nodalpoint.org - Technology in the news - Comments

Thank you Neil, and well

Greg — Mon, 29 May 2006 07:48:13 -0400

Thank you Neil, and well said by the way. I'm not sure if it is the promise of lucrative jobs or lack of jobs (IT jobs are becoming a commodity ?) in IT that is driving people to search for information on computational biology. My current take on the lucrative jobs aspect is that from the outside looking in computational biology superficially has all the attributes of the next big ICT boom: large amounts of data, the need for people with IT/CS skills, novel method development, application of statistics, potential to lead to new drug development and medical breakthroughs etc. This leads people to believe that it will be the a ticket to fame fortune and glory.

Of we on the inside know that one point of failure in this little fantasy is lack of standards for biological data. My argument is that the incentives are just not there for biologists to work together on formal standards for the life sciences (it is all about discovery). Industry is also not that focused because the market is just not big enough. While microarrays are good business, mobile phones eclipse them by many orders of magnitudes. I don't doubt that the situation will get better, just not as quickly as you would imagine. What it boils down to is that lack of standards makes it hard to commoditize the knowledge necessary to working computational biology. Hence producing humans with standard compbio knowledge to fit into standard jobs is not possible.

But it goes both ways.

People on the inside looking out haven't yet appreciated the need to *pay* good money for people with IT/CS skills to make their computational pipelines more robust/extensible. It is publish or perish all the way, not re-factor and thrive.

IT market

Neil — Sat, 20 May 2006 06:39:53 -0400

My naive assumption would be that you're seeing IT graduates in search of employment. India and SE Asia have seen a huge increase in IT investment and education in recent years and many graduates are under the impression that biology is a source of lucrative jobs. Recall when the human genome project neared completion - there was much hype about disease gene discovery, cross-fertilisation of the IT and pharmaceutical sectors, even dire predictions that the amount of data would be too great for current hardware.

As it turns out, identifying genes is just the first tiny step in any kind of biomedical advance and whilst we can certainly handle the raw data, extracting what we want from it is immensely painful due to inadequate data standards and integration. And now I hand over to Greg :)

If you look at google

maximilianh — Sat, 20 May 2006 05:47:51 -0400

If you look at google trends, almost all queries for "bioinformatics" come from India! The list is INDIA (5 times more than number two), Singapore, Korea, Malaysia, then, heck, Ireland! United States are ranked 8th on this list!
"Football" immeditely gives United Kingdom, Biology quickly UK/US, but "molecular biology" again gives India, Korea etc. Any ideas? Is India so much stronger in "molecular biology" and "bioinformatics" than these other countries or why do people type in these keywords into google, if not?

GTrends

PedroBeltrao — Fri, 12 May 2006 05:01:54 -0400

The time we can waste on Google trends :). I gave it a go as well but it is a pity that they don't have an option to restrict to the search volume of Google Scholar. Maybe there are not enough searches there to make these trends. This way the trends don't really represent the scientific view of these terms. We don't really see in GTrends the buzzword chasing phenomena when you try to compare the different keywords (like genomics, proteomics, systems biology, synthetic biology).
Go give Co-Op a try, it is a bit obscure but there might be something there of use. You can tag online content and make your meta-data available for subscription to anyone (social search). I am not sure that you can access the meta-data trough the normal Google web API but if it is possible than there might be some interesting uses for it. If we can't use the API then it will be again like Google Base (only potentially useful)

Technology in the news

Neil — Thu, 11 May 2006 18:32:29 -0400

Over at my little blog, I've been musing on how articles about web technology are entering the mainstream media. Examples include a recent SMH story on mash-ups (warning: fairly awful) and in the Guardian technology blog, a small piece on Google Trends.

Google Trends is quite addictive and informative. Try "bioinformatics" as a query - the trend for the past 2 years is rather interesting.