nodalpoint.org

Eureka Science News just launched - it's an intelligent science news aggregator based on machine learning (for classification) and clustering of recent news from all major science sources - I'm a microarray analyst, so I used the same techniques I use to cluster genes, but this time to cluster news! It's fun to use skills in other contexts - I hope you will enjoy the site!

From the guy who is already known for:
"woman should have the right to abort her unborn child if tests could determine it would be homosexual"
"a link between skin colour and sex drive, positing the theory that black people have higher libidos"
"argued in favour of genetic screening and engineering on the basis that " stupidity" could one day be cured"
"People say it would be terrible if we made all girls pretty. I think it would great"
Comes another:
"all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours – whereas all the testing says not really"

Last reminder for Bio::Blogs #2.

Send your submissions to bioblogs <at> gmail.com. Same address if you'd like to host a future edition. We have 7 submissions so far (all from non-Nodal regulars!) and a volunteer for October, I'm pleased to say. I've also been keeping an eye on the blogs and have a few posts to add. See previous post for guidelines.

update: edition 2 is now online - thanks to all contributors.

update #2: note that the link above changed, as I just moved my blog to its new home. The old site is no more.

...that you have 3 days to send in your Bio::Blogs submissions. You don't have to write a huge essay - in fact, you don't have to write anything if you can find something interesting on someone else's blog. It'd be great to see this initiative work, so get posting.

update: 2 days...1 day...last day :)

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.

I'm not sure "how scared we should be" - rather less than the commercial news networks would have us believe, I suspect. If you're looking to inform yourself about avian influenza (aka 'bird flu'), Flu Wiki is a good place to start.

Update: I just can't resist The Onion's Nation's Leading Alarmists Excited About Bird Flu.

Can it be IgNobel time already? Seems like only yesterday I was posting about the 2004 awards.

See all the winners here or summary in the Guardian here. The penguins have to be the highlight.

Firefox, the latest offering from the Mozilla Foundation is one of the best web browsers in the market at the moment. In addition to built-in extras like popup-blocking, tabbed browsing, smart searching capabilities, the mozilla development platform offers more than 200 add-ons in the form of extensions.
According to the mozilla update site, the official download home for all extensions:

Extensions are small add-ons that add new functionality to your Mozilla program. They can add anything from a toolbar button to a completely new feature.

Firefox offers the average biologist many advantages over Internet Explorer or Opera.

I'm finally ready with the latest release of biobar. See Post 1547 or Post 1537. Biobar is a toolbar project for firefox/mozilla/netscape, which allows a user to easily search and retrieve data for a particular search term straight from many biological data collections. The latest release provides access to 38 biological databases . Based on user input from Nodalpoint and other users this release has the following salient features:

Biology News just launched! Previously hosted on The Scientist Blog, the site is a daily updated news feed about everything biology - stem cells, biotechnology, bioinformatics, microarrays, molecular and cellular biology.

I'm a PhD student in bioinformatics working on AIDS - I know the stuff, and invite you to come and share your thoughts / ideas on the daily news, either via comments or in the forum (which is quite empty right now, but its expected for a new site, isn't it? It depends on you...