Class 2 Discussion Seeds

10 steps

• Which of the 10 steps sounds the most daunting or was the most confusing? Are there any steps missing?
• How does your lab do computational lab notebooks?

History

• What is the same about bioinformatics now as it was in the 60s, 70s, 80s?
• Why is free software so valued by scientists? Is free software and public data important?
• “the use of computers has become ubiquitous in biology, as well as in most natural sciences (physics, chemistry, mathematics, cryptography, etc.), but interestingly, only biology has a specific term to refer to the use of computers in this discipline (‘bioinformatics’). Why is that so?”
• In a thought experiment for the year 2039, “biology and bioinformatics are so intertwined that there is no need to distinguish one from the other. Both are simply known as biology.” What do you think?

ISAAC Filesystems

• File system limits – home directory vs scratch vs project
• What did this page tell us about data back ups?