Inspiration from cool graphics

My walk to work from the new apartment takes me past the Broad Institute. A few days ago, something caught my eye and so I stopped to take a look. The ground floor of the Broad is a large lobby only separated from the street by a wall of glass. I realized that the lobby is now filled with large, flat-screen computer displays that I didn’t recall having seen before. Sure enough, these display are part of what the Institute is calling The Broad Institute Museum. Admittedly, I stood on the sidewalk for a while and stared at the displays facing the street because I think they are pretty cool. One in particular stood out to me: In one corner of the display is a depiction of a DNA microarray. Taking up most of the middle of the display is a depiction of the human karyotype. Nucleotide sequences fly off of the microarray into the part of the karyotype that corresponds to the appropriate location in the genome.

During the past year, I’ve spent some time working with DNA microarray data. While the concept of being able to measure some quantity, such as gene expression, at tens of thousands of genomic locations simultaneously is pretty awesome. My actual work consisted of manipulating poorly annotated, awkwardly large files full of numbers and cryptic symbols. In other words, it wasn’t very glamorous work. But, while watching the display at the Broad Institute, I was reminded of how cool I think computational genomics is and my resolve to finish the research project that I have been working on was boosted. Its amazing what a difference some fancy computer graphics can make.

The really awesome thing about the Broad display is that it is supposedly depicting actual real-time analysis of SNP array experiments that are part of a cancer research project. While doing a bit of reading for this article, I came across this page about the Broad’s Outreach Program. Imagine doing a semester long research project at the Broad as a high school student!

Staying up to date without getting overwhelmed

My attitude about reading feeds tends to cycle. Occasionally, I go on a rampage and subscribe to a ton of feeds in Google Reader. Then for the next few days or weeks, I spend a lot of time trying to keep up with all of the feeds that I have subscribed to. Finally, I eventually start to feel overwhelmed and I stop following the feeds that I am subscribed to all together. This time around I have decided that I want to find some way to avoid through this cycle again. The realization that I came to today is that I subscribe to feeds for at least three reasons. Some feeds I subscribe to because I happen to read an article on a blog or website that was probably linked to from another blog and I feel like I would like to read an occasional article in the future. Other feeds I subscribe to to keep up with news that is important to me. These feeds include those from major news sites like the New York Times or my friends’ blogs. The third category of feed that I subscribe to are those from research journals and conferences that are related to my work (e.g. Nature, Science, Cell… biology related resources seem to be more organized online than those relating to machine learning/computer science ironically). These are, in some ways, the most important feeds to keep up with because maintaining an awareness of what researchers are working on in certain scientific fields is crucial to my work.

So, given this realization, I have just gone through all my feed subscriptions and given each of them one of three labels. One label is for feeds that I want to read occasionally when I have a few moments to spare. Placing feeds in this category will significantly reduce the stressfulness of keeping up with my feed subscriptions because I am effectively stating that I don’t care if I miss most of the articles that get posted to these feeds. The second label is for feeds that I want to try to keep up with so that I can stay current with news about my friends and the world. If I miss a post here and there it wouldn’t be a big deal, but I want to try not to miss too many. The third label is for feeds relating to my work that I want to really try to at least read the title of every post.

We will see how this scheme goes. How do you manage your feed subscriptions?