Category: science

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programming science

Software Carpentry Boot Camp in Berkeley

On Wednesday and Thursday, I’ll be volunteering at a Software Carpentry boot camp that’s happening in Berkeley/Oakland. I’m looking forward to it.

Previously, I’ve created an episode of the online lectures for secure shell. I also wrote the initial code for the episode using phylogenetic trees, although it got re-written by Greg. So I was more like just the narrator in that episode, but now I know how triangular matrices can be handled by maps. It’s always nice when you can work alongside smart people and can imbibe some of their knowledge and wisdom.

Categories
general programming science

Essence of Productivity

For a while, now, I’ve been trying to explain to people what makes someone effective — productive and efficient to do programming and/or science research. Until very recently, I was working in a genetics research lab, and I was asked by coworkers about what it takes for someone to be productive. Whether it was in terms of programming productivity or ability to intuit scientifically, I had been on both sides of the non-/productive divide. I distilled the differences to being resourceful and resolved.

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Categories
genetics programming science

DNA Sequencing Moving Too Fast for Computers and Bioinformaticians

Everything in technology seems to increase in exponential fashion.  There’s the ever-quoted Moore’s Law, where CPU speeds seem to double every 1.5 years.  RAM capacities and HD capacities seem to follow this rate, although the correlation might be coincidental more than anything else.  However, network speeds have barely increased in the past decade, it seems. The boon in high-tech, high-throughput technological advancements in modern genetics labs is also a bit of a curse. As the New York Times reports in DNA Sequencing Caught in Deluge of Data:

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