The first paper of my PhD is finally out! Its full title is "Integrative modeling reveals the principles of multi-scale chromatin boundary formation in human nuclear organization" but in talks and posters I've been referring to the project as "Unravelling higher order chromatin organisation" (geddit?) or even "the ENCODE-ing of ..." (referencing ENCODE, of course).
Recently I discovered that some academic publishers will let you submit PDF figures right up until acceptance, where they then need to be in an "editable" format. Vector figures inside PDF containers are editable of course, but the author guidelines for your journal of choice may well say otherwise, instead offering a list of ancient and bewildering image formats which are deemed acceptable. It's baffling to me why a journal would prefer a pptx PowerPoint file containing your figure than a modern open standard like SVG (not a format without consistency issues, admittedly). So for this reason I needed to convert a bunch of PDF figures to EPS (encapsulated postscript) without too much manual effort.
With under two weeks to go to the 2015 UK general election, there's no better time to take stock of all the voter intention polls being published by the British media. The data has already been aggregated by UKpollingreport—a site I've used before for analysis of the Scottish independence referendum—and there's not much more to be said then is already widely known: it's likely no single party will win an outright majority and we'll be left with a coalition or minority government.
I'm creeping towards the tail-end of my PhD so it's probably time to dust off my CV and tidy it up. In the past I've written this document a few different ways, from LaTeX to a custom Inkscape document, but I've decided to move with the times and try something new: a markdown CV that compiles to both an HTML web version and well-formatted PDF.
Living in Edinburgh it's been hard to avoid the build-up to Scotland's referendum on independence. On September 18th 2014, less than a month away as I write this, people living in Scotland will go to the polls to answer the question: Should Scotland be an independent country?
Apparently an 80s commerical for the helmet manufacturer Bell bore the slogan: "If you've got a $10 head, wear a $10 helmet". Nowadays it's a deeply-ingrained and widely accepted idea among bikers that it's worth spending a lot of money on your headgear. A top-of-the-line Arai can sell for almost four figures, particularly if you want a nice race rep design, but what are you getting for your money and, in particular, is it any safer than a helmet you pickup for a tenth of that price?
I think Wordpress is a great CMS and I'm reluctant to leave it behind. While it doesn't have much hacker kudos, in my opinion (and undoubtedly many others) Wordpress is a very usable and near-complete blogging platform which doesn't leave much justification for reinventing the wheel. It also seems to have reached a kind of critical mass where it's own "like" and "follow" features are useful tools, with the latter a decent way of building an audience that don't use RSS readers and aren't interested in the extra cruft that comes with twitter. In fact, my Wordpress blog currently has more followers than my twitter account, and I suspect a higher CTR per post. So with that in mind, why am I making the switch?