Lazy post: a Life Scientists best-of

When stuck for ideas or pressed for time, a blogger can always fall back on a round-up of activity from elsewhere on the web. Yes, it’s time for a “best of the past 14 days” from the FriendFeed Life Scientists group.

Just a slight twist to make it more exciting (?) – we’ll automate the process using the API and a little Ruby.

#/usr/bin/ruby
require "rubygems"
require "json/pure"
require "open-uri"

bestof = JSON.parse(open("http://friendfeed-api.com/v2/feed/the-life-scientists/summary/14").read)
0.upto(9) {|entry|
  url = bestof['entries'][entry]['url']
  body = bestof['entries'][entry]['body']
  puts "<li><a href='#{url}'>ff#{entry+1}</a> - #{body}</li>"
}

Run, copy output and paste to your blog post editor. Result:

  1. ff1 – A Farewell to Scienceblogs: the Changing Science Blogging Ecosystem http://scienceblogs.com/clock…
  2. ff2 – Please Sir, I want some more Science! « O’Really? – http://duncan.hull.name/2010…
  3. ff3 – Humans continue to evolve. http://www.nytimes.com/2010…
  4. ff4 – I have just received an email about a proposal to fix "peer review system by requiring authors to ‘pay’ for their submissions with credits ‘earned’ by performing reviews." The description entitled "Pubcreds: Fixing the Peer Review Process by ‘Privatizing’ the Reviewer Commons" by Jeremy Fox and Owen L. Petchey is attached. I’ll paste the abstract…
  5. ff5 – For those of you running labs or supervising others, do you have training routines in place to smooth the transition of new people?
  6. ff6 – The private beta of the Stackexchange Q/A site for Statistics has opened, and there are already some great contributions. If you signed up, go here to check out the site: http://stats.stackexchange.com/ If you didn’t sign up, no worries – it’ll open to the public in a week.
  7. ff7 – Protein function: how do we know that we know what we know? http://bytesizebio.net/index…
  8. ff8 – Machine Learning :: MLcomp . [free website for objectively comparing machine learning algorithms across datasets for multiple problem domains] + Google Prediction API – http://mlcomp.org/
  9. ff9 – Science 2.0 Wiki and collborative writing tools set up: http://www.science2point0.com
  10. ff10 – PLoS ONE: Sexual Experience Promotes Adult Neurogenesis in the Hippocampus Despite an Initial Elevation in Stress Hormones – http://www.plosone.org/article…