and that the two of you understand each other. If not, it is likely to be a very long climb to the summit - or you might not reach it at all.
--
Read the rest in PhD survival guide
- Saturday 21 Apr 2007
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Precise specification of URI meaning is much more critical for semantic web applications than for human consumption because programs are very inflexible, certainly compared to humans.
--
Read the rest in Sharing Common Names on the Web and BioGUID: Common naming
- Funday 20 Apr 2007
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This comic occasionally contains strong language (which may be unsuitable for children), unusual humour (which may be unsuitable for adults), and advanced mathematics (which may be unsuitable for liberal-arts majors).
--
Read the rest in xkcd: a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math and language and Randall Munroe interview
- Thursday 19 Apr 2007
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The other thing that is remarkable about this animal [Caenorhabditis elegans ] is it has won FIVE nobel prizes so far! And the pace is picking up, because the last one was in 2002, and now this one in 2006, but I think there will be more for this organism.
--
Read the rest in Craig Mello: Return to the RNAi world
- Wednesday 18 Apr 2007
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Science is the best defence against believing what we want to.
--
Read the rest in Evolving the Alien: The Science of Extraterrestrial Life
- Tuesday 17 Apr 2007
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I no longer enjoy the taste of chocolate - my brain has reclassified it as medicine, and frankly, I wish I could take chocolate pills and not have to taste it any more.
--
Read the rest in How I write: the secret lives of authors, Writers reveal what gets their creative juices flowing and Hack your way out of writer's block
- Monday 16 Apr 2007
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Right now, the internet is too often like a stuffy meeting room on a bad night. It needs to change if it's to live up to its democratic potential.
--
Read the rest in The blogosphere is in danger of becoming stale and claustrophobic and Journalisms uneasy relationship with the blogosphere
- Funday 13 Apr 2007
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It's just a F**KING string!
--
Read the rest in Unavailable source, personal communication, Uniform Resource Identifier (URI), A Practical Guide To Building OWL Ontologies Using The Protégé-OWL Plugin and CO-ODE Tools and Untangle URIs, URLs, and URNs
- Thursday 12 Apr 2007
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Never be the brightest person in any room you are in. If you're the brightest person, no-one can help you.
--
Read the rest in DNA and the Brain and Googling the Jimome with Lincoln Stein
- Wednesday 11 Apr 2007
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The relationship between Humans and computers is extremely parasitic. We are parasites of computers. What I want to advocate for in this talk is more of a symbiotic relationship in which humans solve some problems, computers some other problems. There are some problems that computers can't solve, I want to show how we can easily solve these problems by making good use of human processing power.
--
Read the rest in Human Computation, Why do tagging systems work? and Games with a Purpose
- Tuesday 10 Apr 2007
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We are very very tiny.
--
Read the rest in We are very small
- Good Funday 06 Apr 2007
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I am of course, duty-bound from now on to end all my sentences with an !
--
Read the rest in Semantic! Web! Yahoo! and Searching for the next internet hit at Yahoo! Research! Laboratories!
- Thursday 05 Apr 2007
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It's tempting to draw parallels between the careers of Albert Einstein and Tim Berners-Lee. Both men made world-transforming breakthroughs and then pursued even grander visions. Einstein, of course, never found the unified theory he sought for three decades. A lot of people think Berners-Lee's vision of a semantic Web will prove equally elusive.
--
Read the rest in Bootstrapping the Semantic Web and There seems to be a growing tendency to forget about the “Web” part in favour of ever more esoteric semantic nuance
- Wednesday 04 Apr 2007
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Identity is who you are, identity is what you like, identity is what I say about me.
Identity is also what others say about me. Identity is reputation.
--
Read the rest in Identity 2.0
- Tuesday 03 Apr 2007
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We tried to get NASA's help to develop such a system for years with their mapping expertise and data, but Google Earth answered the call first. I am so impressed with Google that I have named an ant I recently discovered in Madagascar Proceratium google.
