Thursday, August 12, 2010

The reason why I am starting this, is because my PI would routinely call out 'Wikipedia' in the lab and expect me to answer. I don't know if it's my mighty internet-fu, but give me 2 minutes and a broadband connection, and I can generally find it. So I thought that I would introduce you to 2 of my favorite websites today:

Flowing Data:

When I was a post-doc, I needed to find a free and easy way to make a heatmap for some data I was generating. There was no good program that I could find that would take my data and do what I wanted with it. After talking to a friend, he suggested looking into R, and I thought that might be a good idea. So, because I'm quick and dirty, I looked for a site to teach me what I needed to do right then. So through this tutorial, I was able to take my data and get it into a format that I wasn't embarrassed to show in the big lab meeting.

I subscribe to the RSS feed, and they (as long with GOOD) have some excellent infographics that are good for us Data Junkies^TM.


The second site that I love: IHOP (and so help me if I get any waffle house comments, I'm going to slap the taste out of someone's mouth)

I occasionally have to look for some human gene product (i.e. protein) that I know nothing about, but have to figure out interactions with other things. This site scours papers for keywords (i.e. your protein) and brings up the contexts. So it does the abstract skimming for you. I feel like it cut down significantly the time it took me to learn which papers I should be reading versus those that I can toss when I was looking at something new.


So if you have any suggestions about things that you would like to see covered (looking for a free flow cytometry program, something to read sequence data, a good database, etc) leave me a comment, and I'll put it out there for everyone.