Archives for March, 2008
Posted by Conflicts between predators like cougars and coyotes and human companions like pets and small children are becoming more common as people move into areas that used to be wildlife habitat. The Seattle Times has a great story this morning about biologists in Washington who are studying cougars to learn if cougars and people can coexist.…
It’s a good thing my 13 yr old doesn’t read my blog. Why? Because I’m on to her. Being a biologist, well, acronyms are my life. And, for a long time, I’ve been able to interpret some of the lingo that she uses on AIM. Lately, we’ve certainly been having our little talks about cell…
I’ve been writing quite a bit this week about my search for a cross platform spread sheet program that would support pivot tables and make pie graphs correctly. This all started because of a bug that my students encountered in Microsoft Excel, on Windows. I’m not personally motivated to look for something new, since Office…
I think all of us; me, the students the OO advocates, a thoughtful group of commenters, some instructors; I think many of us learned some things that we didn’t anticipate the other day and got some interesting glimpses into the ways that other people view and interact with their computers. Some of the people who…
It’s a Solexa data directory. I’ve held off on blogging about Next Generation Sequencing here, but now that one of my colleagues has started blogging about it, it seems like a good time to write a little about FinchTalk, our company blog. We’ve decided that we can serve an educational role for people who are…
Okay OpenOffice fans, show me what you can do. Earlier this week, I wrote about my challenges with a bug in Microsoft Excel that only appears on Windows computers. Since I use a Mac, I didn’t know about the bug when I wrote the assignment and I only found out about it after all but…
I read about this in Bio-IT World and had to go check it out. It’s called the Genome Projector and it has to be the coolest genome browser I’ve ever seen. They have 320 bacterial genomes to play with. Naturally, I chose our friend E. coli. The little red pins in the picture below mark…
Your canopy is disappearing, you’re likely to freeze. NASA’s Earth Observatory reports that over 1,110 acres of forest were illegally logged, during the past four years, in the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve in central Mexico. Monarch butterflies travel here from all over the United States and Canada. Images from the Ikonos satellite tell us though,…
The other day, I wrote that I wanted to make things easier for my students by using the kinds of software that they were likely to have on their computers and the kinds that they are likely to see in the business and biotech world when they graduate from college. More than one person told…
The NASA Earth Observing System is an incredible resource for both science and education. One of the amazing things about it is all the different kinds and quantities of data are assembled together into pictures that even grade school kids can immediately comprehend. How do they do it? Each of the EOS satellites delivers a…