--
Read the rest in Ants unearthed with Google Earth and Ants, RDF and triple stores
- Monday 02 Apr 2007
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I feel there's an essential tension in thinking scientifically. It's important to question everything and demand good evidence, but to stay motivated I need to just bask in nature's glory sometimes. Thinking analytically is important, but if you aren't creative your analysis will be empty. For me these types of thinking don't coexist very well. To be productive I need to maintain a kind of dual personality and switch between them regularly.
--
Read the rest in Numinous numinocity
- Funday 30 Mar 2007
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I'm not a cynic, I'm a hypocrite. Hypocrites believe in something.
--
Read the rest in Creation Science 101 and I'm a professional cynic...
- Thursday 29 Mar 2007
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Cells evolved to survive, not for scientists to understand.
--
Read the rest in Simplicity and Complexity in Systems Biology
- Wednesday 28 Mar 2007
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Too many people create a metadata ontology for data that doesn't exist, announce its availability and the kind of data it would be good for, and then move on to create more ontologies.
--
Read the rest in What data is your metadata about, and where is it? If metadata really is data about data...
- Tuesday 27 Mar 2007
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Ruby, Ruby, Ruby, Ruby!
--Kaiser Chiefs
Read the rest in Due to lack of interest tomorrow is cancelled, Goodbye Ruby Tuesday and Agile Web Development with (Ruby on) Rails
- Monday 26 Mar 2007
-
...a minimal Italian dinner contains exactly three courses. Some Italian restaurants in the US consider you a dummy when you skip either primo or secondo, but it is quite common in contemporary Italy.
--
Read the rest in Qualified Cardinality Restrictions (QCRs) in the Web Ontology Language (OWL)
- Independent Sunday 25 Mar 2007 Εικοστή πέμπτη Μαρτίου
-
Spartans in bikinis is Zack Snyder's own idea, and I am not sure it is a good one: these outfits look a whole lot better on women.
--
Read the rest in Briefs encounter: With its war rhinos, marauding elephants and ninja-style warriors, 300 is an interesting stab at history. But its the underpants that steal the show and A “fantastically silly retelling of the Battle of Thermopylae in 480BC”
- Funday 23 Mar 2007
-
(To the tune of Kumbaya)
Cumbria my Lord, Cumbria!
Cumbria my Lord, Cumbria!--
Read the rest in Carlisle United Football Club, Cumbria
- Thursday 22 Mar 2007
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On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.
--
Read the rest in Information Wants to be Free, Information doesn't want to be free. Information wants to be valuable and Freebase
- Wednesday 21 Mar 2007
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The Semantic Web: Unworkable, unnecessary, and unsafe at any speed.
--
Read the rest in Taking a Stand on the Semantic Web, ...now with added meaning! and The Semantic Web: Will It All End In Tiers?
- Tuesday 20 Mar 2007
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Forget test tubes, petri dishes and pipettes. One of the few pieces of equipment that can be honestly labelled ubiquitous in biology today is the computer. Bioinformatics - the development and application of computational tools to acquire, store, organize, archive, analyse and visualize biological data - is one of biology's fastest-growing technologies.
--
Read the rest in Bioinformatics: Bringing it all together
- Monday 19 Mar 2007
-
Almost everyone hates their PhD dissertation by the time they're done with it. The process inherently tends to produce an unpleasant result, like a cake made out of whole wheat flour and baked for twelve hours.
--
Read the rest in Undergraduation and More Advice for Undergraduates
- Funday 16 Mar 2007
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Women are more focused in the workplace than men, who tend to spend a lot of time flexing their egos.
--
Read the rest in This man can makeover your career: Alan Sugar interview by Jane Moore
- Thursday 15 Mar 2007
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Today's software isn't easy to make or change, to fix or understand, to use or reuse. It's as if every violin were a Stradivarius, and you could only play one you built yourself. You'd have to have built it recently too, because otherwise you wouldn't remember how to work it.
--
Read the rest in Slaves of the machine: Gaining power by losing control
- Wednesday 14 Mar 2007
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There are no such things as applied sciences, only applications of science.
