the dao of flow

It looks like Michael Kuhn kick-started the Flattr wave for the science blogging scene. As not everybody knows what this service is – here is a short intro: Flattr is a social micropayment system that makes it very easy to pay content creators like bloggers, podcasters, programmers or photographs little amounts of money just with [...]

It has been quite a while since I was working in a wet lab the last time but I still have a lot of respect for the busy bees generating data there. It’s hard to imagine such a lab without personal computers which get data automatically from the detecting apparatus or manually from the experimenter. [...]

Some weeks ago my brother who works in the field of Neuroscience made me aware of a genealogical tree of his scientific community called NeuroTree. This inspired me to think about such a tree for science in general which might give interesting insights into the scientific community and reveal connections that usually only insiders have [...]

It’s summer hacking camp time again! The Hacking at Random (HAR) opened its gates on Thursday and a lot of interesting things have been going on there since that. As usual I want to share some of my personal views on selected parts of this huge event and give some insights about what is happening [...]

The financial crisis and the climate change should make everybody think about our current global financial system and its implications to society. Most actions that are taken by governments, banks and companies are superficial or even just populist window dressing and only aim to maintain a sick and weak system. Artificial stimulation of the consumption [...]

After 6 months of hard work the OpenBSD project released version 4.3 of the great, (non-)fishy operating system. As usually there is a collection of micro-interviews with some of the developers about new features at the O’Reilly’s BSD DevCenter.

This year the well known EMBL PhD Symposium will cover fields belonging to the topic “Decision Making in Biology – Nature at the Crossroads” and you can already register. It is still some time until October (23rd – 25th) so the program is not yet available but the list of speakers looks very promising.

Outch! Styczynski et al. [1] found an error in the BLOSSUM62 – THE substitution matrix used since 16 years in bioinformatics for protein database searches. Lessons learned: Don’t stop questioning even fundamental laws/tools/assumptions/etc. Transparency – in bioinformatics the access to the source code and the data – is essential for proper science [Via Suicyte Notes] [...]