A farewell to bioinformatics (2012)
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A farewell to bioinformatics (2012)
1–10 of 179 posts
Re: A farewell to bioinformatics (2012)
#2>> I’m leaving bioinformatics to go work at a software company with more technically ept people and for a lot more money.
More money, good on you. Starting off your critique of your former colleagues with "technically ept people'...not going to get a lot of sympathy for the correctness of your work.
Re: A farewell to bioinformatics (2012)
#3>> I’m leaving bioinformatics to go work at a software company with more technically ept people and for a lot more money. More money, good on you. Starting off your critique of your former colleagues with "technically ept people'...not going to get a lot of sympathy for the correctness of your work.
Everyone is jumping on that, but (while I had to look it up too) 'ept' actually is a real word:
from the OED:
ept, adj. Pronunciation: /ɛpt/ Etymology: Back-formation
Used as a deliberate antonym of ‘inept’: adroit, appropriate, effective.
1966 Time 30 Sept. 7/1 With the exception of one or two semantic twisters, I think it is a first-rate job—definitely ept, ane and ert.
1976 N.Y. Times Mag. 6 June 15 The obvious answer is summed up by a White House official's sardonic crack: ‘Politically, we're not very ept.’
Re: A farewell to bioinformatics (2012)
#4Really makes me want to learn more about molecular biology.
Any solid factual resources besides the references mentioned in this justified rant?
Re: A farewell to bioinformatics (2012)
#5>> I’m leaving bioinformatics to go work at a software company with more technically ept people and for a lot more money. More money, good on you. Starting off your critique of your former colleagues with "technically ept people'...not going to get a lot of sympathy for the correctness of your work.
Well, ept is obviously a back-formation and a clever and amusing one.
Etymology is straight from Latin: ineptus, which is prefix in- plus aptus (fitting or suitable). Interestingly there's also inapt which is quite similar.
edit: aheilbut's research on this is much more thorough.
Re: A farewell to bioinformatics (2012)
#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 attitude of both the researchers and the other developers on the projects I worked on. It was very frustrating.
Re: A farewell to bioinformatics (2012)
#7>> I’m leaving bioinformatics to go work at a software company with more technically ept people and for a lot more money. More money, good on you. Starting off your critique of your former colleagues with "technically ept people'...not going to get a lot of sympathy for the correctness of your work.
Everyone is jumping on that, but (while I had to look it up too) 'ept' actually is a real word: from the OED: ept, adj. Pronunciation: /ɛpt/ Etymology: Back-formation Used as a deliberate antonym of ‘inept’: adroit, appropriate, effective. 1938 E. B. White Let. Oct. (1976) 183, I am much obliged..to you for your warm, courteous, and ept treatment of a rather weak, skinny subject. 1966 Time 30 Sept. 7/1 With the excep…
That was…surprisingly thorough.
Re: A farewell to bioinformatics (2012)
#8Sounds like a fed up academic with a stick up his backside.
Sh*tty data? Comes from the community. If the data and algorithms are so poor, and the author so superior, he should have been able to improve the circumstances.
This whole screed reads like an entitled individual who entered a profession, didn't get the glory, oh and yeah, academia doesn't pay well.
In the realm of bioinformatics, lets ignore the work done on the human genome and the like.
Re: A farewell to bioinformatics (2012)
#9>> I’m leaving bioinformatics to go work at a software company with more technically ept people and for a lot more money. More money, good on you. Starting off your critique of your former colleagues with "technically ept people'...not going to get a lot of sympathy for the correctness of your work.
Everyone is jumping on that, but (while I had to look it up too) 'ept' actually is a real word: from the OED: ept, adj. Pronunciation: /ɛpt/ Etymology: Back-formation Used as a deliberate antonym of ‘inept’: adroit, appropriate, effective. 1938 E. B. White Let. Oct. (1976) 183, I am much obliged..to you for your warm, courteous, and ept treatment of a rather weak, skinny subject. 1966 Time 30 Sept. 7/1 With the excep…
We have the term "adept" though, which is actually in common usage and fits the intended meaning here...
Re: A farewell to bioinformatics (2012)
#10> 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…
Part of the problem is grant money. Sometimes it's faster to buy more machines and get more results as opposed to rewriting entire algorithms. But the author does correctly identify, I think, some tendencies of some academic bioinformaticists.