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I’m Moving and Hiring
Starting June 1, 2015, my lab is moving to Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa, and I’m very excited about this. I’ll be joining a growing cohort of researchers as part of a presidential “big data”...
View ArticleOn cross-disciplinary ambiguity and conference comfort zones
I recently attended a conference which was unusual for me as most of the speakers come from a computer science culture, rather than a biology one. Somewhat outside my comfort zone. The science that was...
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The Dark Matter Metaphor in Biology
Dark matter is a proposed kind of matter that cannot be seen, but that we believe accounts for most of the mass in the universe. Its existence, mass, and properties are inferred from its...
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Family genetics in Star Wars (Warning: Episode VII spoilers)
So I saw Star Wars VII: “The Force Awakens” the other day. Great movie, which has mostly erased the shame of episodes I-III. Despite even more than the usual suspension of science, it’s a great SF...
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Predicting protein function: what’s new?
Long time readers of this blog (hi mom!) know that I am working with many other people in an effort called CAFA: the Critical Assessment of protein Function Annotation. This is a challenge that many...
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PLoS-1 published a “creationist” paper: some thoughts on what followed
As everyone knows by now, PloS-1 published what seemed to be a creationist paper. While references to the ‘Creator’ were few, the wording of the paper strongly supported intelligent design in human...
View ArticleNIH scaling back on model organism database funding: what you can do
TL;DR: NIH are scaling back funding on model organism databases, which will degrade annotation quality. This can have far-reaching implications in many aspects of biology and computational biology....
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How much do cows offset wind energy savings?
So I saw this Tweet from Michael Eisen a couple of days ago: and those cows are destroying whatever gains clean energy creates https://t.co/DWRFj5x8Jj — Michael Eisen (@mbeisen) September 3, 2016...
View ArticleLively discussion: how to cross-validate?
So today's group meeting got a bit heated as Nafiz, Ashley, and Xiao touched on the finer points of how to cross validate. Machine learning people, your comments are welcome.
View ArticleThe Yoda are an Extreme K Species
Eric Spitznagel has recently asked me to provide my opinion on the mysterious Baby Yoda for an article in Popular Mechanics. The really cool piece was published today, but obviously Eric had to...
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