Recent Blog Highlights

• The May Scientiae Carnival is up. This month’s theme: Career paths, perspective, and changing self-mage. (Hosted by Cat Nap).

• A great piece on the history of the platypus is up over at What You’re Doing is Rather Desperate.

• See Jane Compute has a set of posts on “Is computer science a science?” (See Part 1, Part 1A, Part2, Part 3 is promised soon …)

• I saw Jorge Cham give a talk yesterday. It was an hour lecture on the value of procrastination. While the talk was content-light, it was incredibly funny and entertaining.

• Be sure to get your art break in today by visiting Drawing the Motmot.

Reading List

I’ve been traveling a lot lately … hence the relative silence. While gone I’ve focused on implementing some computational techniques. Consequently, I’ve fallen behind on reading. Here is a short (not comprehensive) list of some of the interesting papers have been published recently:

Character generation

Bioinformatics Zen has a funny post on the World of Bioinformatics Quest: Character generation. It made me laugh.

News: Link fest.

I’ve been mentioned on Bio::Blogs #17 (the one Santa brought us)! This has provided the necessary motivation to mention some good posts I’ve read recently on Blogs:

Pedro Beltrao over at Public Rambling has a good post on the recent Cell paper by Lécuyer on Global Analysis of mRNA Localization. This paper has been on my radar because I’ve been working with the BioGRID lately and therefore thinking a bit about how to infer missing network connections.

The recent article at PLoS ONE by Keller and Harel entitled “Beyond the Gene” attracted some attention in the blogs I read. Jason Stajich over at Fungal Genomes and Comparative Genomics highlights some problems with the jargon introduced by Keller (post here) and RPM at evogen rips the article to shreds on a number of grounds, including the dreaded “adaptionist claptrap” (post here). I can honestly say that I got more from reading these two posts than from the article itself. (I reviewed a good article related to the “adaptionist claptrap” in my very first post.)

Finally, while not a literature review, I enjoyed the recent post Good Programming versus Biological Intuition over on Bioinformatics Zen.