Weblog Archive

Bad publicity is still good publicity

Starring in porn flick probably won't get S.F. cops fired. All the news surrounding this pair must actually be doing wonders for orders of their extracurricular "smut-umentary."

Hurry before it's booked! Free NCBI Course.

I got this email from the NCBI's e-utilities listserv. For the programming intensive people out there, this sounds like a very nice conference.

--------------------------------------------------------------

Subject:
[Utilities-announce] NCBI PowerScripting
From:
utilities-announce@ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
Date:
Wed, 26 May 2004 08:59:08 -0400
To:
"'utilities-announce@ncbi.nlm.nih.gov'"

================================================================
*** ANNOUNCING A NEW NCBI COURSE: NCBI PowerScripting ***
================================================================

NCBI PowerScripting

The National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) presents NCBI
PowerScripting, a 3-day course including both lectures and computer
workshops on effectively using the NCBI E-utilities within scripts to
automate search and retrieval operations across the entire suite of Entrez
databases.

Dates: July 14-16, 2004

Location: Lister Hill Center (Bldg 38A), NLM, NIH, Bethesda, MD

For more information and to apply for the course, see the course web page at

http://www.ncbi.nih.gov/Class/PowerTools/eutils/course.html

The course is free but an application is required.
Space is limited to 20 participants, so apply now!

******************************************************************

During the course, participants will learn how to do the following:

* Design and execute complex searches across the 23 Entrez databases
* Implement data pipelines for genomic, proteomic, or microarray analysis
* Create automated searches to keep local databases current
* Create and download customized datasets
* Seamlessly combine local data with NCBI data
* Develop a focused interface to NCBI data

The course is intended for bioinformatics and information specialists who
are interested in accessing NCBI data in an automated fashion. A working
knowledge of NCBI resources and the Perl scripting language is required.

The course consists of a series of lectures and associated computer
workshops over 2 days, followed on the third day by a morning panel
discussion with NCBI programmers, an NCBI tour and an optional afternoon
session for individual consultations. Participants will program using Active
State Perl on Windows 2000 laptops. NCBI will provide all necessary hardware
and software.

The course will be held at the NCBI Training Center in the Lister Hill
Center (Building 38A) of the National Library of Medicine on the main NIH
campus in Bethesda, MD.

Participants will be responsible for their own lodging and meals; however,
there are numerous hotels in Bethesda, as well as in Rockville and
surrounding areas of Montgomery County. Bethesda also contains a renowned
variety of restaurants that are only a few minutes walk from campus.

Public transportation to the Medical Center Metro stop (Red Line) provides
the most convenient access to NIH. See the course web page above for more
information.

Questions to David Wheeler (wheeler@ncbi.nlm.nih.gov)

_______________________________________________
Utilities-announce mailing list
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/mailman/listinfo/utilities-announce

Gmail? Forget about it.

SquirrelMail - Webmail for Nuts!. Who really cares about gmail? For $20 a month, you can get your own virtual linux server from Rimuhosting.com and run not only unlimited web servers from it, but can also run a mail server. Install squirrelmail from the link above and you have a highly accessible mail account that will rival gmail, yahoo, hotmail, etc. If you think about all the things that you can really do with Rimuhosting, it's mind boggling how much money you can really save!

Long time no see

It's been a while since my last post, my frontpage was blank for sometime and I didn't notice 'til now. I had to attend a conference a few weeks ago and I had a number of presentations to do since -- hence, the lag. I do have to comment on a very memorable moment that occurred during the conference that I attended. The conference was at NCI in Frederick, MD and without naming names, one of the presenters, who happened to be a very reputable and respected investigator in his field, presented a topic that was highly contentious. After his presentation, the roundtable discussion and question and answer section was inundated and biased with comments and questions on his work -- not much was said about the work of other presenters. The scientist was at the end of it visibly annoyed with the audience's consternation of his work. I sat quietly on one corner of the room and all the while I debated whether or not I envied his position. A number of scientists in the past have made their mark in history because of their seminal work in changing the de facto paradigm of the times. The observations made by this scientist may create one of those moments. I, in some way, wished that I could be fortunate enough to experience what this scientist was experiencing. Although, all of his work could be just bunk, but only time will tell.

Live by the sword, die by it

The New York Times > Sports > Pro Basketball > Sports of The Times: For Williams, Jury's Verdict Cannot Clear His Burden. Some people may feel bad for JW, don't count me as one of them. I wonder what his response would be today, if he was asked, "What do you think about guns in the home?" I have a feeling, it's 180 degrees from his stance before all this. I feel so bad for the limo driver and his family. The worst part of this is that it sounds like nothing was done to help the victim in the last few minutes of his life -- everyone just gave up on him.