91–100 of 179 posts
So as someone working in application of medicines, I'd agree with the comments that say those of us doing these things have learn to make code work, but are not software engineers (and would not claim to be). This means that if you can improve the tools that are used (and don't care about making a return), the leverage would be massive. I imagine it isn't trivial (otherwise it would have been done by now), but imagin…
This will sound harsh, but it isn’t meant to be. Scientists code better then you do science. This is simply a consequence Of a weeding out mechanism for those that have no coding skills. The only ppl who get away with no coding skills are important professor with grad students to do the coding. This isn’t to say that our skills are great, but a generic programmers (I.e. CS majors) science abilities are approximately…
And now a problem that would be great to solve is having vectored images and being able to change my fonts on size, lines are too small, I changed the paper format, whatever. I can't express how often I've had to redo plots simply because they don't look right in a paper.
I also cannot express the beauty of LaTeX but the absolute horror it is to create Tikz images. They are beautiful but it is definitely an art that one can never master. I want to do it with code, I don't want dumb gui interfaces that only work on certain machines and never work as expected.
If a nicer version of Tikz could be made that had a lot of power under the hood was created, this would help a lot of people. That's why matplotlib is so great. To do basic things is extremely straightforward. But if you want to do extremely complex things you also have that power. (Even something as simple as matplotlib for LaTeX - which results in vectored images - would be incredibly helpful)
Build tools to make research more efficient and reproducible. The research community is a small market and has little money. Building tools is often not regarded as scientific activity and can lead to dead ends if publication is pursued. So, if you do not have to rely on income anymore and want to contribute to science, build tools for the community. Or better, come up with a way to help scientists to build their own…
This is a pipe dream of mine, but I would love a Wikipedia of null results: nullpedia! Nobody publishes null results bc they’re not exciting, but I think a lot of NSF money would be saved if “failed” experiments were aggregated somewhere in a searchable way. There’s lot of questions. How to organize it? How to encourage participation? How to maximize usefulness while at the same time minimizing volunteer effort? How…
[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-07118-1 via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18297724
Side note: I am the co-founder of Aidlab - a device and a platform that is widely used by biomedical scientists and students in their research ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wY0YPOKNk88 ) In my free time I am working on my next project - an open-sourced platform where everyone can contribute to help fight death. The platform allows uploading anonymized, structured health records - publicly available. Why? Dying is…
My dream would be to have a place I could look at any paper (even if not on a campus internet connection), be able to look at raw data, code, and have a forum to facilitate discussions between researchers. I know the first won't happen for awhile, but it is a dream (open science). The second is direly needed but in some cases not practical. But I think there could be a lot to gain from just having a small portion of…
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This isn’t the most obvious way to make an impact, but we’ve effectively saved many labs thousands of dollars on equipment and consumables that can then be reallocated toward their research. Our mission is to increase the efficiency of scientific research — the supply room is just the beginning.
Would be happy to chat - tristan@quartzy.com