Ruchira S. Datta › Comments

Publish - no. Read - Yes - Deepak Singh

I have mixed feelings about the database + web issues. It's exactly the type of content that I think is unsuited to journal article format. The resources themselves should be valued, rather than their dry, dull, traditional and rapidly-obsolete descriptions. On the other hand, in a world where merit is measured by publication, how else are bioinformaticians to gain attention? :-) If you can get it together once a year, it amounts to a free publication opportunity. - Neil Saunders

"Google Fusion Tables is a free service for sharing and visualizing data online. It allows you to upload and share data, merge data from multiple tables into interesting derived tables, and see the most up-to-date data from all sources. The Google Fusion Tables API enables programmatic access to Google Fusion Tables content. It is an extension of Google's existing structured data capabilities for developers." - Ruchira S. Datta

Anyone have any advice on the usefulness of Fusion tables vs Google spreadsheets vs. other online data sharing tools? This got me excited to create a list of all the factors that increase and/or decrease neurogenesis, modify new neuron physiology etc etc as a resource for scientists in my field, since the literature is getting pretty hard to sort through. I started by downloading Pubmed... more... - Jason Snyder

My wife cuts my hair too. - Mike Nencetti

I think I have those same clippers. Using them with no guard buys quite a bit of time. - metalerik

Anyone who has read jezebel.com and seen the retouch bloopers they highlight would find Moore's "no retouch done" claim to be idiotic. - Archangel ωαřмaiden from Bookmarklet

wow. brilliantly done. - T. Brent, technopeasant

Anthony Citrano is on FF, more discussion here: http://ff.im/daM07 - Ruchira S. Datta

"Israel has admitted that pathologists harvested organs from dead Palestinians, and others without the consent of their families – a practice that it said ended in the 1990s, it emerged at the weekend." - Itachi from Bookmarklet

What Ruchira said. - Eric Logan

I work on Monday and then will be off until Jan 4 - Alan Simpson

Me, as you know :) - Pete

"When you are famous it is hard to work on small problems. This is what did Shannon in. After information theory, what do you do for an encore? The great scientists often make this error. They fail to continue to plant the little acorns from which the mighty oak trees grow. They try to get the big thing right off. And that isn't the way things go. So that is another reason why you find that when you get early recognition it seems to sterilize you. In fact I will give you my favorite quotation of many years. The Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, in my opinion, has ruined more good scientists than any institution has created, judged by what they did before they came and judged by what they did after. Not that they weren't good afterwards, but they were superb before they got there and were only good afterwards. This brings up the subject, out of order perhaps, of working conditions. What most people think are the best working conditions, are not. Very clearly they are not... more... - Paul Buchheit from Bookmarklet

I'm half way through and although he has excellent insights, nothing so far helps explain lolcats. - Hayes Haugen

This is another version of Walter Mischel's marshmallow experiment-- in the 1960s, a group of four-year olds were given a marshmallow and promised another, only if they could wait 20 minutes before eating the first one. The researchers then followed the progress of each child into adolescence and demonstrated that those with the ability to wait were better adjusted and more dependable (determined via surveys of their parents and teachers), and scored an average of 210 points higher on the Scholastic Aptitude Test. - Tom Stocky

@Ruchira - This girl was hilarious, I was laughing so hard that I had tears in my eyes ;-) - joergkurtwegner

Geeks have argued since time immemorial. "Who's stronger? Thor or Hulk?" - Spidra Webster

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"An extremely rare infection has been passed from an organ donor to at least one recipient in what is thought to be the first human-to-human transfer of the amoeba, medical officials said Friday. Four people in three states received organs from a patient who died at the University of Mississippi Medical Center in November after suffering from neurological problems, said Dave Daigle, a spokesman for the Centers for Disease Controls and Prevention." - imabonehead from Bookmarklet

"Balamuthia mandrillaris is a microscopic parasite found in soil that causes encephalitis in humans, horses, dogs, sheep and nonhuman primates. Scientists think people get infected by breathing it in, but it can also pass into the blood through a cut or break in the skin. It can be especially dangerous to people undergoing organ transplants, whose immune systems are purposely weakened so their bodies don't reject their new organs." - imabonehead

Dislike. :-( - Ruchira S. Datta

Here's the manager's amendment: http://democrats.senate.gov/reform... - Ruchira S. Datta

Also deriving a great deal of satisfaction from removing the air bubbles from under the protective film, probably because it's hard work. - Ruchira S. Datta

and you haven't put in line ordinary book... - A.T.

"Taking a man’s name opened up a new world. It helped me earn double and triple the income of my true name, with the same work and service." - Ruchira S. Datta

I recently read that women lawyers with masculine names made more money and/or had higher positions than those with feminine names. - Gabe

Nucl. Acids Res. (16 December 2009), gkp1019. Protein Analysis THrough Evolutionary Relationships (PANTHER) is a comprehensive software system for inferring the functions of genes based on their evolutionary relationships. Phylogenetic trees of gene families form the basis for PANTHER and these trees are annotated with ontology terms describing the evolution of gene function from ancestral to modern day genes. One of the main applications of PANTHER is in accurate prediction of the functions of uncharacterized genes, based on their evolutionary relationships to genes with functions known from experiment. The PANTHER website, freely available at http://www.pantherdb.org, also includes software tools for analyzing genomic data relative to known and inferred gene functions. Since 2007, there have been several new developments to PANTHER: (i) improved phylogenetic trees, explicitly representing speciation and gene duplication events, (ii) identification of gene orthologs, including least... - Neil Saunders

