Anatomy of an mainstream science piece

A great blog post by Ewan Birney that describes the process of writing an commentary piece for the Guardian newspaper, and which also discusses the need for more involvement of scientists in the public discussion of science. I like the concluding remarks:

As practicing scientists, we need to continue laying the groundwork started long ago by many others…engaging consistently and non-judgmentally with our communities and policymakers about out work. There is a real task ahead of us in providing an accessible way for people to digest this information. We should take every opportunity to communicate on every level, from the most basic to state of the art. Only then can society really use the hard-earned information gleaned from genetics appropriately, and for the greater good.

A long time ago in a Galaxy browser far, far away…

Today marks exactly 10 years since the first publication that describes the popular Galaxy platform:

The tremendous success of the Galaxy project can be summarized by the following two graphs (taken from the statistics page on the Galaxy Wiki):

New user registrations on Galaxy main site

 

Publications that reference or mention Galaxy

I'm sure that the Galaxy team have a more official date to use as their anniversary, but I'll mark the 10th year since their initial publication to say congratulations and 'Happy Birthday'! I hope that Galaxy can emerge unscathed from those difficult 'teenage years' that lie just around the corner!

Twitter competition: win a signed copy of Bioinformatics Data Skills by Vince Buffalo

I have an extra copy of the fantastic Bioinformatics Data Skills book by Vince Buffalo (who you should all be following on twitter at @vsbuffalo). I've come up with a fun little competition to let someone have a chance of winning this signed copy.

All you have to do is write a tweet that includes the #ACGT hashtag (so I can track all of the answers), which provides the following information:

Name a useful bioinformatics data skill

The winner will be chosen randomly — hopefully by a powerful scripted solution that Vince will help me with — in two weeks time. I will post details of any interesting (or funny) suggestions that you come up with on this site. The full details are below.

Competition rules

  1. Tweets should name a 'useful bioinformatics data skill'
  2. Tweets must contain the hashtag #ACGT
  3. Last day to enter into the competition is 25th September (midnight PST)
  4. One winner will be chosen randomly
  5. Only one entrant per twitter account
  6. Retweets of tweets that use #ACGT hashtag will be excluded