Weblog Archive

Pleiotropic

Sounds just as bad as Tat.

Forbes.com: Dr. Mold by Daniel Fisher:

There's no question that mold can cause asthma, sinusitis and other breathing problems. But that's not what experts like Ordog are saying. They're diagnosing more serious conditions--such as cancer, immune-system disorders and memory loss--that have been linked to specific mycotoxins. And if they find any traces of them in a plaintiff's home, workplace or school--bingo. But there are no reliable tests to show that a person has been exposed to a specific mold or mycotoxin, much less how long that exposure lasted or how much of a substance he absorbed.

Office 2004 11.1.1 vs. EndNote (#2)

MacFixIt - Office 2004 11.1.1 vs. EndNote (#2)

Yesterday we noted a conflict between EndNote -- a bibliography tool -- and the Microsoft Office 11.1.1 update. This problem has appeared with previous updates to Microsoft's Office suite, including several revisions of Office v.X.
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Meanwhile, at least one reader reports that deleting the EndNote .plist file (located in ~/Library/Preferences/) resolves issues introduced during the Office 2004 11.1.1 update process.

Linux boosts productivity at pharmacy school

WebSphere, Linux the right prescription for UNC pharmacy school.

About a year and a half ago, the school's progress had started to become affected by several error-prone manual processes that had slowed down turnaround time on valuable research, said UNC professor Alex Tropsha, the director for the Laboratory for Molecular Modeling.

The problem was compounded by the fact that over the years, the university had gained access to much larger data sets, Tropsha said. Each data set needed to be developed into a computer model that a chemist would then use to make predictions and develop new components for biological activity. The structures also had to be translated into a numerical format so that a matrix could be created for future analysis.

Until IBM WebSphere and Linux came along 16 months ago, those cumbersome tasks were conducted manually by one of the graduate students attending the school.

Are you a grad student who wound up stuck doing crabby manual tedious stuff like this? Wait...we are grad students, that's our job, isn't it ;-) Follow the link above to find out how UNC fixed this "problem."

The SchoolTool Project

SchoolTool - The SchoolTool Project

SchoolTool is a project to develop a common global school administration infrastructure that is freely available under an Open Source licence.

SchoolBell 1.0, our calendar management system, was released on March 15, 2005. All subsequent SchoolTool development will build on SchoolBell 1.0.

It's a love hate thing

PCWorld.com - Google Removing Agence France Presse From Google News. Personally, I think it's to AFP's detriment to be removed from Google News, but they are entitled to what they want, and if that means they want to opt out, then Google should respect that decision. I wonder how long it will take AFP to realize that their traffic will decline or plateau and that they will need to be re-included in Google news?

Yahoo or Google buyout of Flickr

business2blog: Flickr, Yahoo Deal Rumored. Back in December 2004, I made a prediction that Ludicorp would be bought out by Google -- it was an easy and obvious prediction to make. But since Google has Picasa, it turns out Yahoo wants Flickr more and that the deal is more imminent than the timeline I predicted. Nothing is yet set in stone, but I see the rumors flouted about, even at slashdot. Well, once the service is bought out, time can only tell if Yahoo will use it to the fullest potential and develop a truly magnificent piece of software all of us can use daily -- or drive it to the ground as AOL has done for so many of its services that it bought.

Have an awesome idea for a voice application for scientists?

The Future of Voice is Applications
And how you can win $5000 proving it! . Michael Robertson (founder of MP3.com way back when before it was sold to Viacom) is challenging users of his new service, SIPPhone.com, to develop a voice "killer app."

So now if you go and develop an application using the Tellme Developers Studio studio.tellme.com, you can test and even deploy that application for free on SIPphone developer.sipphone.com. It's easy to get started today, just develop your application with Tellme Studio and you can test your application using the SIPphone-Tellme developer access number, 1 (747) 555-VXML. When you are ready to deploy your application, we will help you migrate it to its own SIPphone number, help you publicize it, and even start earning money.

MR will be awarding prizes from $100 to $5000 and that's not including the fame you'll get for being recognized as the developer. I'm sure the scientific community can come up with some awesome applications. How about a PubMed application where you can call out the PubMed ID of an article and the voice app will reply by reading the abstract back to you?

Google desktop plug-in SDK -- notebook maintenance?

SDK Overview. If you get the Google Desktop Search SDK, you can develop plug-ins using a number of languages:

• Visual Studio .NET
• Java
• Perl
• Python
• any language that supports COM and XML

I am willing to bet that we'll be seeing some interesting plug-ins related to managing information we keep daily to maintain our labs and our science. If you happen to be able to program in any one of these languages, why don't you try your hand in making something useful for the scientific community at-large? Some perks you get for developing these tools include:

# Receive a free, limited-edition Google Desktop Developer T-shirt (how cool would it be to be called a google developer?)
# Be promoted on the GDS Download Plug-ins page (lots of users will download your tool --> name in lights).
# Advertise your plug-in for free on Google with Google AdWords (the more people who use your plug-in, the more famous you'll be. Heck, if you want, it's not shameful to put a google banner ad on your download page to subsidize a portion of your freely available work).

Christopher Frenz: Voice Your Opinion to the NIH

Voice Your Opinion to the NIH | Linux Journal

For more information about the NIH proposal for open access, read Christopher Frenz's EOF column, "Open Access for Science", in the April 2005 issue of Linux Journal.

In recent months, open access for science has become a heavily debated topic. Many scientists are in full support of an open access publishing model, but many publishers of scientific journals remain stalwart opponents. In early February 2005, however, a partial victory towards achieving open access was scored when the National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced it had decided to establish a voluntary program that would present researchers with the option of archiving their published articles in the open electronic repository PubMed Central.

Bookends 8 for Mac OS X 10.2

Macworld: News: Bibliography tool Bookends 8 offers 50 changes

In addition, it includes a built-in http server for reference databases, a new List Views window and integrated Internet searching for finding references on PubMed, the Library of Congress and many worldwide libraries.

NMR Software in Linux

NMRPipe Home Page. NMR-philes among you know more about NMRPipe than I do. I can verify that the software will install fine in Debian 3.1. Download the binaries for Linux Redhat 9 and follow the installation instructions (they're not rpm files, they're tarballs). If you have Free NX installed and running, it'll even work remotely from the comfort of your *dows PC (just be sure to install the font files for NX client). Also, be certain that you're using the C-shell (csh).

Google desktop to organize PDF

Google Desktop Search Download. Google has finally released the much anticipated function for it's desktop -- PDF organization. Now you can dump all of your articles into one directory or have them scatter for all you care and have Google desktop index them for quick and easy retrieval whenever you want. Warning: this is new software, it has yet to be scrutinized heavily for possible privacy exploits, security flaws, etc.