http://blog.pacificfibre.net/uncategorized/the-technical-details/

It’s interesting to note they intend to offer to sell Auckland Wellington, effectively competing with the internal network over these two points.

Jim Nixon also has a brief post up: http://sciblogs.co.nz/light-my-fibre/2010/03/11/pacific-fibre-undersea-cable-connection/

I think a little care is needed when pointing at one tool or another as if it’s going to be a magic bullet :-) It’s also a matter of how you use the tools. If you ignore whatever reproducibility features they have…

With that in mind, I think no matter what tools are developed, the “real” problem is finding a (nice!) way to make it in academic researchers’ interest to do this.

Sticking my neck out a bit, I’d quibble (in an academic fashion…) that standardisation is closer to what the MLs offer, or this is what I would have thought was their “point of difference” compared to other approaches. Consider my case example: I had reproducibility going. (Well, bits of it…) Sure it was unique to that program! No two ways about that… But it was *there*. (In the late 1980s, too! Got to give myself some credit…) One-off implementations or reproducibility features, like mine, can achieve reproducibility with respect to (that implementation of) that product. Standardisation helps wider adoption, hence the standardised MLs.

Finally, Tiwari mentions that some journals are calling for SBML/CellML for systems biology. Wouldn’t this be an acknowledgement that there is a problem, not that it’s not an issue? (I don’t work in systems biology, btw.) I can’t imagine that they’d see the need to ask for it otherwise. Crystallography and other areas have faced this too. Food for thought: a number of years ago, there was considerable fuss over bioinformatics journals not requiring that the software be made available at all at the time of publication.

I can’t help but think that this is a general problem that continually re-surfaces. At some point in time people decide it’s too much of an issue and “demand” that the journals (or databases) insist on additional material to resolve the issue. And then a few years later it recurs, but about some other aspect. (Note I’ve shifted to a broader view that just software.) To me the underlying reason is probably the conflicts between the driving goals of academic researchers doing the work and others’ interests in their work.

(This has gotten long enough that perhaps I ought to resurrect it as a blog post… sigh.)

Good to hear you’ll be going to the talk. I put this up in the hope that it might attract a few people from outside the university. I think sometimes the public talks offered by the university don’t reach the general public as well as they might.

http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/?p=21

She writes that ‘allopathy’ was originally was meant as a reference to only suppressing symptoms, which is not what modern medicine aims to do. She goes on to explain how even in it’s own day, the use of the term didn’t make sense (some “conventional” treatments of the day were aimed at the underlying cause, even if the treatments would not be considered sound today).

Kimball is pointing out a straw-man argument make by proponents of homeopathy, where through this term modern medicine is incorrectly represented as only dealing with symptoms and not the underlying causes.

http://scienceblogs.com/laelaps/2010/03/at_times_the_study_of.php