After a long hiatus SciView is back with a new interview with Dr Roderic Page from the University of Glasgow. Dr Page is the current Editor in Chief of Syatematic Biology and developer of TreeView(X), the beloved phylogenetic tree visualization software. He was also the editor of the Current Protocols in Bioinformatics.
As usual here is the link.
Enjoy.
The lone researcher, chipping away at her niche, making some breakthrough discovery... It is a nice image, but likely not true as the business of doing science requires management and interaction with many other scientists. The Howard Hughes Medical Institute publishes a free book on managing science for early career scientists called: Making the Right Moves. It is easy to dismiss management as formalized commonsense (i.e. plan a project before you start it). However I feel that the value is not in the knowledge contained in such books, but rather the fact that thinking about it helps to change your mindset from the lone researcher mentality.
I just read this article in the Scientist. It makes interesting reading, since most of us are/have been PostDocs sometime or the other. The biggest problem, and getting worse, is the one of there not being enough tenure-track positions in Academia or industry where PostDocs can be accomodated after a few years of training.
So what use is a PostDoc stint anymore ? Do people here think that the age of the PostDoc is slowly going to be replaced with the PostDoc continuum, where PostDocs remain in limbo for 8-10 years or more ?
Seems traditional at this time of year to take a look back - I've been skimming through Nature, New Scientist and others, all of whom are running their "highlights of 2005".
Well here at Nodal, we're all about looking forward. So - what are your predictions for the year ahead in the types of topics that we cover (bioinformatics/computational biology, genomics, genetics, biotechnology)? What are you hoping to see more of? Or less of? What's going to be hot, cool, exciting?
Two of my favourite things and the subject of a 3-article feature in Nature this week, presumably for the festive season. The first of these is a fascinating look at the evolution of ADH genes.
I don't know if anyone here uses an electronic lab notebook (I'd be interested to hear if you do), but for the last couple of years I've been using a simple weblog-style notebook based on Wordpress.
Now, so that I had something to recommend to people who were interested in keeping an electronic log of their experiments, and to get feedback on the kind of tools people would like to be able to use, I've released NotePress: a package of Wordpress (slightly modified), a custom theme and some useful plugins.
It's free, open source and all that, and pretty obviously doesn't include the kind of electronic signature verification or data management tools that the big expensive commercial notebook packages do, but it's been good enough as a searchable archive of experiments.
As a card-carrying geek, I don't do anything so pedestrian as PubMed searches. Instead, I have Hubmed deliver common search content via RSS (cheers, alf!). A side effect of this system is that you see a lot more literature than you otherwise would, particularly for broad-brush searches. In some cases, this may be instructive, leading you to things that would have escaped your notice otherwise. In other cases, it leads you to the plain weird. As a case in point, a search for "regulatory variation AND mammals[mesh]", one of my standards, today popped up with this:
I was skimming through my RSS feeds in search of a "paper of the month" and I came up short. It was rather disheartening actually - a lot of current publications in bioinformatics seem to consist of:
I'm beginning to worry that bioinformatics is in danger of failing to live up to its promises. We have to convince the unenlightened that our tools, applied intelligently, can provide meaningful insight into real biological problems of fundamental interest. Yet I see little evidence of this at the moment.
Could someone please find a really good paper or suggest a fantastic collaborative project, or I'll get really depressed.
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.
Congratulations on an exciting new site, it looks like it's beginning to really shape up!
I figured maybe I can liven it up a bit with a small (beta) debut here. Maybe you'd like to have a look at my new (totally rewritten) software for bioinformatics analysis; it supports analyzing almost every type of file through some advanced information theory techniques. Try it and see, it's easy to use:
