On Saturday, we went to see a Kolam ritual at Bozar. Kolam is the designs the Pulluvans are drawing on the floor for a lot of occasions, using multicoloured sands, rice and spices. Here, it was supposed to be a ritual for a family (“supposed” only because it was a demonstration for the public and no family was specifically involved). In this ritual, two women in a trance erase the drawings and answer questions the family is asking. The whole ceremony is linked to snakes that are supposed to have been in Kerala before men and that should be pleased in order to peacefully live together. ...

This friday, I attended the Symposium on Neuroproteomics organised at the University of Gent (B). Apart from Deborah Dumont’s excellent talk, lectures were almost only focused on oxydative stress, neurological diseases and gel-free proteomics (like 2D-LC). One speaker even seemed to talk only to his computer or his presentation. So, it was not very interesting for me (finishing my thesis based on gel proteomics). The organisation was very “basic” and we even didn’t have any free pen + paper (fortunately, I took two pens and a notebook).

Hannah Wallash put their slides about Dasher on the web (quite the same as these ones from her mentor). Dasher is an “information-efficient text-entry interface”. What made me interested in Dasher is her introduction about the way we communicate with computers and how they help us to communicate with them. There are keyboards (even reduced ones), gesture alphabets, text entry prediction, etc. I am interested in the ways people can enter text on a touch-screen, without physical keyboard. Usually, people use a virtual keyboard (like in kiosks for tourists or in handheld devices). But they are apparently not the best solutions. ...

From the 11th to the 14th of October, I was at Proteom’Lux 2006, an international conference on proteomics held in Luxembourg. I presented a poster, learned quite a lot of information, met a lot of very interesting people and have now a clearer view on the directions and additional details needed in the proteomic part of my work. Some people presented some interesting new ideas ( QconCat, MS-Blast, …). I am still assimilating all this information … ...

Today, we were required to vote for the Belgian town and province elections (voting is mandatory in Belgium). A certain percentage of polling stations used an electronic voting technique. After identification, a person gives you a (presumably blank) magnetic card, you enter a voting booth, insert the card into a computer and, with a stylus, you point on a screen. The screen mimics a paper used in the old-fashioned way of voting: white circles on the left of a candidate’s name. After you voted, the computer gives your card back and you simply put it in a ballot box. If you want to know more about potential problems with electronic voting, you can look at Poureva, Recul démocratique and the Wikipedia article about electronic voting, e.g.. ...

I went to Gent, last Friday, to the BASS Autumn Meeting. With “New drugs for sleep” as a title and mainly physicians and psychatrists in the audience, I didn’t expected to have a lot of “basic science” presentations but the University of Liege was well represented by T. Dang-Vu, P. Peigneux, C. Schmidt and me in the free communications section (btw, we are all four from the Cyclotron Research Center). I outlined some recent findings on proteins differentially expressed after a short-term sleep deprivation. I had a nice question from Prof. Verbraecken ( UZA) and, next time, I’ll focus more on pathways and physiological implications of proteins found rather than on functions only.

I was using Poseidon as a modelling editor for my UML2 diagrams. It was based on Java and I was able to run it from both GNU/Linux and MS-Windows. It was not free software but the Community Edition was free (as in “free beer”) and has all the tools I modestly needed. The only trick: all the diagrams had a string in the bottom, stating it was not meant to be used for commercial purpose (for educational purpose, I’ve written a small software that removes it). ...

On 6 Nobel prizes, 2 were awarded to people involved in research about RNA. The 2006 Nobel Prize in Medicine was awarded to Andrew Fire and Craig Mello “for their discovery of RNA interference - gene silencing by double-stranded RNA”. And the 2006 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Roger Kornberg “for his studies of the molecular basis of eukaryotic transcription”. RNA interference is a mechanism where a “double-stranded ribonucleic acid (dsRNA) interferes with the expression of a particular gene”. And transcription is basically the process through which a DNA sequence is copied to produce a complementary RNA. ...

Following my previous post where I retrieved EXIF tags from photos posted on Flickr, here is the next step: my script now stores data in a database. There is a lot of free wrappers for databases in Python. Although I first thought of using pysqlite (because I am already using SQLite in another project), I decided to use Gadfly, a real SQL relational database system entirely written in Python. It does not need a separate server, it complies with the Python DBAPI (allowing easy changes of DB system) and it’s free. ...

Some days ago, I was quite amused by Flagrant Disregard Top Digital Cameras: these people daily took 10000 photos that were uploaded on Flickr and looked at the camera makes and models of these photos. This kind of study is interesting because one can see what people are actually using and what camera models can give good results (with a good photographer, of course). I was just disappointed by the fact that they are not saying anything about their sampling method nor the statistics they can apply to their data. I then thought that I can do a kind of survey like this one and publish results along with the method. ...