Genome Fanboy I’m a personalized medicine and genomics nerd and fanboy. Have been for years. Back in 2008, I did 23andme. I immediately downloaded my raw data and began to tinker (as one does). I poked and prodded at the text files they provided –…
I had the opportunity to write a guest blog post for Elastifile. It’s about the fact that a lot of the data in the life sciences is housed on big NFS fileservers. It has been challenging to shift our workflows, which rely both on the…
I’ve been reading Who Owns the Future by Jaron Lanier. It’s a good book, and you should probably read it. It’s particularly important if you’re a person who participates in the economy – which is most of us. Among the good points he makes is…
People seemed to appreciate my first post about the mechanics of starting a one-person consulting shop. This post builds on it, talking about the pattern I use as I progress interesting conversations through to closed business. This is offered in the same spirit as that…
Since going independent in February, A few people have asked me about starting an independent consulting practice. This post shares some of my experiences. In order to keep it to a manageable length, I have omitted stuff like developing and maintaining relationships with clients, writing…
This is a follow-up to my earlier rant about unicorns. As with the data challenges of genomics, I feel like we’ve been talking about this unicorn thing forever, or at least long enough that it’s awkward to keep pretending that it’s a new thing. There…
A friend and mentor once described language as “the operating system of organizations.” They said that a large portion of effective leadership lies in actually listening to the words that a team uses to describe their situation. It’s a subtle and powerful way to work,…
Another day, another data breach. The Swedish government has apparently exposed personal identifying data on nearly all of their citizens. The dataset came from the ministry of transportation. It included names, photographs, home addresses, birthdates, and other details about citizens – as well as maintenance…
Public key encryption, or PKE, is one of the oldest techniques in the blockchain toolbox. PKE dates from the 1970s and has a lineage of being “discovered” by both military and civilian researchers. It’s powerful stuff: One of the early implementations of a PKE system,…
The nice folks at Bio-IT World and Bioteam have edited the end-of-conference symposium that I moderated into a video. You can watch us play “catch” with the throwable microphone!