Bioinformatics Zen

Pigs are clever animals, and certain people of the right persuasion might find them cute. Realising the market potential of pet pigs, I spent a couple of years selectively breeding them until they were around the size of a household cat. The iPig is small, cute, and just as clever as a normal pig. Combining a great product and some investment capital I started a business based on the iPig. The iPig is a new and novel idea, so I needed to persuade a pet store of the selling potential of the iPig. This was not easy as some pet stores are sceptical about new types of pets, but on the condition I make some changes to the marketing, the iPig was accepted at a chain of pet stores. So I’ve bred the iPig, and got it accepted at a local pet store, I can relax and think about the next product in the pipeline.

Why stop there? The iPig will continue to sell as the pet store gets a steady stream of customers, but I’ve been thinking recently though, I’ve spent a huge amount of time breeding up the iPig, could I also do a little bit of marketing to maybe boost sales of the iPig? Doing a bit of work on the web would be a small effort compared to the amount of work I’ve put in already. So I create a short video explaining what I think is great about the iPig, I also start a wiki to help other users in the development and care of iPigs. Neither of these take much work, and easily findable on the web via keyword searches. Many businesses uses web tools such as blogs and twitter to engage with customers, so in future I might also consider doing something like this for my company. Even further, I know other people are able to create a business model from open sourcing their development process, so I could test how this is useful for the development of the iChicken.

I’m going to return to reality now for a short exposition of the point I’m trying to make. Can you treat your research as a product you believe is important and that you want the rest of the scientific community to know about? For example in future it may that, a research department’s output will be increasingly measured on the number of citations published articles receive. Getting work published in high impact journals won’t go out of fashion any time soon, but the increasing growth of science on the web gives you and your department the tools and ability to increase the number of people who see your research, and therefore include that research in the development of their own work.

Pictures: beeldenzeggenmeer and liberodicrederci

Back from a weeks holiday in Hungary just in time for my, hopefully, last ever year as a student. Last month I had a flurry of work completing a report and poster for the end of my second year, but now I’m aiming to work hard and try and get at least two papers out in my final year: in time to write up my thesis.

But now, to coincide with the beginning of the academic year, and the time that new PhD and Masters students start, I thought I would share some the resources that I found useful through out the course of my own Masters degree, then first two years of PhD.

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I wrote previously about using the file system to organise your scripts and data. I use this method and it does help my organisation, but it doesn’t replace a lab book. I want a system that explains the relationships between the different set of results, and shows the outline of my work.

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