I watched the Democratic debate in Las Vegas this evening. It was a good debate after they got down to real issues and policy matters. I think all the candidates did well, each had their good moments, and each had times they stumbled a bit. I was pleasantly surprised that when asked what their weakest point was, Barack Obama actually gave a real answer, i.e., not the standard "I guess I care too much about... Full Post
Last week I attended the TCGA Data Portal Use Case Workshop. TCGA stands for The Cancer Genome Atlas and is an ambitious project to more fully characterize and understand the molecular, i.e., DNA-level, mechanisms at work in cancer. While the end goal is to gain a rich understanding of all types of cancer, TCGA is a three-year pilot program investigating three types of cancer (brain, ovarian, and lung) and testing whether its approach to study... Full Post
Today is the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birthday. Martin Luther King Jr. Day will be observed this coming Monday, January 21, 2008. It seems he is back in the news lately due to the rhetoric around the Democratic presidential nominee campaigns. Is that how he would want to be remembered? Here is a letter titled "A Call for Unity" that several Alabama clergy published in a local Birmingham, Alabama newspaper on April 12,... Full Post
In a previous post I wondered how long it would take for the character assassinations to begin. Well, it didn't take long. The ABC debates on Tuesday got pretty nasty. Ads are out on TV and the internet exaggerating each candidate's flaws. The establishment candidates are attacking the change candidates while at the same time claiming to be change candidates. I guess that all depends on what you mean by change. Still, we have not... Full Post
Someone emails me asking why a bioinformatics program (more specifically a short-read aligner) that works for someone else gives them a segmentation fault when they try to run it using the same command-line arguments. The program is written in C and is being run on a computer running GNU/Linux. This problem has caused him quite a bit of consternation and it is only after a while he emails me wondering why. After looking at the... Full Post