sphyg, posts by tag: work - LiveJournal

At work, we've had Spanish student interning with us over the summer, and I'm suck what to buy her as a leaving gift. She's hoping to stay in Cambridge (currently job hunting, if anyone has any biology-ish vacancies) and we've collected about 50 UKP.

For my day job, I basically do text mining for various pharmaceutical customers (officially referred to as "healthcare informatics"). For various reasons, this involves reading rather a lot of scientific abstracts. I've been in my current job for coming up to three years and am wondering how long it will take me to get through the whole of Medline, the bibliographic database for the life science research community. Medline contains over 18 million citations, but around half of these contain titles only. It varies wildly, but I'm going to estimate I read an average of fifty abstracts every working day. Calculators at the ready...

50 abstracts per day
250 abstracts per week
1,000 abstracts per month
12,000 abstracts per year
120,000 abstracts per decade
1,200,000 abstracts per century

9 million / 1.2 million = 7.5
(3 x 12,000) / 9 million = 0.004

So I've read 0.4% of Medline and only have another seven and a half centuries to go at my current reading rate. Maybe I'll have a party when I get to 1%. Or clone myself. Speaking of which, bonus points for getting the title of this post.

Another one is jiggling his feet and making the floor wobble. I hope my computer gets fixed soon so I can move back to my normal desk.

Some biologists are very brave:
1) Novel papillomavirus isolated from the oral mucosa of a polar bear does not cluster with other papillomaviruses of carnivores.
2) Spatial and temporal variation in size of polar bear (Ursus maritimus) sexual organs and its use in pollution and climate change studies.

The Map kinase kinase kinase family is silly.

Poetry of the vegetable world.

Live heart surgery
BioWisdom's CSO speaks

My employers, BioWisdom, are looking for a senior software engineer. Commercial experience and C#, .Net, Java, XML, RDBMS wanted. Let me know if you know of anyone interested and I'll send you the job specs.

Pharmaceuticals from the human system to the human system: Current management of Pharmaceuticals.org, Inc. in collaboration with Porta-John Systems, Inc. has been developing methods of harvesting human generated toxic pharmaceuticals and human sourced proteins within the scope of operating a portable sanitation business and is very interested in expanding this business concept throughout the world.

Isn't the internet great? I've found some visual guides to animal reproduction. Choose from cow, buffalo, horse or sheep. Just thought I'd share. (Don't look if you're easily squicked)