One of the things I’ve found in two years of doing bioinformatics, is that directories quickly fill up with files, usually data, scripts, and results. Working out the contents of each file is difficult as the only identifier is the name, which with lots of similarly named files, is confusing. Using lots of scripts gets more complicated when there are dependencies. For example scripts need the data from one file, or are dependent on an intermediate set of results from the output of another script. These dependencies mean that when a set of results needs updating, usually many times when producing a manuscript, scripts need to be re-run in the correct order. The requirement of manually re-running scripts in a specific order is cumbersome, and easily generates errors.
How often do you check your email? Once or twice a day? Obviously it’s not really necessary to check email more regularly than this. Well, speaking from experience, this is a bit of a fantasy world. Hands up everybody who I checks their email at least twenty times a day? Read more »
Does your immediate work answer questions that begin with “Are”, “Does”, or “Is”?
Do you spend a shameful amount of your day checking for email, reading websites, and playing flash games?
Do you find it a pain to get out of bed in the morning?
Is reading the literature an extremely dull activity, and you rarely read a paper completely?
Ok, so these questions aren’t perfect. Nobody reads scientific papers for fun, and you’re a lucky person if you leap of bed with the expectation of a day solving the world’s scientific problems. But you get my point I’m trying to make. Being a computational scientist is hard work. No one really knows what you do, day-to-day. You have to be your own boss - is the next slice of code you write going to move you any closer to your goal?
Science, biology in particular, lags behind in the uptake of new web technologies. For example blogging is still regarded in the mainstream as a frivolous, self-indulgent activity. While, in business, blogs have been embraced as an effective method of communicating with customers - have a look at these wired articles, here and here.
Neil Saunders has posted a great tip on using the new iGoogle page to synchronise your internet paraphernalia across computers. I definitely agree with his points. Having to “mark as read” the blog posts you read at home, in your work RSS reader, is a bit of a pain. Online tools, as opposed to installed, are where things are going, and iGoogle is an example of this.
One cool thing that google also offers is a new personalised search. Search results tailored to what you’re interested in, based on previous searches. Does this work with google scholar? It would be cool if you could upload your bibliographic database to google and it weighted your searches based on your article interests.