First, how many Nobel Prize winners would want to teach in America’s public schools. I don’t think he realizes that this would be a serious pay cut for most Nobel Laureates.

Second, there is much more to be an effective teacher than simply having “knowledge, wisdom, and experience.” Nobel laureates are usually good for ribald seminars but I’m not certain I’d want them teaching my kids. And I don’t even have kids

First, I’ve gathered ten years of web access logs from WormBase, a generic model organism database where I work as the project manager.

Next, I correlated IP addresses with requests and tried to trace browsing patterns from one object to the next. This isn’t an exact science since we haven’t historically tried to uniquely identify users.

Data is loaded into a simple MySQL schema with object and object2related tables. Expediently simple.

I’ve long felt that a recommender system could revolutionize the browsing and mining of biological data. The idea would be to provide users with a list of related objects based on browsing history of cadres. See this post for some preliminary implementation notes.

I am worried that a recommender system won’t be received with open arms. Given that my current implementation is based on web log analysis it presents serious privacy issues. It’s conceivable that it’s use could inadvertently reveal the identity of uncloned and unpublished loci.

Consider:

protein => {
title => '%s release [%s]‘,
qq{formatdb_cmd => ‘-p T -t ‘%s’ -i %s’},
filename => ‘protein.fa’,
},


Yes, there’s a typo, with the qq enclosing an entire hash entry. This doesn’t raise an error, but obviously obscures the hash entry!

According to Google Trends he just might be onto something. Searches for bioinformatics have dropped in half in the past four years. C’est incroyable! Not surprisingly, the top-ten sites for searches for bioinformatics are all in India.

Gory details available by searching Google Trends for bioinformatics.

Interesting parallels in the trends between bioinformatics, molecular biology, proteomics, and C. elegans:

Today we discussed the need for a bug/issue tracker. In the past, we’ve considered RT since it integrates with our existing email flow. But frankly, RT is a PITA to configure.

I know that some people are hot and heavy on Mantis. I’m not. For one, I don’t like it’s name or it’s logo.

Here’s how I installed Trac:


// install Python
cd ~/src
wget http://python.org/ftp/python/2.5.2/Python-2.5.2.tgz
cd ../build
tar xzf ../src/Python*
cd Python*
./configure; make ; sudo make install

But hey, enough with the desktop apps already. I’m an on-the-go guy and need a mobile, web-based solution. With rounded corners, too, please.

Here are two options that I’ve discovered.

14dayz.com

Goofy name, but feature rich. Gratis and paid plans available, restricted by the number of projects you can maintain at once and the types of reports that are available. Looks helluva lot like 37 Signal’s project management tool Basecamp. Intuitive interface with appropriate (albeit sometimes flakey) ajax. Generates simple and generic invoices. Export to PDF and CSV available with paid plans, which start at a reasonable 5 bucks a month.

Toggl.com

They’ve got the name sans final “e”. That’s a good start. Again, both free and paid plans. I found the free plans to be nearly useless since reports don’t calculate a sum for billable hours unless you upgrade to a paid plan. And at 19 smackers a month, it ain’t cheap. Still, looks promising.

Know of other good (free) web-based time-tracking tools?