Quite a few things happened while I was away. If you’re interested, here’s not so short summary of my internet hiatus:

Research area

I think I’m done with bioinformatics. My current research area seems to be located somewhere between systems biology, theoretical biology and information/complex systems theory. I hope to build on Dawkins work, deal with emergence in biology and study subtle effects in biological systems. While I’m not sure if I will have anything interesting to show ever, I don’t have energy to do yet another project which involves programming/web interfaces/dealing with data/annotations/modelling etc. I’m done with analytics, time for synthesis :).

Carrer

Last year I wrote a post dreaming about small non-profit contract research organisation. This model of Research-as-a-Service has materialized in a virtual research institute which we have finally launched few days ago (materialized in something virtual, sign of times? 😉 ). The setup is quite simple – the institute gets a project (or applies for such) and then it searches for researchers/institutions/freelancers which are willing to subcontract parts of the project. We have outsourced not only research part, even money gathering (writing grants, etc.) is done by external company. The setup is quite flexible and pretty transparent – for example, we may represent somebody’s rights, but no intellectual property is owned by the institute. Why such institution? We become a single point of contact for a large and diverse group of scientists, which are willing to do some research for real money but don’t have time and energy to hunt for gigs by themselves. While I have an academic job, I’m in the middle of transition from being a freelancer, to being a jobs provider for freelance scientists. More on that in some other post.

Open science

I plan to spend way more time on advocating open science (all of its flavors), but… in Polish. This step is out of large frustration that even prominent figures in Polish science have no idea about changes in the science internet-aware researchers are watching and creating. Knowledge about even basic things like Open Access is dramatically low in Poland (a number of people here equals OA with low quality publications which have not been peer-reviewed). With few friends, we have a number of projects in the pipeline (for example, we hope to launch a nation-wide, created by professionals  promotional campaign – bilboards, TV commercials etc. – for open science). If any of these actually works, I will let you know if we have any measureable success 😉 .

Labels, labels

Robert Anton Wilson tells a nice story in his book Prometheus Rising:

William James, father of American psychology, tells of meeting an old lady who told him the Earth rested on the back of a huge
turtle.

“But, my dear lady,” Professor James asked, as politely aspossible, “what holds up the turtle?”
“Ah,” she said, “that’s easy. He is standing on the back of another turtle.”
“Oh, I see,” said Professor James, still being polite. “But would you be so good as to tell me what holds up the second turtle?”
“It’s no use, Professor,” said the old lady, realizing he was trying to lead her into a logical trap. “It’s turtles-turtles-turtles, all the way!”

Another story is a comment from my advisor about putting my real research plans in some proposal (he supports these plans):

The most likely a reaction from reviewers will be something like this: “Nice start, some decent papers, PhD looks good. And then he got crazy.”

I feel like screaming “Labels, labels, labels, all the way!” when facing stiff schemas of what scientists “is” or what artists “is” etc. It’s a hard task by itself to integrate multiple passions and multiple interests into a coherent structure. I don’t need another set of issues because of labels people attach to seemingly creative professions. But limiting myself only to topics consistent with the image of an online scientist became even more frustrating. Therefore expect that this blog (or any other venue I choose to express myself) is going to become a lot more diverse in topics and form.