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…
A farewell to bioinformatics (2012)
141–150 of 179 posts
Re: A farewell to bioinformatics (2012)
#142Earlier 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?
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)
#143I 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…
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> 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…
Re: A farewell to bioinformatics (2012)
#145Re: A farewell to bioinformatics (2012)
#146This 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…
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)
#147John 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…
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)
#148Some 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…
Re: A farewell to bioinformatics (2012)
#149Earlier 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.
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)
#150Earlier 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.