The Drosophila melanogaster Genetic Reference Panel
Mackay, Richards et al., Nature
North Carolina State University's Trudy Mackay and her colleagues present the Drosophila melanogaster Genetic Reference Panel, "a community resource for analysis of population genomics and quantitative traits."
The Forks in the Road
December 24, 2009
Computer scientists have three choices in a career, blogs Mark Chu-Carroll at Good Math, Bad Math. They can do academic research, industrial research, or industrial development. Chu-Carroll says these paths differ on five points: freedom, funding, time and scale, results, and impact. Funding, he points out, is "a direct tradeoff with freedom: the more freedom you have, the more you're stuck working to get resources; the more constrained you are, the more secure your funding situation is." For time and scale, Chu-Carroll notes that academics can take on longer-term, ambitious ideas but industry people often can only map put a project for a year or so. Then, the results coming out of the work are different: in academia, you get publications while in industry, you produce a prototype or a product. Impact, though, is what Chu-Carroll says is important to him. "My work actually matters to people. The importance of that can't be overstated," he says.