I've been asked -- in several different contexts now -- whether not the openness of my lab has had any specific impact. I blog about active research; we develop our code in the open; we post papers to arXiv; we emphasize remixability; I'm pushing open data in consortia; and we are trying …
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At the "What to Teach Biologists about Computing" meeting (discussed here, a bit) we received a strong message from Our Dear MozSciLabLeader, Kaitlin Thaney. The message was this: if we want to maximize reuse and remixing of educational materials, we should explicitly license them under CC0. (See her talk and …
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We all know that biology (along with other sciences) is becoming ever more data intensive. Biologists (among other scientists) are not terribly well prepared for this, because of a lack of computational culture, lack of computational training, and a lack of tools. What do they need to know?
This question …
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(This blog post was mightily helped by Qingpeng Zhang, the first author of the paper; he wrote the pipeline. I just ran it a bunch :)
We have been benchmarking k-mer counters in a variety of ways, in preparation for an upcoming paper. As with the diginorm paper we are automating …
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My father, Gerry Brown, passed away yesterday. He had been convalescent for some time, so this was not entirely unexpected, but it sure is final when it happens.
Gerry was a fairly well known physicist. His Wikipedia page gives a pretty good summary of his professional life, and I am …
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I've been reading Peter Seibel's excellent book, Coders at Work, which is a transcription of interviews with a dozen or so very well known and impactful programmers. After the first two interviews, I found myself itching to highlight certain sections, and then I thought, heck, why not post some of …
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I just finished reading The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, an excellent book about the HeLa cell line cultured from cancerous cells taken from Henrietta Lacks. In addition to raising some really interesting and astonishing questions about the appropriate (mis)use of patients' tissue samples, a section about George Gey …
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