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A farewell to bioinformatics (2012)

madhadron.com

141–150 of 179 posts

Re: A farewell to bioinformatics (2012)

#141

Some thoughts on this article: - This guy clearly has a limited understanding of the field. This quote is laughable: "There are only two computationally difficult problems in bioinformatics, sequence alignment and phylogenetic tree construction." - As a bioinformatician, I feel sorry for this guy. Just like any other field, there are shitty places to work. If I was stuck in a lab where a demanding PI with no computer…

The problem with bioinformatics is not "prematured optimization", but rather no optimization at all.

Re: A farewell to bioinformatics (2012)

#142
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regarding "ML is the new sexy thing," check out these graphs: http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=machine+learnin... http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=machine%20learning

From your second graph, Iran and Pakistan have stronger interests in Machine Learning than the US. (I am not surprised about India, South Korea, and China though). Is the interest in advanced Info Tech that widespread in those countries or simply because the only people who could use Google in those countries are government-sanctioned researchers? Anyone familiar with the reason could shine light for the rest of us?

I am not sure how you based your conclusions.

Pakistan's internet is generally open (except youtube and pornography). But there is no widespread interest in ML particularly. Only a few companies - most of them outsourcing from the US.

Re: A farewell to bioinformatics (2012)

#143

I have some experience working at a genomics research company and I'll broadly +1 Fred's experience about the industry, although in less negative terms. I got out before I got jaded, so my perspective is a bit more "oh, that's a shame" than his. I really like genetics, bioinformatics, hardware, deep-science, and all that but the timing and fit wasn't right. The tools are written by (in my experience) very smart bioin…

This is an old story. Every domain I've worked in featured a chasm between the domain experts and the software folks. Experts write terrible software that somehow mostly works. Software folks misunderstand the problem and create overwrought monstrosities.

In my experience, this applies to accounting software, sensor data, computer-aided design, print manufacturing, healthcare, etc.

I imagine there's phases of maturity, something akin to CMM/SEI. Eventually there's enough people with a foot on both sides to bridge the gap.

It just takes time.

Re: A farewell to bioinformatics (2012)

#144
post #6

> the software is written to be inefficient, to use memory poorly, and the cry goes up for bigger, faster machines! When the machines are procured, even larger hunks of data are indiscriminately shoved through black box implementations of algorithms in hopes that meaning will emerge on the far side. It never does, but maybe with a bigger machine… I spent five years working in bioinformatics, and this is exactly the a…

I dont think the problem is people (researchers, developers) but of the infrastructure for research. Researchers are constantly thinking about getting new grants and renewing old ones the way politicians are constantly worried about their corporate sponsors and getting reelected. The result is that we only get a little science and we only get a little good governance. The internal organizations that form as a result of this environment are artificial. In the lean times researchers make short term decisions aimed at generating marketing and taking mindshare. In the fat times researchers ensure that all computational and lab space are used and come up with new reasons for growth. A friend working in a large research institution once suggested a refactoring that would greatly improve efficiency of an application. Instead, she was handed back down a recommendation that would make the application less efficient with the same functionality. The reason was that the computational usage was about to be audited and the rule was that there would be no improvements in efficiency until after it was complete. The system is an old house with hundred year old plumbing. The people you pour through the system are going to flow through the pipes abiding by the laws of physics. Blaming them for a leak is about as useful as blaming water: while you may win the moral argument, you will not solve the problem. The best you can do is replace them with new people who will react largely in the same manner.

Re: A farewell to bioinformatics (2012)

#146
post #46

This is a little discouraging - BioInformatics was my top choice for a Master's program I'm planning to start this year. The program at Melbourne Uni looks really good (accepts from three streams, Math/Stats, Biology or Computing and tailors the course based on your background). Maybe I should go for a more generic Machine Learning one and try to apply that to healthcare in some other field if things are really this…

I am also in the field, and IMHO we are starting to get away from the worst excesses code quality wise i.e. things are getting better.

6 years ago using CVS or something like that was novel. Now not using GIT is. Big improvement!

Problems are still interesting and challenging.

Re: A farewell to bioinformatics (2012)

#147

John Graham-Cumming (jgrahamc here) co-authored a piece on making scientific code open. It was received well-enough that Nature published it [0]. This approach has inspired others to do better work by describing a concrete problem, then outlining steps to fix it on an individual and institutional level. When someone finds fault with the way a field conducts itself, I would implore them to constructively influence tha…

The problem is people who would have the experience / knowledge to really make it better, are not tempted to go in and fix it, because there's so much political / non-technical work involved in doing that. If someone wants to solve hard computational problems, they might as well go into another field. If they really care about doing biology, chances have been that they aren't the greatest programmers (I understand this may be changing, but still seemed to be the case 4 years ago when I left bioinformatics). This leaves the people who are happy with the status quo, staying in bioinformatics, and the people who are dissatisfied, going to other fields where they feel their work can have more of an impact.

In my experience, what happens is that biologists define the science, and they depend on the computer scientists / engineers to implement solutions to their computational problems. The computational people depend on the biologists to validate whatever results they produce. The iteration cycle can be painfully slow, especially for people used to telling machines what they want them to do, and getting results immediately. The proposition of changing that dynamic is not alluring to most people, but I still hope there will be some who try.

Re: A farewell to bioinformatics (2012)

#148

Some thoughts on this article: - This guy clearly has a limited understanding of the field. This quote is laughable: "There are only two computationally difficult problems in bioinformatics, sequence alignment and phylogenetic tree construction." - As a bioinformatician, I feel sorry for this guy. Just like any other field, there are shitty places to work. If I was stuck in a lab where a demanding PI with no computer…

" I could give a rat's ass about performance. I'm trying to find the answer to a question, and if I can get that answer in a reasonable amount of time, then the code is good enough" This is the only bad point that a lot of people are aligned with. The more time a program needs to finish, the more time you will need to run it again with some other dataset, and in turn - more time to find the right answer. I really fee…

Want to teach us? A bunch of us work right near AT&T park in Mission Bay and would love to learn. Even a long day or two from you guys would be awesome. But as was eluded to, we can't pay you - we're poor as shit - especially when compared with you all.

Re: A farewell to bioinformatics (2012)

#149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The smoking gun was an error, but there were something like 9 Potti papers that ended up getting retracted. There's no way that someone could have accidentally made that many mistakes...

Interestingly, the fraudsters were caught because of a false claim on a CV, and that finally destroyed their creditability. It is intentional fraud, no doubt about it; they restarted halted clinical trials. I was just pointing out they did sloppy work too.

Wow, that's messed up.

Fundamental methodological error -> "Come on, these are competent people, you have to trust that whatever error they made didn't effect the final result."

False claim of accolade -> "How dare you fucking try to pass off this garbage as legitimate science?!?!?"

Re: A farewell to bioinformatics (2012)

#150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not an outsider and the 30K was a bit of an exaggeration, and I apologize for that. The point I was trying to make was that if you look in as an outsider, you would see the requirements being extremely daunting compared to what you might see elsewhere with a pay scale that is very low and unappealing to anyone who might match it. Unless, of course, you just finished your degree in some biological discipline where…

If 30k is the inaccurate number, what's the accurate one? I'm curious as to what the realistic requirements are from your experience with the field.

50k-60k starting out.
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