Blog
Workshop organization 101.
2013 May 07
Last March I was program chair for CompleNet2013 after attending as a speaker the previous year. I thought that my experience might help others understand what are the different organization roles, and also how the whole process looks like behind the scenes.
Bravely holding ground against the five paragraph essay
2013 April 30
Ideas on why the structure we learned in middle school might not be the best option for blogging --Irmak
How we do time and task management
2013 April 26
Traditionally scientists have managed their time using paper based tools including lab notebooks and agendas. Today we have a wider variety of offline and online tools available to organize ourselves. Here I cover how various members of the lab do their time and task management. --Arnau
A framework to understand cellular processes
2013 April 26
Our new paper "Use of a global metabolic network to predict organismal metabolic networks" has been published in "Scientific Reports":http://amaral.northwestern.edu/publications/use-global-metabolic-network-predict-organismal-metabolic-networks/. In this work we define a new framework, the global network, to use in analyzing cellular processes.
The global framework springs from a concept put forth by Alfred ... read more
Pencil Lead, Shooting Stars, and Metabolism
2013 April 15
Pencil lead is not lead, shooting-stars are not stars, proteome is part of the metabolome, DNA is also an enzyme. -Meilin
A quick introduction to web crawling using Scrapy - Part I
2013 April 08
How to use Scrapy in 5 mins!
Lab blogging Part III - I was not joking about five paragraphs
2013 April 03
Yesterday I wrote that I think we should keep our blog posts to five paragraphs. The five paragraph format is frequently derided. Today I explain why I advocate for it. -- David Mertens
Lab blogging Part II - One audience, five paragraphs
2013 April 02
One of the points of confusion for the lab blog is our audience. To whom shall we write? How sophisticated should our entries be? I believe that we should consider our own lab as our audience, and we should keep things simple. -- David Mertens
Lab blogging Part I - We don't blog enough
2013 April 01
One of my roles in the lab has been to encourage the members of the lab to write entries to the lab blog. How has that gone, you ask? In this first in a short series of blog posts, I simply want to state the obvious. We don't write often enough for our own good. -- David Mertens
Extraterrestrial Riches
2013 January 25
A couple months ago I stumbled upon the website for a start-up company called Planetary Resources. On their site, they have a well-produced video explaining their goal of mining near-earth asteroids and bringing the resources back to earth.
A stress free career of course
2013 January 09
As I get older I keep encountering the great discrepancy between theory/concept and reality in application. This comes to a head for me right now as I approach the twilight years of my graduate school career and have to answer people (read, strangers) as to what my career aspirations are. ... read more
Can a physicist fix a cell?
2012 December 17
For those of you who haven't read the article "Can a biologist fix a radio?" allow me to summarize: physicists and engineers are awesome, biologists are idiots.
Fewer resources may explain why some female faculty publish less
2012 December 13
New study uncovers impact of gender-biased resource allocation on ‘productivity gap’
Biologists hate math and other citation database stories
2012 November 26
The conclusions reached by a study published in a recent issue of PNAS may not be entirely trustworthy. Well, maybe I need to be more specific so as to narrow it down to just one study. The paper I'm referring to is ==[HTML_REMOVED]"Heavy use of equations impedes communication among biologists"[HTML_REMOVED]== ... read more
The astonishing power of group pressure
2012 November 20
I recently (finally!) found a short video showing one the "classical" experiments performed by the social psychologist Solomon Asch. If this name does not ring any bell, please take two minutes of your precious time and watch "this Youtube video":http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gf2PGZ0mW-U: I promise you will not regret.
Pretty funny, isn't it? ... read more
Rediscovery of knowledge: Pythagoras’ theorem, Stigler’s law and others
2012 November 19
"Pythagoras’ theorem":http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pythagorean_theorem is one of the most ancient, well known and studied mathematical theorems. It has a history longer than three thousand years as well as more than three hundred proofs. Although its first detailed description is in Euclid’s Elements, people often attribute its discovery to Pythagoras and named it ... read more
Rotten Tomatoes vs Metacritic
2012 November 14
Two men enter, one man leaves
In my younger and more vulnerable years my advisor gave me some advice I've been turning over in my mind ever since. "Whenever you feel like using statistics," he told me, "just remember the assumptions you make."
He didn't say any more, but we've ... read more
Interactive Data Analysis
2012 October 22
GUI programs are notoriously complicated and time consuming to write, but they are an essential component in a computational scientist's toolbox for one simple reason: they are the best means for developing deep intuition for the behavior of the algorithms that we write every day in our work. - David Mertens
The euro crisis – a portuguese perspective
2012 October 15
We have a saying in Portugal: “things are bad, things are very bad”. It is something I have heard for as long as I can remember.
Clearly correlated
2012 September 21
As a consequence, I think I have become something of a fierce detractor of correlations happily interpreted as causality.