SteinBlog

Open positions in my team at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI)

We have two open positions for a Software Engineer and a Scientific Database Curator in my team here at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) in Hinxton, Cambridge, UK.

We are looking for a scientific database annotator to work on the ChEBI (Chemical Entities of Biological Interest) project. The aim of this project is to provide a high-quality, hand-curated chemistry database to the biomedical community, to standardise chemical and biochemical terminology across biological databases and to develop a chemical ontology.

The EBI has recently acquired a large scale drug discovery database (www.ebi.ac.uk/Information/News/pdf/Press23July08.pdf) which will be partly integrated into ChEBI.

The software engineer we are looking for will re-architect the existing ChEBI software to allow the smooth integration of this newly acquired dataset. (S)he will provide technical leadership in a closely cooperating team of software engineers and scientific curators and will be involved in all aspects of development including internet applications, database management systems and data analysis.


CDK Workshop at EBI on April 20/21

The CDK team is glad to announce the Spring 2009 CDK workshop held at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI). More than two years have passed since the last CDK workshop in Cologne and we hope to have these great events more regularly again.

We are glad that the EBI Industry Program as well as the EBI outreach and training department are sponsoring the event. This means that things will be much more organized as they used to be :-). We are going to have one day (lunch time to lunch time the next day) of tutorials on how to use CDK and talks on research using the CDK. Afterwards, we’ll have our usual free-form developers workshop for the rest of the second day with all the usual fun. Both the evening of the 20th and the 21st will be opportunities for enjoying refreshments. We also have a small nominal registration fee of 50 Pounds to cover the costs for the workshop dinner and other food and drinks.


Industry-funded medical research will double your impact factor

The Guardian has a nice piece by Ben Goldarcre reporting about a study published by the British Medial Journal entitled “Relation of study quality puttygen download , concordance, take home message, funding, and impact in studies of influenza vaccines: systematic review”. Both the newpaper article and the study are worth reading and seem to be open. Besides many other interesting findings, the BMJ article finds that the journal impact factor of industry-funded studies of influenza vaccines (both Ben and I find it quite likely that this is not limited to the study of influenza vaccines :-)) are on average more than twice as high as those for purely academic studies (Impact Factor 3.74 vs 8.78). Judge yourself.


The Hilton in Bonn, Germany

Quite a contrast to the Renaissance Hotel in Cologne, where I stayed yesterday, is todays stay at the Hilton in Bonn, Germany’s former capitol village. The run-down place confirmed experiences with previous hotel of the same chain. While my room was nicely renovated, the communal areas of the hotel made me feel like in a eastern European hotel during cold-war times. The location next to one of the ugliest bridges in the world – the Kennedy bridge – ruins the only potential plus of this hotel of being directly located at the river. My mood dropped even further when I discovered that the hotel does not offer (I would have payed for it) decent newspapers for breakfast – only one crappy stock-market publication they get for free. As a plus I should mention that I was allowed a late check-out without any problems and most of the staff was friendly.


The Renaissance Hotel in Cologne

I’m staying for two nights at the Renaissance Hotel in Cologne, Germany. The place is perfectly located just a few steps away from Friesenplatz, since I had some business to do at the University. The Renaissance Hotels belong to the Marriott empire. One thing that struck me with this particular stay was the extremely well trained or well selected staff. Whatever request you had was answered in a “no-problem” kind of way. Small issues where solved immediately and where a solution could not be found, good alternatives where proposed. The whole hotel was in very good shape (no run-down looking corners, etc) and the room well designed, quiet as requested and cosy. Breakfast buffet offered rich choice. The only minus was that my laundry, dropped off before 8:30 am at the reception, got lost and was not ready the same days, as promised in their guide, and neither the next morning. In compensation for this mistake, they offered me to waive my wireless bill of 24 Euro and a late check-out (with out the need for any fuzz on my side) which I of course happily accepted.

I can whole-heartedly recommend this hotel and will go there again when in Cologne next time.


Open Notebook Science/Open Drug Discovery at GDCh national meeting

For the national meeting of the German Chemical Society in Frankfurt, August 30 – September 2, 2009, I’m co-organising a symposium on Open Notebook Science and Open Drug Discovery. John Overington, Cameron Neylon and Egon Willighagen have already agreed to speak and we are looking for further interesting speakers. Being incredibly Open PuTTY SSH execute command , I thought I post this here and harvest your ideas. Our symposium is on Monday from 10:30 to 12:30.


Thanks to those heroes out there …

… for getting Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex Linux ready to run on my sweet little Dell Latitude XT. Things still were a total mess half a year ago when I go this sexy thing. Vista was preinstalled and drove me crazy with the famous Blue-Screen-of-Death, caused by crappy video drivers. I really wanted this tablet thing and was even ready to go back to Vista, despite some happy years with Ubuntu and my old Thinkpad 41p. Back to Vista, life sucked again, so at the end of 2008 I was ready to go back, even if not all of the features of this laptop should be working under Linux. The first attempt to roll out linux on this machine was with Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) and many things, including the wireless device, let alone my UMTS (G3) mobile broadband, did not work. Most importantly, there were no drivers for the N-TRIG touch screen, which was the reason why I wanted this laptop in the first place. It is really hand to review papers on a tablet PC and make annotations directly in the PDF with PDFAnnotator.

So, things simply weren’t as they should have been.

But I was not hopeless. Googling for the usual keywords revealed that a couple of heroes out there were working on it. Rene Mayrhofer‘s page on getting to run Ubuntu on the Latitude XT was the first I found. He is continuously updating his page with the latest developments and when I was ready to give Ubuntu a new go at the beginning of the new year, his page revealed that most my problems were solved. The best news was that Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex essentially had solved all the wireless and broadband issues and indeed, after an upgrade of my existing Hardy Heron, both the wireless as well as, to my greatest delight, the mobile broadband, worked out of the box and where supported by Ubuntu’s nice NetworkManager applet.

Additionally, Rene and rafi at ofb.net had found out how to patch the xorg wacom driver to work with the N-TRIG panel. Using Rene’s binary of rafi’s patch I can now use either Xournal or Jarnal to annotate my pdf’s again.

The most credits, of course, go to the Ubuntu team for making this distro available and for keeping is cutting-edge all the time.


The Giraffe Juice Bar at Stansted Airport

If you fly out of Stansted Airport with RyanAir about once a week, like I do, you need to come up with certain rituals to stay mentally sane. One of my rituals at Stansted is having a Tropicana Juice with an additional piece of Ginger at the Giraffe Juice and Coffee Bar in the RyanAir terminal. The Tuna melt is another one.

This Giraffe Juice and Coffee bar is run by some really nice girls, who are always friendly and helpful, even when its the end of a long buisiness day, which is when I typically go there.

The Bar features a great variety of freshly prepared food – the fresh juices like my favorite Tropicana are made on the fly with one of those large juicers. The coffee is excellent.Since they always give me a feeling of home when I’m there puttygen download , I should probably not give them a positive review because they do not seem to lack business, but good stuff should be honored.