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  AI solves complex biology problem from scratch

An interdisciplinary, interuniversity group of scientists from Vanderbilt, Cornell, and CFD Research Corporation have created an artificial intelligence capable of solving complex scientific problems from scratch. The AI, called ABE (Automated Biology Explorer), “discovered” how glycolysis produces energy in a living cell by looking at a set of data and then squeezing it into a mathematical formula, just like a human biology researcher.ABE is powered by the freeware Eureqa softw...

   AI,Artificial intelligence,Biology,ABE     2011-10-17 11:08:58

  Advice From An Old Programmer

You've finished this book and have decided to continue with programming. Maybe it will be a career for you, or maybe it will be a hobby. You'll need some advice to make sure you continue on the right path, and get the most enjoyment out of your newly chosen activity. I've been programming for a very long time. So long that it's incredibly boring to me. At the time that I wrote this book, I knew about 20 programming languages and could learn new ones in about a day to a week depending on how w...

   Advice,Programming,Python,Old programmer     2012-03-08 13:51:11

  Do scientists really need a PhD?

Young scientists at a Chinese genomics institute are foregoing conventional postgraduate training for the chance to be part of major scientific initiatives. Is this the way of the future?The approach to extended postgraduate training varies from country to country. The United States and Europe, for example, have long believed that students need to finish a multiyear programme of postgraduate work before they can fully participate in the front rank of research, whether in industry or acad...

   Career,PhD,Scientist,Relationship,BGI     2012-01-02 08:19:32

  The price of information

SOMETIMES it takes but a single pebble to start an avalanche. On January 21st Timothy Gowers, a mathematician at Cambridge University, wrote a blog post outlining the reasons for his longstanding boycott of research journals published by Elsevier. This firm, which is based in the Netherlands, owns more than 2,000 journals, including such top-ranking titles as Cell and the Lancet. However Dr Gowers, who won the Fields medal, mathematics’s equivalent of a Nobel prize, in 1998,...

   Information,Price,Value,Facebook,Social network     2012-02-07 06:24:53

  The "C is Efficient" Language Fallacy

I came across an article yesterday about programming languages, which hit on one of my major peeves, so I can't resist responding. The article is at greythumb.org, and it's called Programmer's rant: what should and should not be added to C/C++. It's a variation on the extremely common belief that C and C++ are the best languages to use when you need code to run fast. They're not. They're good at things that need to get very close to the hardware - not in the efficiency sense, but in the...

   C,GCC,Fallacy,Evolvement     2012-01-09 08:54:46

  I am a programmer

Admitting that may be career suicide, or possibly it will cost me dearly because 'software engineers' are raking in the big bucks these days, but the fact of the matter is that I'm a programmer. It's what I do best and it is the job title that I associate with most because it feels as though the biggest chunk of me will always be most likely to blurt that out when people ask me what my job is. That I like to program definitely helps.So instead of choosing some fancy title for what it is that I d...

   Programmer,Skill,Future,Requirements,Software engineer     2011-11-01 07:08:11

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