--
Read the rest in address given on the inauguration of the Faculty of Science, University of Lille, 1854-12-07 and Louis Pasteur (subscription required)
- Tuesday 13 Mar 2007
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Why learn an artificial language?
Like Latin, this language is not spoken, but unlike Latin, it is used every day by mathematicians, philosophers, computer scientists, linguists, and practitioners of artificial intelligence. Indeed, in some ways it is the lingua franca of the symbolic sciences.
--
Read the rest in The Language of First-Order Logic and Artificial vs. Natural Languages
- Monday 12 Mar 2007
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'Science' has become something of an honorific term, and all sorts of disciplines that are quite unlike physics or chemistry are eager to call themselves 'science'.
A good rule of thumb to keep in mind is that anything that calls itself a science probably isn't.
--
Read the rest in Speech acts: an essay in the philosophy of language, Life “Science”, Computer “Science”, Mathematical “Science”
- Funday 09 Mar 2007
-
D'ya like that?
--
Read the rest in Fred Dibnah's Ups And Downs Of Chimneys
- Thursday 08 Mar 2007
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We have actually succeeded in making our discipline a science, and in a remarkably simple way: merely by deciding to call it “computer science”.
--
Read the rest in Computer Programming as an Art, Computer Science is neither a Science nor about Computers and Anything that calls itself a Science, probably isn't
- Wednesday 07 Mar 2007
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We dangle our three magic letters PhD before the eyes of these predestined victims, and they swarm to us like moths to an electric light.
--
Read the rest in The Ph.D. Octopus, Harvard Monthly 1903
- Tuesday 06 Mar 2007
-
There are many ways of making a million pounds, but doing a PhD is not likely to be one of them.
--Estelle M. Phillips and
Read the rest in How not to get a PhD, How to get a PhD: A handbook for students and their supervisors and Rock 'n' Roll or PhD?
- Monday 05 Mar 2007
-
We do have a wonderful propensity in this country to doubt our ability. We have fantastic examples of excellence at every level, whether it's in the arts, sciences, in the quality of our policing or armed services. And yet we sometimes enter a tunnel of despair about it which few other countries actually do.
--
Read the rest in Sebastian Coe interview
- Funday 02 Mar 2007
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My PhD dissertation is killing me as we speak. I have nothing nice to say about it.
--
Read the rest in Bijan Parsia
- Thursday 01 Mar 2007
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It's nice to be first, but it's better to be right.
--
Read the rest in And the second shall be first: Lessons from Harry Truman's unexpected victory, it's better to be wrong than vague and Pretty structures, but what about the data?, A scientist's nightmare: software problem leads to five retractions and Geoffrey Chang et al Retraction
- Wednesday 28 Feb 2007
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History has so far produced exactly one system in which trillions of facts are transmitted to billions of learners: the system of publishing the written word. No other system comes within a factor of a million of this performance benchmark. This in spite of the fact that the written word is notoriously imprecise and ambiguous.
--
Read the rest in The prospects for Artificial Intelligence (AI): Accelerating Change
- Tuesday 27 Feb 2007
-
Over the past year the number of genomes available from Ensembl has increased from 15 to 33, with the addition of sites for the mammalian genomes of elephant, rabbit, armadillo, tenrec, platypus, pig, cat, bush baby, common shrew, microbat and european hedgehog; the fish genomes of stickleback and medaka and the second example of the sea squirt and the mosquito.
--
Read the rest in Ensembl 2007, hasn't this genome lark become a bit ho-hum? and Keeping up with the Human Genome
- Funday 23 Feb 2007
-
As almost every MIT student knows, a smoot is a unit of length equal to five feet seven inches. Most students also know that the length of the Massachusetts Avenue bridge between MIT and Boston is precisely 364.4 smoots and one ear.
--
Read the rest in A Salute to Smoot
- Thursday 22 Feb 2007
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In this paper we have attempted to convey why computer scientists seem to care so much about a representation language's semantics. In essence, it is in order to prevent ambiguity of interpretation of statements in the language.
