The Life Scientists at FriendFeed: 2009 summary

The Life Scientists 2009

It’s Christmas Eve tomorrow and so I declare the year over. My Christmas gift to you is a summary of activity in 2009 at the FriendFeed Life Scientists group. It’s crafted using R + Ruby, with raw data and some code snippets available. If you want to see the most popular items from the group this year, head down to the bottom of this post.

(Note: this post is a work in progress)

APIs: I wish the life sciences would learn from social networks

I was prompted by a thread on the apparent decline of FriendFeed to look for evidence of declining participation in my networks.

Has our quest for completeness made things too complicated?

In my opinion, yes. Let me elaborate.

My current job is very much focused on “data integration”. What this means is that we have a large amount of diverse data from different “-omics” experiments: microarrays, protein mass spectrometry, DNA sequencing – really, whatever you like, but it’s all aimed at answering the same question. Namely: which of these biological entities (transcripts, proteins, metabolites) are markers for various human disease states?