Monkeyshines

Author: James

  • Single Noun Book Reviews

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    James
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    I’ve been rather slack lately at writing about the books I’ve been reading; I don’t expect anyone else to care, but I’ve found that I quite like having a record of what I’ve read. So, to catch up for May’s reading, I’m writing one word book reviews; to increase the cryptic and obtuse nature of…

  • The War-and-Peace-O-Meter

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    James
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    Some years ago I asked for War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy for Christmas; a new translation had just been published, and that seemed as good a reason as any to tackle this metaphorically and literally immense book. I do a lot of my reading on the bus, which has tended to put me off…

  • Cats I Have Known – Ghengis

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    Ghengis was the son of our neighbour’s cat, Nursie, one of a litter of four. He had one sister, Kylie, a pretty tabby who proved to be a ruthless predator, and two ginger brothers, who moved together to a new home. Ghengis was the boldest of the kittens, the first to climb out of the…

  • Present Tense Book Review – Akira: Part 3

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    James
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    (Part Two of this Present Tense Book Review.) Volumes 5 of Akira has already been thrown into the arena of one of my book battles, where I rather obliquely discussed its merits with rather tortuous metaphors. I finished Volume 6 some time ago, and then completely forgot that I needed to write up my thoughts.…

  • Book Battle 4: The Hare with Amber Eyes vs The World of Yesterday

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    When I’m off on my travels, I like to read books that are set in my destination. And ordinarily I read fiction, as real pastos (pron: past-ohs) aren’t really my cup of tea. However, in an effort to combat my long-standing antipathy towards History (in the sense of the school subject, rather than the past…

  • T1DBase: gene models

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    James
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    I recently wrote an overview of T1DBase, an online resource for the type 1 diabetes (T1D) research community (Hulbert et al. 2007; Burren et al. 2011). I shall now describe one of the more interesting of my contributions to the project, calculating and graphically displaying gene models. In the month since I first started writing…

  • CEBlog

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    James
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    The “department-sized grouping of researchers” among whom I work, the Computational and Evolutionary Biology (CEB) group at the University of Manchester, have started a blog about our journal club (at which I have presented in the past).

  • MASAMB XXI (Part 2)

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    James
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    Photographic evidence that I did, indeed, attend the latest MASAMB conference.

  • MASAMB XXI, in Vienna

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    I was pleased to be invited to present some of my work at the MASAMB conference in Vienna recently (11-12th April 2011). My talk was titled “Quantifying the effect of evolution and genomic alignment on de novo RNA gene prediction”. I have a similarly themed manuscript in preparation, so won’t go into detail here. But…

  • Whelan Lab Journal Club: Seemann et al. (2011)

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    James
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    Members of Simon Whelan’s lab at the University of Manchester participate in a regular journal club, where a paper with an evolutionary/phylogenetic slant is discussed. Here, I briefly describe a paper that I recently presented, and summarize our conclusions about the methodology and results. (I have attempted to represent the discussion and consensus of the…