Data
Glug, Glug, Glug …
11/02/11 14:16 Filed in: GenomeWeb Daily Scan
Josh Fischman at The Chronicle of Higher Education observed that a recent series of 10 articles published in Science highlights the problem of "data deluge" and the difficulties in sharing such data due to the diversity of data formats and the lack of "a common language for tagging their data." S. Pelech comments that there remains of wealth of largely ignored genomics and proteomics data available in many open-access repositories on-line that is easily retrievable, and the real problem is the lack of expertise available within the scientific community to interpret this data. More researchers need to markedly expand their biomolecular vocabularies about proteins and their activities to generate actual knowledge from the raw data. Read More...
Faster, Faster!
24/02/11 15:34 Filed in: GenomeWeb Daily Scan
Blogger Matthew Yglesias at Think Progress wondered if computing power has improved at an "un-optimally rapid pace" that does not permit people sufficient time to develop better ideas for what to do with all this computing power. Blogger Mike the Mad Biologist thinks that instead of slowing down the pace of technological advancement, we need to speed it up to have enough computing power to handle all the data being generate, as the cost of DNA interpretation rather than DNA sequencing is becoming the bottleneck. S. Pelech suggests that the real problem arises when other supporting areas of science and technology become underfunded or relatively neglected relative to the more outwardly sexier endeavors that suck up the lion's share of funding, and this ultimately severely compromises realization of the true value of the public investment in science and engineering. Read More...