nodalpoint.org - Page - Comments

Commercial posts

dbodde — Mon, 05 Jun 2006 10:50:32 -0400

Yes, I am. That policy sounds fair enough..

Doug Bodde

So I assume you're Douglas

Greg — Mon, 05 Jun 2006 09:07:33 -0400

So I assume you're Douglas Bodde, VP Sales and Marketing from Biomind ?

I'm am not fundamentally against biotech companies posting informative news/announcements on nodalpoint. However cutting and pasting from press releases and white papers is the wrong way of going about it. It comes across as a little bit contemptuous of the people who run/frequent the site.

Please contact me if you have any questions reading site policy wrt companies/advertising etc. or reply to the post. If I don't hear anything shortly I'll unpublish this post.

Ironically this has already been indexed by google, I came across it today doing a search for 'supervised leaning and biomarkers'. I didn't see biomind.com there...

Murky ownership

chris — Mon, 14 Nov 2005 05:44:46 -0500

At a certain antipodean university, complete lecture notes for some schools/faculties are available for purchase at the campus bookstore. The price tag suggests that more than the paper and spiral binding is being paid for, so I'm sure that this will also be a problem if transferring online. (That having been said, the same university operates a free, reg-only online student portal with a lot of available material. However, the material is not, I believe, available year-round due to storage restrictions).

MIT, on the other hand, has launched Open Course Ware where staff post their teaching materials. Although no credits or staff access is given, it's a very good resource both for students and for new academics designing courses for the first time.

re ownership

e2holmes — Mon, 07 Nov 2005 18:19:32 -0500

MIT has a big open-course project, and they have lots of good courses online some with downloadable lectures http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/

Rice University also has an open course program that anyone can upload courses to: http://cnx.rice.edu/

E E Holmes

thank you!

helgew — Wed, 02 Nov 2005 13:32:24 -0500

and kudos for nodalpoint!!

good points

helgew — Wed, 02 Nov 2005 13:30:43 -0500

I have had my own courses online for years and have not had any problems so far. Maybe I just slipped past under the radar, but my old site is actually linked to from my official online course.

Allowing students to post materials is possibly the most problematic issue here. I have had one case, where I was actually asked by a University, whether they could use one of my student's images. When I scrutinized the student's page, I discovered that it was plagiarized (including caption and without propper attribution to the original source) and I opted to remove it from the site.

Students generally are very happy to have everything accessible online and my own site receives some decent traffic from non-students... not enough to really make the hokey google-ad links and amazon shop items all that profitable, but hey at least it pays for some of the upgrade cost for the DSL line I have. For now, I am planning to keep biosciencecourses.org free of ads, but that's just an aside.

thanks for the feedback!!

Ownership

Neil — Tue, 01 Nov 2005 22:37:03 -0500

I expect different institutions have different policies regarding who "owns" teaching material. One possible problem is that most teaching material contains material that may itself be copyright or otherwise protected (scanned images, excerpts from papers and so on). I suppose some institutes might also be nervous that online material exposes the quality of their teaching to scrutiny - a good idea if you ask me.

Legalese nonsense aside, I think this is a good idea. Online teaching material is useful not just to students of that course, but students looking for alternative viewpoints and even non-specialists who just want more in-depth information than that provided by mainstream media. Hope the site succeeds.

I made some minor edits to

Greg — Tue, 01 Nov 2005 21:36:01 -0500

I made some minor edits to this post, adding the link to biosciencecourses.org etc.

Any thoughts on copyright issues with people putting lectures online ? Lecture podcasts are also a cool idea that might be worth checking out.

prove your point

Neil — Tue, 14 Jun 2005 07:54:53 -0400

We are a tough audience here at Nodal. On the one hand, geeky enthusiasm is what we live for. On the other - if you storm in full of big promises, you'd sure better live up to them. Because we have a zero tolerance policy for bullshit.

Do not make the fatal mistake of assuming that bioinformatics is merely a branch of computer science. Because when I read claims like "analysis of almost every type of file", then I see a bunch of clustering algorithms which construct trees with nodes, I wonder how that applies to everyday bioinformatic tasks like annotating genomes or batch-processing PDB files.

Richness of data is the hallmark of biological information. I've no doubt that this software is interesting and important, but before telling me that it can do everything, take some time to understand biological problems.

complearn

cilibrar — Tue, 14 Jun 2005 05:42:38 -0400

Sure, there are many reasons details in my research papers on my homepage: http://www.cwi.nl/~cilibrar/

In summary the main reasons are
a) it's easier, usually
b) it's more robust, usually

I would like to fix the Mac OSX compile/link problems. Can anybody let me have an account for a day or two on their Mac to fix this problem? Please email me at cilibrar@gmail.com if you are up for helping.

Best regards,

Rudi

Exciting new site ?

Greg — Sun, 12 Jun 2005 23:36:36 -0400

Nodalpoint will be celebrating it's 5th anniversary in a few months. I think "exciting" rather than "exciting new" site might be a better way to put it.

So can you offer us any reason why a compression based approach is better than [insert favorite machine learning technique applied to biology here] ?

Compiling on OS X

alf — Sat, 04 Jun 2005 11:22:24 -0400

I had no luck compiling this on OS X. Things like malloc.h and -export-dynamic throw up easily fixable errors, but I wasn't able to find a way round an undefined symbol error later on.

Firefox promotion

Neil — Wed, 11 May 2005 09:27:56 -0400

Things move fast in the world of OSS - seems like Firefox has been with us for ages and we're almost blasé about it. It absolutely rocks as a browser and a great example of an OSS project.

I was in my boss's office last week. He had so many IE windows open that the Windows bottom toolbar was rendered useless. "I need a bigger screen", he sighed, gazing at his almost brand-new, shiny 19" LCD. I resisted the urge to smack him and gently pointed out that what he needed was a tabbed browser.

Firefox v IE

jaws — Wed, 11 May 2005 08:16:14 -0400

This post was something I wrote up for our internal pages here at the EBI, and then thought it would be good to share. There are all these IE-crazy people who will probably never move to any other browser, till such time *nix is the OS of choice...

I would be more than happy to help out in the maintainence of nodalpoint if you think it prudent. Would it also not be a good idea to get people to sign up before they can post ? Or do you think its too m uch hassle and goes against free access to information ?

Hey Jawahar, I'm sorry tha

Greg — Tue, 10 May 2005 00:03:25 -0400

Hey Jawahar,

I'm sorry that this post got stuck in the queue over the weekend. I turned off automatic posting to the front page, due to some rather dubious posts (companies, advertising etc.). The down side of this policy is that excellent posts like this one some times get stuck in the queue. One possible way around this problem is to give some of the more frequent posters, such as yourself, admin access to the content module (i.e. posting, promoting, editing and deleting). Thoughts ?

I agree that Firefox is the best browser for bioinformatics, I have biobar and various custom search plugins for our internal lab databases constantly in use. However, even though the usefulness (utility ?) of Firefox over IE is far greater (tabbed browsing), I still have a hard time convincing local users to switch.

Another advantage of Firefox is native RSS support (aka "Live bookmarks).