Seventeen GitHub Accounts to Watch in Cheminformatics 2
It's been said before but bears repeating: social networking is a feature, not a destination. One service that demonstrates this principle very well is GitHub, which not only lets you keep track of specific repositories a given developer is maintaining, but their activity on GitHub in general. This can be very useful in finding new software, learning about new approaches, and meeting other developers that share your interests.
Over the last few months, I've noticed a steady increase in cheminformatics developers using GitHub. Because GitHub doesn't make it very easy to find them (searching by 'cheminformatics' doesn't turn up much), I thought it might be useful to compile a list of them here. In no particular order, they are:
Giorgi Lekishvili / giorgil
David Lonie / dlonie
Christoph Helma / helma
Metamolecular, LLC / metamolecular
If I've missed anybody, please feel free to add them in a comment.
Edit: These were added after initial posting:
Innovation: What Thinking Outside the Box Actually Means 1
The C&EN blog covers a recent innovation symposium. I generally find high-level discussions about innovation to be not terribly useful because they always seem to skirt the central issue, which I posted as a comment:
"You'll know you're being innovative if you feel uncomfortable."
That's the best advice on the subject of innovation I ever got. It came from a talk given at an innovation symposium held by a company at which I did a summer internship. Most speakers said something along the lines of "think outside the box", which when you really think about it is nothing more than useless tautology.
But one scientist offered the advice above. Now that's useful.
It's easy to lose sight of the fact that every single product we think of today as being innovative started out as a piece of junk almost nobody cared about. Stuff that ‘experts' in the field said could never work. Stuff that no serious person (or company) would ever waste time or money with.
The iPod entered a market with several of other digital music players and was not expected by most tech observers to do very well. Netflix is an innovative service – but if so, why didn't Blockbuster develop it instead? In both cases it's a mistake to confuse what now exists with what existed when the respective products were launched.
Now, just because you feel uncomfortable doesn't mean you're being innovative. You could be doing something merely stupid or criminal instead.
But if what you're now working on is widely-regarded as the 'correct' approach, you've either made it through the period of being uncomfortable with your innovative idea and others are starting to come around (congratulations!), or you're not being very innovative.
Source: Beginning of the End for ACS Journal Print Editions 3
The most recent C&EN contains this tidbit - and this time it's no joke:
Although demand for the Web editions of American Chemical Society journals is growing, demand for print editions has declined sharply. This trend is prompting the society to change the format and dissemination of its printed issues. In July, ACS will begin publishing the print editions of most of its journals in a "rotated and condensed" format that will fit two pages of content on one printed page.
It's not totally clear what "rotated and condensed" means, but if it's what I'm thinking, ACS might as well stop the printing presses now. I've run across one or two of these "rotated and condensed" journals - and they are barely usable. The "rotated" part means that holding the thing feels like you're flipping through a calendar. The "condensed" part means that you'll need a magnifying glass to read captions and other small text.
Then there's the "cheesiness" factor. None of the journals printing in a "rotated and condensed" format were ever held in very high regard - or any regard for that matter. The power of cheesiness to start an uncontrollable chain reaction should not be underestimated. Just ask these guys:
The chemistry publication landscape has been changing for the last several years. The move by ACS to phase out print journals is but one more sign. Can the ACS pull off the transition away from print? Only time will tell, but recent history suggests the odds are not good.
