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There has been a lively discussion on the Sanger’s internal e-mail list, inspired by this extract from Free: The Future of a Radical Price by Chris Anderson, editor in chief of Wired. The take-home message of the extract is that companies and institutions are stuck in a 20th Century way of thinking about computing resources: we plan for scarcity, assume that memory or CPU time are limited, and get people to keep to strict rules to keep usage down. But these days, computing is cheep; what is scarce is human time, ingenuity, and exploration, and heavily restricting computing use wastes and stifles these things.

This specific issue raised is that the Sanger’s computing maintainers often e-mail us to tell us that our shared hard drives are getting full, and we each need to clear out a few gigs. Someone pointed out that it takes a good half an hour to cut back space, translating to a few dozen person hours across the Institute, and the end result, a few hundred gigs of space, could be purchased from amazon for 50 quid or less. This, the argument goes, gets the cost-benefit analyses the wrong way around; 20 person hours is worth so much more than 200Gb of disk space.

The reply, and resulting discussion, hammered out something that I could call a consensus ensemble of computing resource philosophies, if I wasn’t worried about alienating everyone I’ve ever loved.
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Hello there reader. I thought I would share an interesting experience, of the Being Starved And Then Put In A Tube And Shown Random Pictures While A Machine Makes Odd Noises And Watches Your Brain variety, with you.

I am a member of the always-wonderful Cambridge BioResource, an NHS/Cambridge University/MRC pool of a few thousand volunteers who have signed up to be used in genetics research. We have all been genotyped (I don’t know how deeply, I’d guess at about 500,000 sites or so), and we can be called upon to take part in particular studies based on our particular genetic information. From the perspective of the researcher, you contact the BioResource and tell them what genetic variants you are looking for (and for what gender and age as well, if you so desire), and the BioResource sends out letters to everyone who fits the bill, asking if they will take part in the trial.

I have been called up twice; the first was part of a Type I Diabetes study - as I gather, I have gene variant that is associated with T1D (early onset diabetes), but never got it, and don’t have a family history of it, and that sort of thing can be useful to track down exactly how genetics is influencing disease.

ANYWAY (and this is going somewhere relatively exciting), the second study, which I took part in yesterday, was a functional MRI (fMRI) study; in such studies, volunteers perform tasks, and the MRI scanner measures blood flow throughout the brain, to try and match brain activity to behaviour. Now I probably shouldn’t say exactly what this particular study involved, since there is a slim possibility that you too will be in the Tube, but the general process involved being put in this Big Metal Tube, with a massive electromagnet, and being shown images and told to make simple dichotic choices.

So far so interesting. The study was a bit dull, since it involved sitting in the tube for many hours, but was also sort of relaxing, and when I came out I felt like I’d just woken up. I imagine it was a bit like being in the womb. BUT, the exciting thing, is that when I left, they gave me a picture of my brain. A PICTURE OF MY BRAIN:
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Hello there. I am afraid everything is Hotting Up ’round about now, so I won’t be able to post anything substantial here for a short while. However, I am going to the Darwin exhibition at the Natural History Museum in London this weekend, so I may have something interesting to say about that (other than just going all misty-eyed, sighing a deep sigh, and softly intoning “Darwin…”).

As a bit of filler, as the webcomicists say, I think I’ll show you something cool, but largely unrelated to the general subject matter of this blog.

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