Tag Archives: open access

Scientia Pro Publica #14

Posted on October 19, 2009 by | 5 Comments

Welcome to the 14th Edition of Scientia Pro Publica (Science For The People). This blog carnival collects together the best non-technical science writing that has appeared around the blogosphere in the last few months, to promote and celebrate science, nature or medicine blogs written for the public.

In this edition, we have a glut of posts related to climate change, and an equally large group of posts about the interaction of science and society. Along the way, we will also cover some basic science posts from physics and biology.
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On Excel-Damaged Genes

Posted on March 10, 2009 by | 6 Comments

ResearchBlogging.org

Hello again, it has been a while. In the half an hour I have before an afternoon seminar, I thought I’d share an interesting and amusing paper that came out a few years back. It is entitled Mistaken Identifiers: Gene name errors can be introduced inadvertently when using Excel in bioinformatics. It is available for free on PubMed Central (three cheers for Open Access!).

The paper is about a distressing clash between the sublime and the mundane. The first element of the two is the DNA microarray, a technology that allows you to measure the expression of a very large number of genes (a technology that is now reaching the end of it’s lifespan, a point that I may discuss another day). The output of these experiments tends to be large text tables, in which rows correspond to genes and columns correspond to different individuals, which each entry giving an indicated of the level of gene expression. Often, this data will be processed and analysed with a variety of high tech algorithms to discover genes that differ among classes of people (say diseased and healthy), or to model the expression mathematically, or to reconstruct the networks that underly expression.

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On Blogs

Posted on January 17, 2009 by | 1 Comment

Reader, if I feel I must comply with convention. No doubt you have experience the birth pangs of new blogs many a time before, and at some point early on in their creation they spawn a page that attempts to justify their existence. I have so far put this off, instead seeding my blog with secrets and lies, but I have put it off long enough.

This post will not be about my delusions of importance, my swollen ego or my desperate clawing at the twin doors of love and affection. I shall take these as read, and proceed to the proximate causes.
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