Image via Wikipedia

Which is not to say that I am any good at software engineering, good practice, or writing decent code. And you shouldn’t take Greg to task for some of the dodgy demos I’ve done over the past few months either. What he does need to take the credit for is enabling me to go from someone who knew nothing at all about software design, the management of software development or testing to being able to talk about these things, ask some of the right questions, and even begin …

This post is a follow on from a random tweet that I sent a few weeks back in response to a query on twitter from Lord Drayson, the UK’s Minister of State for Science and Innovation. I thought it might be an idea to expand from the 140 characters that I had to play with at the time but its taken me a while to get to it. It builds on the ideas of a post from last year but is given a degree of urgency by the current changes …

Following on from Science Online 09 and particularly discussions on Impact Factors and researcher incentives (also on Friendfeed and some video available at Mogulus via video on demand) as well as the article in PloS Computational Biology by Phil Bourne and Lynn Fink the issue of unique researcher identifiers has really emerged as absolutely central to making traditional publication work better, effectively building a real data web that works, and making it possible to aggregate the full list of how people contribute to the community automatically.
Good citation practice lies at the core of good science. The value of …

All good traditions require someone to make an arbitrary decision to do something again. Last year I threw up a few New Year’s resolutions in the hours before NYE in the UK. Last night I was out on the shore of Sydney Harbour. I had the laptop – I thought about writing something – and then I thought – nah I can just lie here and look at the pretty lights. However I did want to follow up the successes and failures of last year’s resolutions and maybe make a …

This is the second in a series of posts (first one here) in which I am trying to process and collect ideas that came out of Scifoo. This post arises out of a discussion I had with Michael Eisen (UC Berkely) and Sean Eddy (HHMI Janelia Farm) at lunch on the Saturday. We had drifted from a discussion of the problem of attribution stacking and citing datasets (and datasets made up of datasets) into the problem of academic credit. I had trotted out the usual spiel about the need for …

Image from Wikipedia via Zemanta
Following on from the discussion a few weeks back kicked off by Shirley at One Big Lab and continued here I’ve been thinking about how to actually turn what was a throwaway comment into reality:
What is being generated here is new science, and science isn’t paid for per se. The resources that generate science are supported by governments, charities, and industry but the actual production of science is not supported. The truly radical approach to this would be to turn the system on its head. Don’t …

Following on from my post there has been lots of discussion both in the comments to the post and also support and ideas on other blogs. I also had a good talk (I know, face to face, how archaic :) with Jeremy Frey about the idea. Here I want to collate a few of the comments and ideas.

A whole series of things have converged in the last couple of days for me. First was Jean-Claude’s description of the work [1, 2] he and Brent Friesen of the Dominican University are doing putting the combi-Ugi project into an undergraduate laboratory setting. The students will make new compounds which will then be sent for testing as antimalarial agents by Phil Rosenthal at UCSF. This is a great story and a testament in particular to Brent’s work to make the laboratory practical more relevant and exciting for his students.
At the …