Fantasy Science Funding is a fun game that anybody can play. You select a Science funding body of your choice, imagine yourself as its all powerful chief executive, and decide which areas of scientific research you would “hire and fire”. What could be easier? Here is how Fantasy Science Funding works…
August 14, 2008
Anyone for a game of Fantasy Science Funding?
August 12, 2008
Who funds Science in Britain?
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is full of scientists. All kinds of scientists working in biology, chemistry and physics, as well as plenty of mathematicians, engineers and technologists too work in the UK. They make their living in good old Blighty, pushing forward the boundaries of human knowledge, wherever and whenever they can. Nanotechnology, astronomy, molecular biology, primatology, climatology and lots of other ‘ologies can all be found in Britain. Who is it that pays them and how much money do they spend? Here is a list of funding bodies in 2008, along with their annual budgets and chief executives. It is not a comprehensive list, because it does not include all charities, European money and privately funded Science. However, it does cover most of the larger funding bodies… (more…)
July 25, 2008
How to spend a £400 million Science budget
A thought experiment with lots of money
The Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) is the United Kingdom’s funding agency for academic research and training in the non-clinical life sciences. It supports a total of around 1600 scientists and 2000 research students in universities and institutes in the UK. The head of our laboratory, Douglas Kell, has recently been appointed Chief Executive of the BBSRC [1]. Congratulations Doug, we wish you the very best in your new job. Now, according to bbsrc.ac.uk, their annual budget is a cool £400 million (just short of $800 million or €500 million). This has left me wondering, how would you spend a £400 million Science budget for the life sciences? For the purposes of this article, imagine it was you that had been put in charge of said budget, and Prime Minister Gordon Brown (texture like sun) had given you, yes YOU, a big bag of cash to distribute as you see fit. A mouth-watering prospect, I think you’ll agree. Here, is my personal opinion of how, in my dreams, I would spend the money. (more…)
July 15, 2008
ChEBI, Oh ChEBI, Oh Baby!
With sincere apologies to Jamaican reggae singer-songwriter Eric Donaldson, “ChEBI, Oh ChEBI, Oh Baby, don’t you know I’m in need of thee”?
Chemical Entities of Biological Interest (ChEBI) is a dictionary, controlled vocabulary, database, ontology of small (low molecular-weight) chemical entities that are considered to be biologically interesting, (like amphetamine (CHEBI:2679) for example). After a couple of recent meetings, ChEBI is going through some serious revision, to make it more efficient to maintain and use. Here are some brief notes on the changes, for my own benefit mostly and to collate links, but perhaps others are interested too.
Janna Hastings has created a wiki for the New ChEBI Ontology project which includes links to the ChEBI ontology remediation notes and meeting notes from 9th July 2008.
(more…)
July 6, 2008
You Know OBO? Let’s GO!
According to their website “The Open Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) Foundry is a collaborative experiment involving developers of science-based ontologies who are establishing a set of principles for ontology development with the goal of creating a suite of orthogonal interoperable reference ontologies in the biomedical domain”. This week they are having a workshop in Cambridge, to bring myself up to speed, here is a quick name check of some of the people involved.
- Michael Ashburner, University of Cambridge
- Erick Antezana, University of Ghent
- Colin Batchelor, Royal Society of Chemistry
July 4, 2008
Who Owns Science?
This thing called Science, whatever it is, who actually owns it? Scientists? Technology companies? Industrial Biotechnology and Pharmaceutical companies? Investors? Shareholders? Governments? Universities? Philanthropists? Charities? Publishers? Joe Public? Or none of the above…?
- The Scientists. At the front line of any scientific discovery is a scientist, from the lofty heights of the hallowed Professor to the lowly lab-rat or student, slaving away at the bench, scientists work on the front line Science. For most scientists, they make a living from their inventions, ideas and discoveries that they own. Science is their livelihood, © The Author(s).
