nodalpoint.org

I have been noticing that Nodalpoint's "Who's online" box has been showing somewhere in between 20 to 80 people online at any given time and this got me thinking again on how internet has been such a strong positive force for the development of collaborative work. Open source software comes to mind as one of the best examples of what you can achieve by getting interested people together in a virtual space. Why can't we do the same for scientific research ?

Yet another tags editorial in Nature. I think they're pushing Connotea pretty hard... Of course, they may just be fans of the technology.

Hi all,
i would like to know whether it is compatible to use perl on Windows or Linux operating systems??

Spotted this article a while back: Everything about HubMed. A nice overview of HubMed's features such as RSS feeds, the biologging site (depreciated in favour of HubMed tags ?), link-outs, touch-graph etc.

A new Journal list on Bioinformatics, as a guide to publication and reference in my bioinformatics study life and research work.
Nature
Science
Nature Review Genetics
Nature Genetics
Nature Biotechnology
Nature Molecualr System Biology
PLoS Biology
PLoS Genetics
PLoS Computational Biology
PNAS
Journal of Proteome Research
Genome Biology
Genome Research
Genomics, Proteomics & Bioinformatics (GPB)

Hi, I am new Nodalpointer. It is my first time here. Thanks Greg for the excellent work. I am very intereted in Bioinformatics.Wish I could learn more from NThanks Nodalpoint.

I discovered a nice tutorial on searching Entrez using EUtils and Python. The tutorial is part of the larger Scripting Bioinformatics course, available from the University of Aarhus Department of Computer Science. What I liked about this tutorial was the inclusion of more advanced of python techniques such as generators and iterators.

Spitshine over at A Bioinformatics Blog muses over the importance (or otherwise) of impact factor. I was going to comment over there but it involved some registration with which I wasn't too comfortable (sorry mate).

I agree with his post - impact factor has always struck me as one of the great lies of science and one that I don't want to live. I'd even say that how someone feels about impact factor is one of the criteria that I use to determine what kind of scientist they are - the stuffy, traditional unimaginative kind or the enlightened and serene type that inhabit Nodal :).

Unfortunately, many people that I know are happy to live this lie. Whenever I'm writing up a paper, there is always discussion about where to send it and the impact factor. It's an entrenched attitude that won't change until more people are willing to just "put it out there", in an appropriate forum, as opposed to worrying about status.

Drupal 4.6.3 has been released, including a fix for a new security vulnerability in the third-party XML-RPC library that Drupal ships with. Upgrading (or removing xmlrpc.php) is Strongly-Recommended, nodalpoint's Drupal install has been patched accordingly.

I think this is a potential "Nodalpoint paper of the month". Using MD5 hashes of sequence fragments to create unique identifiers (Smith et al., 2005).

We present a rapid and efficient method to map sequence identifiers across databases. The method uses the MD5 checksum algorithm for message integrity to generate sequence fingerprints and uses these fingerprints as hash strings to map sequences across databases. The program, called MagicMatch, is able to cross-link any of the major sequence databases within a few seconds on a modest desktop computer.