Thanks Neil. - Ruchira S. Datta

"It the perfect Christmas present for normal women everywhere. Scientists have devised the ratios of the perfect face - and they correspond with Miss Average. Beauty, they say, can be broken down to the distance between a woman's eyes and the distance between her eyes and her mouth. Get them just right and she will be just right too. Best of all, the proportions correspond with those of the average face. The study is one of several in recent months which have boosted the stock of real women. Other research has shown that men prefer 'normal'-sized women with a few curves to those who are fashionably thin and, apparently, don't hanker after girls with legs that go on forever. In the latest study, researchers asked a panel of men and women to rate the attractiveness of photos. All were headshots of the same woman, but with different distances from eyes to mouth or between the eyes. She was at her most attractive when the distance between the pupils of her eyes was just under half, or 46... more... - RAPatton from Bookmarklet

Andrew, only two ratios were measured in this study. One would expect those ratios to each be normally distributed. So at least for these particular ratios, one would expect the mean to be the same as the mode (i.e., the largest number of people fit these proportions). - Ruchira S. Datta

_The Who's Who of British Beheadings_, _What Moles Tell You About Yourself_, _Ductigami: The Art of the Tape_, and more! - Ruchira S. Datta

"Gathering sequence information from biological publications is a tedious activity if done manually. The Seeker would like Solvers to develop a means of doing this by using publicly available software and a bit of additional ingenuity. Preexisting solutions that fulfill the criteria well would also be considered by the Seeker." - François Dongier from Bookmarklet

Ruchira, I'm also exploring this from a freelance perspective. - François Dongier

:-) - Ruchira S. Datta

One of the best thai restaurants in Mtn View. Just had dinner there a couple of days. Great soups and a very good lunch place - Bindu Reddy from Likaholix

I used to like this place a lot, when I lived over that way! - Ruchira S. Datta

"Human geneticists have reached a private crisis of conscience, and it will become public knowledge in 2010. The crisis has depressing health implications and alarming political ones. In a nutshell: the new genetics will reveal much less than hoped about how to cure disease, and much more than feared about human evolution and inequality, including genetic differences between classes, ethnicities and races." - Itachi from Bookmarklet

Certainly, one could never use knowledge of how drugs work differently in different genetic backgrounds to help cure disease, right? - Mr. Gunn

By Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie and HP Lovecraft - Ruchira S. Datta

Yeah, I'm always blue. - Will Robinson

I'm green! - Ruchira S. Datta

I am part of the 50% who don't drop out! - Kevin Mohr

I bet you the pre-med numbers are similar, but I'm not sure universities necessarily track undergrads who aspire to go to med school. In general, how many freshmen actually stick with the major they pick when they start college? - Victor Ganata

"A photo turns up of you nakedly doing something that would shame you and your family for generations. Bestiality, perhaps. How many people in your life you would trust with that photo? If you're like the rest of us, you probably have at most two. Even more depressing, studies show that about one out of four people have no one they can confide in. The average number of close friends we say we have is dropping fast, down dramatically in just the last 20 years. Why?" (According to them: Segmented society.) - ⓞnor

Thanks RSD- too bad the key comes at the end:You want to break out of that black tar pit of self-hatred? Brush the black hair out of your eyes, step away from the computer and buy a nice gift for someone you loathe. Send a card to your worst enemy. Make dinner for your mom and dad. Or just do something simple, with an tangible result. Go clean the leaves out of the gutter. Grow a damn plant. - Mark A Jensen

"The work in Nature magazine suggests the mind can win over hormones.Testosterone induces anti-social behaviour in humans, but only because of our own prejudices about its effect rather than its biological activity, suggest the authors." Very interesting! - Ruchira S. Datta

It is shocking that testosterone is affected by environmental factor, I wonder "a hero likes lust".The papers have been quite rewarding for us,have a harvest. - Ami Iida

Oh my. - Derrick

TMI Sean, TMI. - Carmen

"Even though it’s exactly the same E Ink technology that the Kindle and Sony Readers use, the Nook’s screen is achingly slower than the Kindle’s. It takes nearly three seconds to turn a page — three times longer than the Kindle — which is really disruptive if you’re in midsentence. Often, you tap some button on the color strip — and nothing happens. You wait for the Nook to respond, but there’s no progress bar, no hourglass, no indication that the Nook “heard” you. So you tap again — but now you’ve just triggered a second command that you didn’t want." - j1m from Bookmarklet

If it were anywhere close to what Pogue describes I think it would have started bothering me in the time I've spent with it, so I'm leaning toward explanation 2. Pogue must have gotten a bum version to review, which is very unfortunate. - Ruchira S. Datta

LIVE TYPHOID VIRUS! - Ruchira S. Datta

But regarding the closing statement about heritability of IQ, check this out: "$13 Christmas Gift = $13 point gain in children's IQ" http://www.gnxp.com/blog... Heritability depends on which environmental variations have been tried. - Ruchira S. Datta

"Heritability is not a statistic for individuals. If you are using your knowledge of heritability to understand a single individual you are a biographer, not a scientist." Arguably, not yet -- 23andMe and other similar companies are betting that there is enough data out there to be able to derive significance for individuals. - Tudor Bosman

Tudor, I think what they (and indeed I) would like to be able to derive is the genetic component of traits and predispositions. That is what the word "heritability" evokes, but not what it actually means--it has a technical, statistical definition that only applies to populations. - Ruchira S. Datta

My cousin the climate policy postdoc blogging from Copenhagen. - Ruchira S. Datta