--
Read the rest in Understanding and using the meaning of statements in a bio-ontology: recasting the Gene Ontology in OWL and Ontologies in Biology: Design, Applications and Future Challenges and Using the Web Ontology Language (OWL) to model biological knowledge
- Wednesday 21 Feb 2007
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Bee researchers, like their colleagues who work with Drosophila, will now distinguish the BG (Before the Genome) and AG (After the Genome) epochs. We can confidently predict that honey-bee research will now be even more vibrant and interesting than BG, with great consequences for both fundamental and applied biology.
--Michael Ashburner and
Read the rest in Getting a buzz out of the bee genome and Honeybee genome published
- Tuesday 20 Feb 2007
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So if we can't always trust GenBank®, what can we do? Clearly we cannot just ignore it.
--
Read the rest in Genome re-annotation: a wiki solution?, Wikis for genome (re)annotation and Key biology databases go wiki
- Monday 19 Feb 2007
-
I really don't believe that foreign billionaires get involved because of their love for English football.
--
Read the rest in Delia Smith takes on Chelsea Football Club, Chelsea 4-0 Norwich City, Roman Abramovich, Malcolm Glazer, Tom Hicks, George Gillett and Randy Lerner
- Saturday 17 Feb 2007
-
I've never liked Microsoft, but now I realize how much energy they used to inject into the ecosystem, because it's not there any more and I miss it.
--
Read the rest in Bye Bye Microsoft? and Microsoft is Dead, Long Live Microsoft!
- Funday 16 Feb 2007
-
Given the pace of technology, I propose we leave math to the machines and go play outside.
--
Read the rest in Calvin and Hobbes
- Thursday 15 Feb 2007
-
Humans make the best search engines.
--
Read the rest in Waterstones promotion, Together, humans and computers are powerful beyond imagination and Love is...“just another search problem”
- Wednesday 14 Feb 2007
-
When you think about it, love is just another search problem.
--
Read the rest in Google Roomance, An introduction to Search Engines and humans make the best search engines
- Tuesday 13 Feb 2007
-
Knowledge What is knowledge? This is a question that had been discussed by philosophers since the ancient Greeks, and it is still not totally demystified.
Representation The concept of representation is as philosophically vexing as that of knowledge.
Reasoning So what is reasoning? ...reasoning is a form of calculation, not unlike arithmetic, but over symbols standing for propositions rather than numbers.
--
Read the rest in Knowledge Representation and Reasoning
- Monday 12 Feb 2007
-
But who is to say that records must sell? Records must be discovered before they can sell.
--
Read the rest in 30 Νυχτερινά, 15 Εσπερινοί and Web pages must be discovered before they can be linked-to and page-ranked
- Funday 09 Feb 2007
-
Eric has a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and is still baffled by the futility of a college education in determining one's fate.
--
Read the rest in Who's Who at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C): Eric Prud'hommeaux
- Thursday 08 Feb 2007
-
The [first] trap, then, is confusing naming conventions for terms with the meticulous task of axiomatizing those terms.
A second trap is to argue or study for correctness of an ontology. Yes, one might have a particularly bad ontology, some are better than others, but there is no ideal one.
A third trap, related to the second one, is being mesmerized by the most general bit of the ontology. That is, to spend one's time trying to get the upper part right, to study various properties of that upper part of the ontology, such as symmetry, or sevenfold- or tenfold- branching, or the golden ratio etc. This is one mistake Aristotle made.
--
Read the rest in Applied Ontology Issues, Cyc, Building Large Knowledge-Based Systems: Representation and Inference in the Cyc Project and Douglas Lenat on Computers versus Common Sense
- Wednesday 07 Feb 2007
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In an environment the size of the Web we must abandon the classical ideal of sound and complete reasoners. Our reasoners will almost certainly have to be incomplete, no longer guaranteeing to return all logically valid results, but most likely also unsound.
