Tuesday 14 October 2014

MUSIC - MUltiScale enrIchment Calling

Over on the ACGT blog, Keith Bradnam has another JABBA Award (and a nice new JABBA logo):

MUSIC - Multiscale Enrichment Calling.

I'm not sure what the connection between MUSIC and ChIP-Seq is but the authors seemed pretty determined. His post is actually a twofer, as it also draws attention to an equally contrived an unfathomable intranym:

MuSiC - Multiple Sequence Alignment with Constraints

Read more at Keith’s blog!

Monday 6 October 2014

DREAM - Dialogue for Reverse Engineering Assessments and Methods

According to the website, DREAM is a Dialogue for Reverse Engineering Assessments and Methods:

“The main objective is to catalyze the interaction between experiment and theory in the area of cellular network inference and quantitative model building in systems biology.”

Not clear?

“DREAM (Dialogue for Reverse Engineering Assessments and Methods) poses fundamental questions about systems biology, and invites participants to propose solutions. The main objective is to catalyze the interaction between theory and experiment, specifically in the area of cellular network inference and quantitative model building. DREAM challenges address how we can assess the quality of our descriptions of networks that underlie biological systems, and of our predictions of the outcomes of novel experiments. These are not simple questions. Researchers have used a variety of algorithms to deduce the structure of biological networks and/or to predict the outcome of perturbations to their systems. They have also evaluated the success of their methodologies using a diverse set of non-standardised metrics. What is still needed, and what DREAM aims to achieve, is a fair comparison of the strengths and weaknesses of these methods and a clear sense of the reliability of the models that researchers create.”

I know a bit about Systems Biology but I must admit to being confused about the “Assessment and Methods” part of DREAM. I think it means that DREAM is about assessing methods and models for reverse engineering biological systems (i.e. Systems Biology), even though it reads that they are trying to reverse engineer assessments and methods. Such dedication to the acronym over clarity makes DREAM a worthy ORCA entry.

Sunday 5 October 2014

ILIaD - Institute for Learning Innovation and Development

The learning and teaching unit at the University of Southampton has had a few different names over the years but its latest incarnation is ORCA-worthy with some selective use of prepositions: ILIaD - the Institute for Learning Innovation and Development. Find out more at the ILIaD website. (Although ILIaD is undoubtedly replete with heroes, I think this is ad hoc.)