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User: shadowKFC

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  1. Re:private or public science? on Gates Foundation Vs. Openness In Research · · Score: 2, Informative

    This is, to put it bluntly, an extremely ignorant view.

    It is now, and I'm working in science, A LOT better then it was 15 years ago. Back then you physically had to go to a library, get the articles on paper, photocopy them one by one, and then you just had a huge mess of horribly photocopied junk, with no color and hard to read illustrations and figures.

    Not to talk about finding the stuff first, Pubmed and co are invaluable here and this is only possible due to the fact that scientific articles are all digitized.
    I cannot justify the ridiculous prices that are being charged for single articles, (20 $ and up), however in reality nearly no one pays those. Everyone working in a somewhat scientific position will have access to most journals through the institution where they work. This means you can just download everything from your desk in perfect pdf quality, store it on your computer, full-text search it, print it etc..

    When ever I come across a "Please give me 500 $ for this article" page it is usually because our intuition does not have a subscription to this journal. However usually this is no problem, because collogues from other universities will probably have access and vice versa.

    Now what to do when you are not a member of a scientific institution and do not have access?
    Simple, just go to the library and go sit at their computers. Or join a library and get access to their VPN/intranet

  2. Link p53 - Ageing on Tumor-suppressing Gene Contributes to Aging · · Score: 1
    There already is link between one of the most famous tumor-supressor genes ever, p53, and ageing.

    http://www.cell.com/content/article/abstract?uid=P IIS0092867402008188

    I spot a trend here ;-)

  3. freerepublic.com? Are you serious? on Running out of Hurricane Names · · Score: 1

    Could we please not link to strange ultraconservative sites like freerepublic.com? There is really only nutjobs there. This is not news for redneck SUV-Drivers is ir?

  4. Not that amazing on Japan Tests New Bullet Train · · Score: 2, Informative

    The german ICE can do this speed since 2000 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICE

  5. Re:It looks dated to me on Drawing uncovered of 'Nazi Nuke' · · Score: 1

    It means "holdingeye for AS/12/44" (as in hook and eye)

  6. Re:Change Terms Please! on Bioinformatics in the Post-Genomic Era · · Score: 1
    Amen..

    I'm approaching this from the other side, I'm a biologist not a coder.
    What I'm working on right now is alignments of RNA secondary structures. Since this is a relatively new idea there is no really polished software to this yet.
    Some of the stuff I experinced in the last days:
    RSMatch:
    http://http//aria.njit.edu/rnacenter/RSmatch/ Chokes on lower case letters in the sequnce files. Most amusingly it does that when it encounters one, meaning it will happily do seed alignments for 45 minutes then find a 'g' in the ninth out of ten seqs and die.. No problem if you know but it took me some time to figure that one out
    Dart:
    http://dart.sourceforge.net/
    Eats memory like nothing else I have ever seen. I have a Dual G5 with 4 Gigs of RAM here and Dart really manages to fill the whole 4 Gigs with 4000 bytes of data (20 RNAs with 200 bases..)
    Don't get me wrong, I really like what I do and I'm really glad there is people out there writing this kind of software and making it available but sometimes it is a bit frustrating ;-)