tl;dr : metrics-obsessed capitalism is the reason why we can’t have nice things – and watch @tante’s talk Back in Paris, I was semi-joking with friends about how the rate of technological innovations seem to have slowed down or come to a halt. The last “big” innovation that we could think about were smartphones, as carrying the internet permanently in our pockets was quite a change.

Back when I had optimistic views of my time, I vowed to do more blogging this year. Sadly, life had other plans. But I return with an update to an earlier post on the Portal rodent community. To recap, in April 2023, my student Pat Dumandan and I were afraid. Afraid that Chaetodipus penicillatus (the Desert pocket mouse) was about to undergo a population explosion.

Author Amir Aryani: (ORCID: 0000-0002-4259-9774) Definition A research collaboration network is a group of researchers, and practitioners, or both, working together on joint research activities. These networks often span across disciplines, geographic boundaries, and sectors, enabling participants to share resources, expertise, and data to address common research goals more effectively than they could individually.

The Annual International Biocuration Conference (AIBC) was held for the first in India, at the Indian Biological Data Centre (IBDC), Regional Centre for Biotechnology (RCB), Faridabad and co-hosted by the Department of Plant Molecular Biology, University of Delhi South Campus. As usual, GigaDB had representation at the event (see write-ups of many previous meetings here), Mary Ann Tuli and Chris Hunter. Both of whom were wearing two hats!

Hot on the heals of the post on how to downsize microscopy movie files, let’s look at ways to shrink the size of a PDF file. There’s several ways to tackle this – suggestions came from this thread on Mastodon. Scenario: you have created a preprint/manuscript/proposal in PDF format.

What’s the best way to make a movie file from microscopy data? Maybe you need to generate a movie for the supplementary info for a paper, or insert one into your electronic lab notebook, or to show in a talk. The problem is that the requirements for each of those is different. This situation is compounded by the fact that there are so many options to make movie files and not much guidance on what is the best method.

This is a rather niche post, but the method can likely be adapted for other use cases. In the lab we have many different cell lines stored in liquid nitrogen. The arrangement is: the vials are in specific positions in a box (10 x 10) there are 13 boxes to a cane we have 5 canes Ideally, to retrieve the correct vial from the cell store requires a map.

Answering the question of what fraction of a journal’s papers were previously available as a preprint is quite difficult to do. The tricky part is matching preprints (from a number of different servers) with the published output from a journal.

Kevin Ashley’s (DCC director) closing remark at the IDCC (International Digital Curation Conference) 2024 meeting was “ Reflect, Enjoy, Do something! ”. Hopefully you will enjoy my doing something.

What impact did The Carpentries have on me? As a learner, it taught me most of my essential day-to-day computational tools. As an Instructor, it changed how I teach, allowing me to reach more students including those that need help the most. As an organiser, it taught me skills that are essential to collaborating and to managing teams. As a creator, it taught me how to hand off the work to the next leg in the never-ending relay race.