EMBL's online PhD symposium

Over at Public Rambling Pedro has linked to the first online EMBL PhD symposium. It's like any other symposium but... It's free! It's online! It may or may not use IRC! (perhaps Meebo group chat or similar would be better? That way people behind firewalls could participate too).

There's a good list of speakers, too - Leroy Hood, Stefania Bettini (from the Commission's Researcher's Mobility Portal) and Roland Krause, amongst others.

OMG, YOU KILLED CHERNOFF!

I'm a fan of Chernoff faces (though I've never seen them used in anger) and I've always wondered why there aren't any Chernoff face generating algorithms that use the type of graphics you find in, say, the character generation portion of Elder Scrolls, or avatar creation in Second Life.

I would do something like this myself, but I'm rubbish at 3D graphics. I can, however, copy and paste images from the South Park Character Creator, so here's an implementation that uses South Park characters instead of just faces. Yes, it's a bit crap.

The input data is the stats from the top 36 blogs in the bioinformatics category at Postgenomic (have I mentioned the Postgenomic API before? :) ).

Variables include:

Eyes: number of posts. More posts means eyes wide open.

Clothing: more expensive looking clothing means that blog has a higher rank in the overall Postgenomic blog rankings.

Mouth: indicates the average number of words per post, i.e. open mouth means wordier posts, on average, than blog with closed mouth.

Dear Mozilla

I love Firefox. But please... standardize the location of the "Preferences..." menu item, or at least stop moving it around. Explaining where to find a particular Firefox setting is complicated enough as is.

Also, user-supplied Javascript in bookmarklets and Greasemonkey scripts should be treated differently to Javascript coming from the web page. The del.icio.us and Connotea bookmarklets are falling foul of measures brought in to curb pop-up ads.

Del.icio.us to Connotea

I like using del.icio.us for day to day bookmarking but for scholarly links Connotea is vastly superior.

Behold, then, del2con, which will import (a user defined subset of) your del.icio.us bookmarks into Connotea. It uses iframes and javascript and has only been tested on Firefox.

You can only import a hundred bookmarks at a time, which is a limitation on the del.icio.us side. If anybody is interested in writing a marginally more advanced version that uses the del.icio.us API instead (this version uses the JSON export, hence the one hundred limit) let me know and I'll send you the source code.