--
Read the rest in How the Semantic Web will change Knowledge Representation: challenges and opportunities for a new research agenda
- Tuesday 06 Feb 2007
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The SOAP “stack” is a mess, and currently only the simplest of services are able to interoperate. However we believe this situation is likely to improve long term.
--
Read the rest in Services on the Web and Web Services, Web Services: Bloated, opaque and insanely complex, Debugging SOAP, A Nightmare on SOAP Street and The S stands for Simple
- Monday 05 Feb 2007
-
We are the music makers and we are the dreamers of dreams.
--
Read the rest in Ode, “Ode” in Music and Moonlight: Poems and Songs (1874), 808 State ex:el and Willy Wonka
- Funday 02 Feb 2007
-
I'm a big football fan, but there's not much chance to play [football on Bird Island in the sub-Antarctic]. With just the three of us, we can't even play two-a-side. Plus, the beach is swarming with 760 fur seals, so it's not that practical.
--
Read the rest in Donald Malone has lived on Bird Island in the sub-Antarctic for 18 months, Next stop Bird Island and British Antarctic Survey
- Thursday 01 Feb 2007
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When Britain gave football to the world, she also gave it a distinctive terrace culture, rich in humour and foul in language.
--
Read the rest in Shit Ground No Fans, Steve Gerrard, Gerrard and Greater Fanchester
- Wednesday 31 Jan 2007
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It is a truth universally acknowledged that a grid application in possession of good middleware, must be in want of meaningful metadata.
--
Read the rest in Sense and Sensibility: Adding meaning to metadata for manageable middleware, Carole's talk at the Harvard Initiative in Innovative Computing (IIC), It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife and Steve Jones universal truths about science funding
- Tuesday 30 Jan 2007
-
Web 2.0 harnesses the stupidity of crowds as well as its wisdom. Some of the comments on YouTube make you weep for the future of humanity just for the spelling alone, never mind the obscenity and the naked hatred.
--
Read the rest in Time's Person of the Year 2006: You, The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and The Voice of the People?
- Monday 29 Jan 2007
-
Technology is stuff that doesn't work yet.
--
Read the rest in How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Internet, The thing with high-tech is that you always end up using scissors and What kind of an “abbreviation” is www?
- Sunday 28 Jan 2007
-
The scholarly publishing industry remains heavily invested in a dwindling share of today's scientific information landscape: the traditional journal. Change is in order.
--
Read the rest in Publishing perishing? Towards tomorrow's information architecture
- Funday 26 Jan 2007
-
The way to make politics less boring is to have wars, but we've done that before and everybody dies - so that's not good. Instead, we have the European Union [EU], where everybody talks and argues and cajoles and persuades and shouts - but nobody dies - so that is good.
--
Read the rest in The European Union is like a huge rock festival: everyone has colour-coded passes and there are no wars and Eddie Izzard's European podcast
- Thursday 25 Jan 2007
-
With skill and moxie, a “used car” budget, and the tools and techniques described in this very fine book, you (the You on the cover of Time!) can make a film qualified for theatrical release.
--
Read the rest in The Digital Video rebels guide, An All-Digital Approach to Making Killer Action Movies on the Cheap and The Webolution Will Be Televised
- Wednesday 24 Jan 2007
-
Comment is free, but FaCT++ is sacred.
--
Read the rest in The Description Logic Handbook: Theory, Implementation and Applications and Comment is free, but facts are sacred
- Tuesday 23 Jan 2007
-
Comment is free, but facts are sacred.
--
Read the rest in A Hundred Years: The Manchester Guardian and Comment is free, but FaCT++ is sacred
- Monday 22 Jan 2007
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Most words in the language of gene regulation can be spelled more than one way. In English, you might see people writing either 'analyse' or 'analyze'. In genomes, such variation - or even bigger differences - seems to be normal.
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Read the rest in Learning the language of gene expression: New program transforms the search for regulatory regions in DNA and Large-Scale Discovery of Promoter Motifs in Drosophila melanogaster
- Saturday 20 Jan 2007
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What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?
Lack of confidence - every time I start a new piece of work, it seems I have to spend a long while under the duvet thinking I can't do it.
