Archive for the ‘Research’ Category

We Should Have Built This For Them

Wednesday, July 16th, 2008

One Big Lab has a short review of LabMeeting.com, a tool to help PhD students organize papers they've read, discover new ones, share lab procedures, and so on.  It was built by physics students; similar systems, like Ologeez and OpenWetWare, were built by geneticists and cell biologists respectively.  I can't ...

Interesting Tools

Tuesday, July 1st, 2008

WikidBASE is a database that can be shaped using wiki syntax.  The video is a bit long, but worth watching; there are obvious applications to DrProject's new ticketing system. Replay Solutions has a "capture and playback" debugging tool --- this interview in Doctor Dobb's Journal gives details, and this short video ...

Fell at the First Hurdle

Tuesday, June 24th, 2008

My most recent grant proposal was shot down in its first review. Yes, I know, the competition for NSERC funding is increasingly fierce, but dammit, this would have helped a lot of scientists do a lot of good research, and I'm willing to bet that the ones that are finally ...

Recent Research Reading

Friday, June 20th, 2008

I really did mean to blog more regularly about the research papers I'm reading... Oh well---here are the highlights from the last three months; together, they represent about 25% of what I've actually read. I haven't bothered hyperlinking, since many of them are behind paywalls, and the rest ...

Where My Grad Students Are

Wednesday, June 18th, 2008

I've been blogging about undergrad projects pretty regularly, but not about the progress my graduate students have been making.  In brief: Samira is using Information Retrieval (IR) techniques to group events in a project's history (email messages, ticket changes, repository check-ins, etc.) into larger-scale events so that they'll be easier for ...

What a Proposal Looks Like

Friday, June 13th, 2008

I got word earlier this week that The MathWorks (makers of MATLAB) had approved my request for funding to spruce up the Software Carpentry notes, and find out how scientists are actually using computers. I faxed a signed copy of the paperwork down to them today---with luck, work will start ...

Faking Results

Friday, June 6th, 2008

Via BoingBoing, a story about scientists Photoshopping experimental results. Sometimes it's outright fakery; sometimes they're just "cleaning up" or "correcting". Either way, it raises an interesting question: how often are people doing this with computational results? Without scientists' code, or any other way to reproduce their work, we'll probably never ...

Why Don’t We Do This?

Wednesday, May 21st, 2008

Source Code for Biology and Medicine is a peer-reviewed journal from BioMed Central devoted to, well, source code for biology and medicine. It's been around for at least a couple of years; based on a quick scan of four of their most popular papers, they seem to cover everything from ...

But I Was Gone Less than 48 Hours!

Friday, May 16th, 2008

I left Toronto for Austin mid-day Wednesday, and got back at midnight last night. Lots happened in the interim, so here's a linkandthoughtdump (which I bet actually is one word in German): Gave a talk about Beautiful Code to the Austin Python Users' Group Wednesday at Enthought's swanky offices. (They're ...

I Want a Platypus Too

Friday, May 2nd, 2008

Just read Elisabeth Hendrickson's posts on next-generation functional testing tools, and thought the links (her articles, plus tools she finds intriguing) would be interesting to readers of this blog. Long story short, I'm trying to figure out whether DrProject should provide support for testing, and if so, what kind and ...