What Science/Bioinformatics Magazines Do You Read?
Eric asks: "I am a
software developer getting acclimated to the bioinformatics space by
reading through introductory texts like 'Genome : The Autobiography
of a Species in 23 Chapters' by Matt Ridley, 'Genomes' by T.A. Brown,
and bio journals. I find these sources to be exceptionally
interesting but frequently the information is too detailed or too
light for my purposes. I think the ideal information would come from
a monthly magazine or online forum (like Slashdot) that is geared
towards bright non-biologist computery folk (think Dr. Dobbs with an
emphasis on computational biology -- light but definitely not fluff).
I am particularly interested in new discoveries, research techniques,
and experiments in this space. I am also budget constrained, and only
have $100 a year set aside to access this kind of material. Does
something like this exist, if so which ones do you recommend?" I
think this question serves as a fine follow-up to our last question on
Bioinformatics, may I suggest yet
another
starting point for those interested in this subject?
$100/year doesn't go too far. If you have a medical school nearby, there's a good chance you can use it for free. Probably not to check out journals, but browsing is free. Even if they don't allow the general public in, there is often a way to buy access. I mean legitimately, not by handing the guard a $10 bill. Even when I was in Princeton, my company had a sort of subscription with Princeton University to use the library.
I've noticed for some time now that articles about science have by far the lowest response rate on slashdot. For example, Designing An Astrophysical Virtual Observatory [slashdot.org] and Space Station Gets A Blanket [slashdot.org] got only 4 comments each, and none moderated up to my normal reading level. More typically a science article gets 20-30 comments, compared to the 100-200 comments on other topics. Anybody understand why?
I would imagine that this is because the science articles are in general not on the front page. You either have to go to the Science section, or configure your preferences to put those articles on the front page. For this reason they get a much smaller number of viewers. I would like to know exactly what criteria they use to determine if a story goes on the front page or relegated to only being shown in a section.
When I want your opinion I will beat it out of you.