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Experience vs. enthusiasm
May 7th, 2013 by Richard Holland
Recently the BGI was interviewed by a Nature blogger on the subject of why it has such a relatively youthful workforce. Jun Wang, the BGI's Executive Director, gave a surprising statistic that the average age of all his 4000 staff was just 26 years old, with the scientists averaging even less at 23 years old. The…
ISO27001 certification, a mountain to climb?
March 11th, 2013 by Abel Ureta-Vidal
From the outset of our company a lot of effort was deployed to make sure our confidential data and more importantly our customer data were kept safe. However we did not have a reliable and auditable way to demonstrate how good we are at it and how serious we are about it. In fact, it…
Crowdsourcing pros and cons
February 28th, 2013 by Richard Holland
I wanted to blog about this paper on crowdsourcing in bioinformatics but had great difficulty in finding any way of getting across the message without simply cutting-and-pasting the entire paper verbatim. Readers with an interest in the field would do well to read the entire original, but here I'll try to summarise it in a…
Four things every sequence analysis pipeline should do
September 4th, 2012 by Richard Holland
Titus Brown writes a good blog, and so I am surprised that I didn't spot his December 2011 post on "Four reasons I won't use your sequence analysis pipeline" any earlier than I did. So, somewhat belatedly, here is my response to his excellent set of arguments against commercial providers of sequence analysis pipelines and…
The power of open science
August 21st, 2012 by Richard Holland
This is a really short post – the video on the BBC website in this link gives the full story. A 15-year old teenager from the US has developed a pancreatic cancer test which greatly undercuts the cost of the existing standard test, and runs several orders of magnitude faster. Aside from this remarkable achievement…
Outsourcing of Big Data Analysis
August 21st, 2012 by Richard Holland
"Many large drug companies have decided that big data informatics are not a core competency, and have elected to outsource this as a service" says David Shaywitz in The Atlantic. Shortly after, in an article on Forbes, the same author says "many large drug companies seem to have decided that hefty big data analytics is…
Model Patents
August 8th, 2012 by Richard Holland
A couple of weeks ago, Stanford University published details of the first complete computational model of an organism representing every interaction that takes place within it during its entire lifecycle. Whilst only a humble single-celled organism, this is a big step forward. It has long been the desire of researchers to be able to minimise…
Running a business in the cloud
May 25th, 2012 by Glenn Proctor
Eagle Genomics is a growing company, and as such we need to have efficient tools that help us run our business without getting in the way. In the early days of the company we had a basic email system, a "quirky" calendaring system, and our time tracking and holiday management was done with spreadsheet-based procedures…
Who owns Big Data?
May 23rd, 2012 by Richard Holland
The NY Times ran a May 21 article entitled "Troves of Personal Data, Forbidden to Researchers" in which its correspondent discussed the twin thorny issues of size and ownership/privacy of data. Both factors can play a role in making the source data behind published research accessible to third parties wishing to analyse it or replicate…
Crowdsourcing in bioinformatics
April 26th, 2012 by Richard Holland
Tuesday's announcement that James Bonfield won the Sequence Squeeze contest organised by the Pistoia Alliance was interesting for two reasons. The first reason is that although there was an overall winner, there was not an overall single best solution for the problem that Pistoia posed – the compression of FASTQ data. Rather James authored several…