July 3, 2008
The Tree of Life
I’m not much of an evolutionary biologist, but Jonathan Eisen asked for help and I can’t resist. So, in the name of Science, here is some deserved Google Juice for various Trees of Life on the Web.
- Jonathan Eisen’s “Tree of Life” blog
- Tree of Life Web Project
- Tree of life (science) – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
- Green Tree of Life at Berkeley
- Fungal Tree of Life Project
- Beetle Tree of Life project
- Fly Tree of Life project
- Mammal Tree of Life project
- Cypriniformes Tree of Life project
- Liverwort Tree of Life Project
- Early Bird Tree of Life project
- Angiosperm Tree of Life project
- Cnidaria Tree of Life Project
- Decapoda Tree of Life Project
There, I’ve done my bit for Science, now it’s your turn. Spread the ❤ link love ❤, and since we will soon be celebrating the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin, why not marvel at the coral / shrub / lungs of life too?
(CC-licensed Tree of Life picture by Phitar)
June 20, 2008
A Brief Review of RefWorks
There is no shortage of bibliographic management tools out there, which ultimately aim to save your time managing the papers and books in your personal library. I’ve just been to a demo and sales pitch for one of them, a tool called RefWorks. Refworks claims to be “an online research management, writing and collaboration tool — designed to help researchers easily gather, manage, store and share all types of information, as well as generate citations and bibliographies”. It looks like a pretty good tool, similar to the likes of EndNote but with more web-based features that are common with Citeulike and Connotea. Here are some ultra-brief notes. RefWorks in five minutes, the good, the bad and the ugly.
The Good…
Refworks finer features
- Refworks is web based, you can use it from any computer with an internet connection, without having to install any software. Platform independent, Mac, Windows, Linux, Blackberry, iPhone, Woteva. This feature is becoming increasingly common, see Martin Fenner’s Online reference managers, not quite there yet article at Nature Network.
- Share selected references and bibliographies on the Web via RefShare
- It imports and exports all the things you would expect, Endnote (definitely), XML, Feeds (RSS), flat files, BibTeX (check?), RIS (check?) and several others via the screenscraping tool RefGrab-It
- Interfaces with PubMed and Scopus (and many other databases) closely, e.g. you can search these directly from your RefWorks library. You can also export from Scopus to Refworks…
- Not part of the Reed-Elsevier global empire (yet), currently part of ProQuest, based in California.
- Free 30 day trial is available
- Just like EndNote, it can be closely integrated with Microsoft Word, to cite-while-you-write
June 19, 2008
Sixteen (Yes 16!) PhD studentships available in Computer Science
The School of Computer Science of the University of Manchester has up to 16 studentships to offer to highly motivated research students who wish to start a PhD in September 2008 (in exceptional circumstances the start date can be deferred until April 2009). The studentships pay tuition fees and a stipend to cover living expenses for 3 years.
In 2008/09, the stipend will be £12940 per year for students who were UK residents in the 3 years before the start of the PhD, or between £10352 and £12940 per year for students who were not UK residents in the same period and cannot demonstrate a relevant connection to the UK. The stipend is expected to rise in subsequent years. Because of conditions associated with this funding, these studentships are open to students eligible for home fees only; this includes UK and EU nationals. (more…)
June 12, 2008
The drugs don’t work, they just make you worse
What exactly is a drug? A project I’m currently working on requires a good solid definition, at the very least comprehensible to humans, and preferably understandable by more intelligent, semantically aware computers too. I would like to be able to take some scientific model and ask questions like, “show (or hide) all the drugs in this model”. Trouble is, the word “drug” is such a heavily overloaded term, with many alternative meanings, that it is practically meaningless. Just when you think you have a definition, you can find a case that breaks it. I’m not just being an anally-retentive pedant, well no more than usual anyway. It turns out to be much harder than you might think to define what a drug is. The term drug depends on all kinds of contextual information, dosage, species, legality, intent, social conventions and so on. Here are some broken definitions, warts and all. As you’ll see, the various definitions of drugs don’t work, they just make you worse. (more…)
O'Really? 