omnisci
Joined 14 years ago
Karma
155
Submissions
128
Member since
Sep 13
Neuroscientist and ex-startup founder in the genomics world
View on Hacker NewsRecent submissions
Comment · 10 years ago
It was a "Jump to Conclusions" mat. You see, it would be this mat that you would put on the floor... and would have different CONCLUSIONS written on it that you could JUMP TO. I'm going to pitch this company and see if I can raise a $5M seed round, I mean, at this point, why not!
Comment · 11 years ago
How exactly are you so sure about this? And if it's small, that doesn't mean it can't have an impact. Also, perhaps I'm missing something, but it doesn't see like we have any real info about this, if you have more, I'd love to read it.
It takes someone/something with some ability to make something happen. Are they going to change how all academic science is done? Probably not, but could they have an impact and begin a process in which academic science begins to respond/change? Yes, that is probable. Between YC and Google life science, things are happening...and it's going to take us (I'm assuming you are a scientist) to support this change.
Comment · 11 years ago
Every time I explain my experience in academia to VCs or those in business, they don't believe me. "It can't be that bad!" It is. I've worked at 3 of the top schools in the world and it's a total mess as the OP mentioned. It's also a mess that hurts everyone, so I'm happy to see this type of initiative.
Comment · 11 years ago
To answer your first question,
1. they can move much faster than academic research. More money in basic research isn't going to fix the antiquated process in which academics live. It's also not going to help researchers learn how to budget properly, or learn to manage people. So that alone is a value add. A 1% increase in gov spending simply adds money without fixing a problem that currently exists....not really going to make a difference in my opinion(PhD research scientist)
Comment · 11 years ago
you can try http://zocdoc.com . It's like Yelp for doctors, we have it in NYC and it's quite good. It's the only resource I've found to find doctors in this city.
Comment · 12 years ago
Stirplate.io, New York City (Soho area) is looking for a Sr. Backend PHP developer.
http://www.stirplate.io
Stirplate is a VC funded started that aims to completely change how life science research is performed. We are building tools to full automate genomics data analysis (hundreds of GB each experiment) allowing life scientists to work much more efficiently. Our goal is to make genomics analysis and bioinformatics so simple, that anyone can do it. Our long term vision looks something like “Github for life science.”
We are looking for a Sr. developer with experience working with big data, cloud computing (EC2 or Google compute) and a solid interest in helping scientists. We use PHP, python, JS, BigQuery, R and a variety of open source bioinformatics tools.
No bioinformatics, or even an understanding of biology is needed.
Bonus points if you’ve worked with BigQuery, cluster computing, or have a bioinformatics background.
Benefits: Health/ Dental/Vision,stock options, lunch/beer, good tech,happiness, and working on something that matters. More info can be found here or you can email me at [email protected] https://careers.stackoverflow.com/jobs/76598/php-dev-interes...
Comment · 12 years ago
I didn't know that:) In the Life sciences, we tend to pay. We also publish images which are very costly. We have one publication that is going to cost us around $3k to publish as it has a lot of microscopy images.
Comment · 12 years ago
Are you using keith @ stirplate.io ? It should be working...sorry if messages are getting bounced.
Comment · 12 years ago
What you mentioned there is one of the reasons why I left to do this company. They won't come if you build it, and many of the science startups have felt that (Quartzy.com and ScienceExchange.com). Both are doing well, and run by awesome people, but academics need something to drive them to a site. Hence why I built data automation tools :)
Re: PhD, Cool, best of luck:) If you ever want to work on something outside of academic work, let me know. I'm always looking for people to work on Stirplate with me. Also,I'm always happy to help people getting started, so feel free to reach out if you have any questions keith @ stirplate.io
Comment · 12 years ago
Also you don't pay a lot of money to post to Facebook or Reddit. You do when you publish (Cheapest publication I have was ~$500). Publishing a paper is expensive.
Comment · 12 years ago
I'm working on something similar to what you mentioned right now @ stirplate.io
However, to "make it mandatory for publicly-funded ..." is the difficult part. I'm with you 100% (I'm a neuroscience PhD) and this needs to happen,but it needs to come from the financial groups such as NIH/NSF who really just aren't good at dealing with this kind of stuff. They do make it mandatory, but they don't provide real resources for scientists to access these tools. Either that, or they are insanely difficult to use, so people don't do it. I'm shooting for getting raw data from scientists, populating a huge f'in database that is linked and categorized, and if/when the group makes the data open, allow scientists to work off of that huge database of raw, unedited data. (this is specific to life sciences)
I've learned the following when talking about my company: 1. Investors don't want to hear about open science because they immediately get stuck on "what if they don't share". That tends to end the conversation. 2. Scientists themselves complain about the system, but are unwilling to change behaviors. So we have to address their fears in order to start making change (that is what I'm working on now) 3. Schools and funding agencies are using technology from 1996 and thinking that is sufficient. People need to be educated, and this is hard to do.
This isn't impossible and it's happening slowly...the mindset of academics just needs to change. (IMHO)
Comment · 12 years ago
That is 100% true, but that isn't a fair comparison.
Peer review should be open, scientists shouldn't be allowed to choose who reviews/doesn't review their papers, and the process by which selection is done needs to be more rigorous.
My suggestion, open it up to everyone in the field and make sure that the reviewers are identified. Anonymous peer review has the same effect that anonymous posting on internet forums has, people become e-thugs or just say things that they shouldn't ever say because they know the reader doesn't know who they are.
This sounds like it doesn't happen, but you would be surprised that the stuff that happens behind closed doors. Scientists are people, people are flawed (which is fine), but that shouldn't hold back scientific discoveries.
Comment · 12 years ago
Or people spend a lot of time and money trying to chase down something that a ground "found" and published.
It's very common to read a paper, think it sounds good, then try build on it only to find that you can't.
Peer review is completely flawed. Until it's made more transparent, like at F1000, it's going to continue that way.
Not being a negative Nancy here, but I've been on both sides of the fence (reviewed and had grants/papers reviewed) and it isn't an efficient system. Much like many other things in science, it's an antiquated process that needs to be overhauled to get back to it's "roots".