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Read the rest in Sue Townsend interview
- Funday 19 Jan 2007
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Four years of Oxford is certainly enough for anyone.
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Read the rest in Neil Saunders is rather desperate, It's Grim Down South and It's Grim Up North
- Thursday 18 Jan 2007
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If Web Services are the Answer, What's the Question?
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Read the rest in If Web Services are the Answer, What's the Question?, Representational State Transfer (REST) tutorial by Roger Costello and Masters of Computer Science 2003
- Wednesday 17 Jan 2007
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There is something about teaching that makes you a better researcher.
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Read the rest in David Botstein interview, An exploration of systems biology with David Botstein and Those who can, teach
- Tuesday 16 Jan 2007
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In fact nodalpoint has been around so long that it was a weblog before I really knew what a weblog was (or before weblogs were cool for that matter).
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Read the rest in Nodalpoint: on the web since 2000 and Nodalpoint 1st August 2000
- Monday 15 Jan 2007
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I've never had an idea that couldn't be improved by sharing it with as many people as possible -- and I don't think anyone else has, either.
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Read the rest in The Future of Science is Open, Part 1: Open Access
- Funday 12 Jan 2007
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Read the rest in New, improved Semantic web and Semantic Web: Revolutionizing Knowledge Discovery in the Life Sciences
- Thursday 11 Jan 2007
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Short of breaking fingers or sending out squads of vengeful info-ninjas to add metadata to the average user's files, we're never gonna get there.
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Read the rest in Metacrap: Putting the torch to seven straw-men of the meta-utopia, Metacrap is a portmanteau of “metadata” and “crap” and Google and the Semantic, Satanic, Romantic Web
- Wednesday 10 Jan 2007
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What do you see as some fundamental ways that AI in general will impact people's lives in the future?
AI methods (in particular knowledge-based systems) will allow us to make much better use of information in support of the tasks we wish to carry out, and in ways in which the processes involved will be more transparent, open and explainable.
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Read the rest in Austin Tate answers some questions
- Tuesday 09 Jan 2007
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My approach has been not the think narrowly but to think big. The funding bodies want some risk, they want big impact proposals. The EU wants to know if your project will revolutionise and area and beat the US. UK funders want to know that the impact the research will have on the research community. In my experience you are more likely to get this £3m high-impact collaborative project than a £200k project that you would have spent the same amount of time preparing.
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Read the rest in The University of Manchester Good Research Practice
- Monday 08 Jan 2007
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Software-intensive systems can amplify human intelligence, but they cannot replace human judgment; ... [they] can fuse, coordinate, classify, and analyze information, but they cannot create knowledge.
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Read the rest in The promise, the limits and the beauty of software
- Saturday 06 Jan 2007
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Web services and DAS are becoming popular ways to make databases programmatically available. Making these available can stop your website being ground to a halt by users trying to screen scrape all your data.
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Read the rest in Editorial: What makes a good biological database? and NAR Database Issue 2007: Not waving but drowning?
- Funday 05 Jan 2007
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Hofstadter's Law states that: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.
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Read the rest in Hofstadter's law and Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
- Thursday 04 Jan 2007
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Genomes unquestionably contain a rich store of information, but sometimes that information can be deceptive.
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Read the rest in The genome: an outsiders view
- Wednesday 03 Jan 2007
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My finger is on the button.
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Read the rest in Galvanize and Push Button: Wait for Signal
- Tuesday 02 Jan 2007
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Given that this [SNOMED] ontology is used throughout the UK healthcare system, we can only speculate as to the potential improvements in patient care that could result from this work.
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Read the rest in OWL is good for your health and A View of OWL from the Field: Use cases and Experiences
- Monday 01 Jan 2007
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[In 2007] Apple will continue to trounce everyone else for the preferred geek platform. The stigma of being a Web programmer still using Windows will increase.
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Read the rest in Technology Predictions for 2007: Where Is It All Headed? and WS-heaven or WS-hell? and Ruby, Ruby, Ruby, Ruby!