Duncan Hull

#qotd Computer Science Major "WTF, Man. I just wanted to learn how to program video games" - Duncan Hull from Bookmarklet

Too true of computer science majors these days. - Andrew Lang

I like abstractions - Richard Akerman from BuddyFeed

Clojure is the new hotness among people who think the JVM is an interesting platform for post-Java languages, and for people who think there’s still life in that ol’ Lisp beast, and for people who worry about concurrency and state in the context of the multicore future. Over the last few days I’ve been severely bipolar about Clojure, swinging from “way cool!” to “am I really that stupid?” Herewith some getting-started tips for newbies like me. This is almost certainly not interesting to anyone except those who are already interested in Clojure, and to one other group: those who might want to package up a programming language in such a way that learning it will be straightforward. - Duncan Hull

I've been trying clojure a bit too after seeing a talk here at Manchester. - Michael Barton

Organised by the very functional coding trombonist Jim Downing http://jimdowning.wordpress.com/2009... - Duncan Hull

Na... Na... Na... I am not listening.... Na... Na... - Egon Willighagen

@Egon resistance is futile :-) - Duncan Hull

The exponentially increasing number of published papers (1.4 million per year by one estimate) makes it more and more difficult for us to manage the flood of scientific information. Each of us has acquired some protocol to find and organize journal articles and other references over the course of our careers. Most of those protocols are likely to have been formed by old routines or idleness rather than a structured approach to save time and frustration over the long run. Furthermore, with the Web 2.0 revolution, new ways of handling information are emerging (O’Reilly 2005). For example, traditional standalone tools for reference management like EndNote are being supplemented by centralized resources like RefWorks and social bookmarking sites as described subsequently. This fusion of personal and public information offers the promise of efficiency through better organization, which in turn leads to better science. How can seasoned scientists do better using these tools and those newer... more... - Duncan Hull

#qotd "Academentia: The state of being for a person in higher education where they lose touch with all semblance of reality. " - Duncan Hull

November’s entity of the month at ChEBI is the antimalarial drug Artemether. This accompanies release 62 of ChEBI, not just yet another incremental release but an increase of more than twentyfold in the number of entities in ChEBI, thanks to merging of data between an updated ChEBI [1] and ChEMBL [2]. ChEBI now (as of release 62) has over 455,000 total entities, compared to over 18,000 in the previous version (release 61), see ChEBI news for details. The text below on Artemether is reproduced from the ChEBI website: - Duncan Hull from Bookmarklet

That said, the above linked nightly does allow you to download a working rendering and editing library already, based on CDK master (of a few weeks ago, see the git history)... - Egon Willighagen

It is counter-intuitive in the extreme, but young researchers are failing to make use of so-called "emergent technology", such as Web 2.0 tools, to support their work. A three-year study by the British Library, Researchers of Tomorrow, is tracking the research behaviour of doctoral students born between 1982 and 1994 - dubbed "Generation Y". The results are being compared with a wider analysis of the behaviour of 6,500 doctoral students of all ages. Interim results, released to Times Higher Education, show that only a small proportion of those surveyed are using technology such as virtual-research environments, social bookmarking, data and text mining, wikis, blogs and RSS-feed alerts in their work. This contrasts with the fact that many respondents professed to finding technological tools valuable. - Duncan Hull

i commented on the other thread - but there's always this idea that those younger than us immediately know how to use all sorts of technologies and they don't necessarily. was true with e-mail, is true with web 2.0 tools, is always true with search engines. - Christina Pikas

errr - authors who give out their user details deserve what they get! - Jo Badge

I'm not sure I've understood the implications of this, but isn't just like an account on any other service? - AJCann

well, another option would be for journal submission systems to drop the requirement that only the corresponding author can submit. it should be enough to let the PI verify the submission. - Michael Kuhn

See http://www.ebi.ac.uk/chebi/ - Duncan Hull

also, happy birthday - Richard Akerman

I should work harder at my lists. Started one, got bored. The web interface doesn't help. - Neil Saunders

Tweetdeck said they're going to be supporting official twitter lists in their news version, hopefully with a better UI. Still waiting for the "not otherwise categorized" functionality. - Mr. Gunn

#qotd "Tim [Hubbard] has written some awful pieces of code that worked. Which is far better than perfect bits of code that don't work. I have fond memories of the horrendous system that originally ran Ensembl. The only person who understood it was Tim. It was kind of hideous, but it worked." - Duncan Hull

Unfortunately, there is also so much hideous code that does not work... - Egon Willighagen