Economics from the Top Down is 1 year old

A long time ago I posted a little Automator routine to convert Word doc/docx files to PDF. Not long after that, this routine ceased to work due to changes in Microsoft Word (I think). It’s still very useful to convert a whole folder of docx files to PDF in order to avoid Word and just use Preview on the Mac. For committee work or for marking students’ work, I often have a whole folder of docx files and would prefer it if they were in PDF format.

“ Algorithm ” is a word that has become more and more meaningless in our day and age – given how it is thrown around everywhere. If you bring it up with people who didn’t undergo some form of tech initiation – be that formal education or self-learning - it’s easy for them to conjure a picture like the one above: A colourful mess of things, too complex to understand if you don’t have some advanced degree in computer science.

How can we make it easy to add data to Open Humans ? Open Humans lives through its community of members and the projects they design.

President Bartlet of The West Wing is calling his famous “What’s next” to his secretary after managing a task. I just defended my PhD last week, and one question from virtually every person who attended and stayed for the after-party: What’s Next? Which initially felt a bit weird. After all, I already took my next step three months ago when I joined Open Humans as the Director of Research.

Exactly 5 years ago Twitter started offering the option for users to download their full archive of personal tweets. The archive gives you a change to quickly browse through your personal history and find those funny cat pictures you once posted. But there is additional value in the archive, transcending the trips down to memory lane.

The first month in Berkeley – and with that also with Open Humans – is slowly coming to an end. And while much of this time was spent wrangling various forms of organisational and bureaucratic ordeals (finding an apartment; making sure all visa stuff is in order; getting a Social Security Number;

Previously I wrote about our move to electronic lab notebooks (ELNs). This post contains the technical details to understand how it works for us. You can even replicate our setup if you want to take the plunge. Why go electronic? Lots and lots of lab books and folders. Many reasons: I wanted to be able to quickly find information in our lab books.

We finally took the plunge and adopted electronic lab notebook (ELNs) for the lab. This short post describes our choice of software. I will write another post about how it’s going, how I set it up and other technical details. tl;dr we are using WordPress as our ELN. First, so you can understand my wishlist of requirements for the perfect ELN. Easy-to-use. Allow adding pictures and notes easily.

We are very exited to announce a major new release of the Data Retriever, our software for making it quick and easy to get clean, ready to analyze, versions of publicly available data. The Data Retriever, automates the downloading, cleaning, and installing of ecological and environmental data into your choice of databases and flat file formats.