Category Archives: Data Stuff

If Elongated Muskrat (or George Santos) Ran GenBank

Posted on April 21, 2023 by mikethemadbiologist

This article on the founder and driving force behind GISAID, which has risen to fame in no small part due to its role as a data repository during the COVID pandemic, is bugshit crazy and worth the read–it’s as if … Continue reading →

Posted in COVID-19, Data Stuff | 1 Comment

A Failure Of Data Transmission: The CRE Edition

Posted on December 9, 2016 by mikethemadbiologist

There’s a very interesting article that came out recently describing the first public report of carbapenem resistance in E. coli from the U.S. food supply. Maryn McKenna provides a good overview: Bacteria containing a gene that confers resistance to a … Continue reading →

Posted in Antibiotics, Data Stuff, Genomics | 1 Comment

Barriers To Data Sharing

Posted on July 1, 2016 by mikethemadbiologist

I’ve made this point about the role of funders before, but Fiona Nelson is absolutely right (boldface mine): Genomics is a data science. The human genome is vast – 3 billion base pairs. To make any significant findings from the … Continue reading →

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What Should Be The Long-Term Fate of Scientific Databases?

Posted on June 29, 2016 by mikethemadbiologist

One of the problems that all scientific databases face is funding. From the funders’ perspective, they are being asked to make a commitment in perpetuity: with rare exceptions, there is always more work to be done. At the same time, … Continue reading →

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Differences in Data

Posted on January 16, 2016 by mikethemadbiologist

Coming from the natural sciences, this seems unusual to me (boldface mine): Many of the things for which journalists and legal scholars have berated Goffman are considered standard practice for sociologists, and most sociologists have found the mainstream criticisms of … Continue reading →

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