January 2008 Archive

World of Bioinformatics Quest: Character generation

January 28th, 2008

In World of Bioinformatics QuestTM (WoBQ) having the right character that suits your style is essential. You may think that a hot shot Rubyist is the coolest class to be, but remember that you have to play this character for the next 50 years. In general it’s better to be a character that you’ll enjoy playing, rather than one that will get you more publications but have less fun with. This page will guide you through all the parts of character generation for WoBQ.

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Three stories about science and the web : The movie

January 21st, 2008

In a previous post I wrote about how great new web tools are making it easier for scientists to collaborate, find information, and share information. This light-hearted introduction was rather popular, so heres’s a tongue-in-cheek video version.

Decouple the file parsing from the analysis

January 7th, 2008

A common task in bioinformatics is to read data from a set of files, arrange into the required format, then run an analysis to verify or falsify your expectation. An example would be reading in the yeast interaction network, and protein evolution rates, then correlating the two sets of data to see if there is a trend. Using Perl, you would specify how each file gets read in, arrange the sets of data by gene name, then correlate the two.

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