Josh Witten

I have a soft spot for Muppets and for the Ben Folds Five. The Muppets require no explanation. Ben Folds Five might do¹.

The Ben Folds Five played the “Last Day of Classes” event at Duke University my freshman year (1998)². I was having a good day (was named captain of the rugby team) and they rocked. At the time, the combination of good music and sun dresses convinced me that the “Last Day of Classes” was a day of eternal magic. Being a mere freshman, I had not yet learned that music selections by university entertainment committees are almost universally horrible³. The choice of Ben Folds Five was a statistical aberration that gave me an inaccurate expectation for the next year’s festivities due to the small sample size.

Looking back, the next three years of disappointment were well worth it to have that statistical lesson tattooed on my soul.

NOTES
1. For the metaphorical Philistines amongst you.
2. Having been college, these dates may or may not be accurate.
3. They also managed to bring in Kevin Nealon to do stand-up comedy when I visited the campus as a high school senior – an event that certainly influenced my choice of higher education institution. Vanderbilt’s dean of admissions mocking Nashville’s storied country music history may have also helped.

ENCODE, Astronomy, & the Future of Genomics

The ENCODE media fail was epic enough that it totally dominated the discussion when the results were released to the public. Now our collective fury has abated¹, I’d like to talk about, not what ENCODE did, but what it might mean for how we conduct genomic research in the future.

ENCODE produced an unprecedented amount of data with unprecedented levels of reproducibility between labs. This data will be useful to researchers around the world for year to come. To do so, however, it commanded tremendous resources and marginalized the concerns of independent researchers. Can we harness the data collection power of these collective projects without destroying the creativity and risk-taking of individual scientists in the crucible of collaborative compromise? Continue reading “ENCODE, Astronomy, & the Future of Genomics”