Viewing profile — gilesc

NLTK is great for _learning_ NLP, but Python is much too slow for scalable deep NLP (by which I mean tagging and parsing, as opposed to TF-IDF etc). Also parallelization can become…

It's largely been supplanted by Ruby?

Like sports, instruments, and any other developed skill, there will be days you feel like it and days you don't. The key IMO is to pace yourself: don't overwork on days you feel li…

Maybe referring to this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2657135

While they were still choosing targets that either "deserved" it for some moderately reasonable ideological reason (Sony) or should have top-notch security (FBI), yes. Now that the…

Interesting that the author of the fake in-browser Finder apparently uses Dropbox.

Reads like a HOWTO for burnout.

Working on this, if anyone wants a corpus (positive examples from twssstories.com, negative from fmylife.com) https://gist.github.com/945614

In the US, PhD students in biology are paid tuition plus salary. So assuming his undergraduate student loans were subsidized, a PhD who decided to teach high school would not be in…

Well, first of all, a traditional student will be out by age 26-27 not 40. Secondly, PhD students in the sciences are paid. Not much, admittedly -- about $22k, on average -- but en…

Well, bioinformaticians are far from uniform in terms of language usage (my mentor staunchly defends his use of VB6, for instance...), but this link shows people using Python for s…

To be fair, there are also private research foundations and private sector companies -- i.e., drug or medical device companies that also hire biologists. You can also pivot somewha…

Ha! Thankfully, Perl seems to be mostly going out of favor in bioinformatics in favor of a Python / R combo.

I think this article is a bit sensationalist. Yes, there are niche techniques in biology, but many -- Western blots, qPCR, cell culture, transfection -- are transferable to almost …

This looks like a slightly better cake. After all, cake provides a persistent VM and you can run scripts with cake with !#/usr/bin/env cake. It's nice that it doesn't require ruby …

Although I also dislike .NET, it seems the primary complaint here about .NET is that it abstracts programmers too much away from the bare metal. But doesn't that apply equally to n…

see also: https://github.com/weavejester/clucy

It's a great idea technically, but I'm not sure whether you can sell a social networking app. Social networks are valuable in proportion to the number of users, and pay-for-access …

Independence / self-direction. Searches google / manuals for answers instead of asking you every few seconds.

This is absolutely gorgeous. The only thing the standard RGui has on it is basic emacs/bash-ish keybindings (C-e, C-a, etc.) for navigation.

The best toolkits are probably in Java: -Stanford's Tagger, Parser, and NLP Core -Apache OpenNLP -Lingpipe Many smaller components are made to be compatible with IBM UIMA (of Watso…

Oversimplifying things a bit, these writers are saying that scientific objectivity is impossible. This line of argument tends to reduce the credibility of science in the eyes of th…

I like and use it, but it's based on reverse-engineering Pandora's encryption keys, so every once in awhile (when Pandora changes the keys), it breaks the client, which is annoying…

If she ends up losing the data permanently, that will severely hamper her ability to apply for future grants (which usually require preliminary data), and lose funding. This offens…

I'm a student at OUHSC, and her husband, Dr. Janknecht, is one of my professors. Although failing to make a backup is obviously stupid, he is an extremely competent researcher (I d…