• Elsevier's new text mining initiative is a step sideways

    Elsevier’s new ideas on text mining are getting a lot attention now. Sadly, they get it wrong, again. On the bright side, all other publishers, which are expected to follow this year, can learn from this mistake.
  • Looking for a PhD and a Postdoc to work on Open Science Nanosafety

    I am happy that I got my first research grant awarded (EU FP7), which should start after all the contracts are signed, etc, somewhere early 2014. The project is about setting up data needs for the analysis of nanosafety studies. And for this, I have the below two position vacancies available now. If you are keen on doing Open Science (CDK, Bioclipse, OpenTox, WikiPathways, …, …), working within the European NanoSafety Cluster, and have an affinity with understanding the systems biology of nanomaterials, then you may be interested in applying.
  • Programming in the Life Sciences #9: APIs and Web Services

    Continuing on the theory covered in this course, this part will talk about application programming interfaces (APIs) and web services.
  • Programming in the Life Sciences #11: HTML

    HTML (HyperText Markup Language), the language of the web, is no longer the only language of the web. But it still is the primary language in which source code of webpages is shared. Originally, HTML pages were always static: the only HTML source of a web page was that was downloaded from a website. Nowadays, much HTML the is visualized in your web browser, is generated on the fly with JavaScript. In fact, that is exactly what you will learn to do in this course.
  • Programming in the Life Sciences #10: JavaScript Object Notation (JSON)

    As said, JSON is the format we will use as serialization format for answers given by the Open PHACTS LDA. The API actually supports XML, RDF, HTML, and TSV too, but I think JSON is a good balance between expressiveness and compactness. Moreover, and perhaps a much better argument, JSON works very well in a JavaScript environment: it is very easy to convert the serialization into a data model:
  • Programming in the Life Sciences #8: coding standards

    Never underestimate the power of lack of coding standards in code obfuscation. Just try randomly to read code you wrote a year ago or four years ago. You’ll be surprised with what you find. Coding standards are like the grammar in writing: they ensure that our message gets understood. Of course, the primary goal is that the CPU understands what you mean, but because programming languages are not your native language, you may not always say what you think you are saying.
  • Programming in the Life Sciences #7: theory

    No course, with some good theory. In this six-day course, I plan to cover this computing theory. It’s very practice oriented: