So – I have this friend who is in need of help. Suppose you have a collaborator who, well, it is just not working out with. At one point you were sympatico. You were friends with scientific benefits (i.e., you worked together well and were friend too). (No it is not you dear reader – it is someone else). What do you do now? How does one break off a relationship with a collaborator. You might be Co-PIs on a project. You might share students. Or you might study the same system. You might share space or equipment or jointly run some project. But now you just can’t bear the sight of them.
But the problem is – they still love you. And they don’t know how you feel. What do you do? How do you break off the relationships when there is no “unfriend” or “unfollow button”? I don’t know (really, it has never happened to me, I swear and no it is NOT you dear reader).
I have looked for an Ann Landers or Dear Abby for scientists but have no found one. So perhaps we need a new blog or site for people to “break up” as collaborators. Something like IBreakUp or one of these other services. But I think de-collaborating is more complex – more like a divorce than a breakup. Anyone out there know of services to help scientists de-friend a collaborator? Anyone know of stories where someone had to do this and it became complicated? Please post – I have even opened up anonymous commenting in case someone wants to use such a function.
More phylogeny fun from Rod Page. Been reading up on his blog post: iPhylo: Browsing TreeBASE using a genome browser-like interface. Seems very cool.
Please post and distribute
The Genome Center and School of Medicine would like to present faculty candidate:
Justin Siegel, Ph. D
University of Washington, Seattle
“Metagenomic Enzyme Design”
Friday, April 6, 2012
12:00-1:00 p.m.
4202 GBSF
Siegel search flyer 2 [Read-Only] [Compatibility Mode].pdf
LigerCat Pubmed Cloud of my papers http://ligercat.ubio.org/articles/1365086.cloud
For those who read this blog but don’t follow me on Twitter or elsewhere just thought I would share my new project with you: The Eisenome. Please join in.
Just got this email regarding Nature Precedings.
Dear registrant:
As you are an active user of Nature Precedings, we want to let you know about some upcoming changes to this service. As of April 3rd 2012, we will cease to accept submissions to Nature Precedings. Submitted documents will be processed as usual and hosted provided they are uploaded by midnight on April 3rd. Nature Precedings will then be archived, and the archive will be maintained by NPG, while all hosted content will remain freely accessible to all.
Be assured that Nature and the Nature research journals continue to permit the posting of preprints and there is no change to this policy, which is detailed here.
Nature Precedings was launched in 2007 as NPG’s preprint server, primarily for the Life Science community. Since that date, we have learned a great deal from you about what types of content are valued as preprints, and which segments of the research community most embrace this form of publication. While a great experiment, technological advances and the needs of the research community have evolved since 2007 to the extent that the Nature Precedings site is unsustainable as it was originally conceived.
Looking forward, NPG remains committed to exploring ways to help researchers, funders, and institutions manage data and best practices in data management, and we plan to introduce new services in this area. We have truly valued your contributions as authors and users to Nature Precedings and hope that you will actively participate in this research and development with us.
Interestingly, there is no announcement at the Nature Precedings site itself. I assume the email I received is real (it really looks real) though you never know these days. It’s too bad. I like the concept of a preprint server for biology. Interestingly, one of the alternatives to NP is FigShare (which is pretty cool) which recently became part of the Digital Science group which is a sister group to Nature. Hmm … wonder what the conversations at joint tea parties between Nature and Digital Science group are like. Could be fun.
Seriously? Scientists look to mummies for obesity cure. I mean – yes – I do think it is possible that antibiotic use has screwed up the human microbiome across the planet and that might have led to other problems. But for 3$&#$# sake there are 1,000,000 plus other things that have changed since the time of the mummies from diet, to pollution, to longevity, to urbanization, to sedentariness, to TV, to … well … almost everything. So – sure – the microbiome in “the ancients” might be different (I don’t see a paper here). But the headlong “look for mummies for obesity cure” is pretty darn misleading. And thus I am giving MSN one of my coveted “Overselling the microbiome” awards.
Jonathan Eisen's Lab 