Posts by VonDutch 73 publicly visible posts • joined 29 Apr 2019
You're forgetting the glacial pace of University decision making that means that the successfully won funding gets eroded away by bureaucracy before you get to do anything meaningful with it.
The second round of funding is generally there to fund the first project because it only paid for you to be allowed in to the building. Ends up being a ponzi scheme to deliver research papers.
Traditional modelling methods (10 years or so ago) would take the model of the amino acid sequence, simulate heating to a high energy state so the chain moves around a lot in to random confirmations and then reduce the temperature and simulate the rearrangement in to a low energy conformation. Through thousands of rounds of this a number of classes of probable conformations would be produced with a likelihood of each one being "true".
The real complication comes where there are post translational modifications that either direct or inhibit the formation of different conformations. A lot of these PTMs can't be predicted from the genome (glycosylation) and they have a temporal factor (turning on or off of a protein by phosphorylation as an example).
The exponential amount of information moving from genomics to proteomics and beyond is a real challenge but the output of this project could help accelerate the hands on research a lot.
I absolutely detest being on hold and the messages telling me it might be quicker to go to the website. Particularly when the website has told me I can't do what I need to do online and I need to call.
Believe me, if I could complete what I need to do without picking up the phone I'd have done it already and it's just rubbing it in.
My previous employer had a clean desk policy. That's fine for documents but it doesn't work for a lab.
At the end of every day you were expected to clear everything away which was not practical when you have samples that have to cure and shouldn't be moved.
Put away sensitive documents but a constantly clear desk looks like you're not doing any work.
^This. Absolutely gets on my nerves. Give me a reference code, I'll go to the website to get an official number to call and do the verification that way. Not a chance I'm proving who I am when they called me.
Same goes for the cold calls about mobile phone upgrades. I have had good fun calling them out on their "we see you're due for an upgrade" schemes. First question to them is can they confirm my name?
I remember being so conditioned by Win95 to push the power button after the PC had shut down.
When we got our first Win98 PC (with a newfangled soft latch power button) it would briefly flash up the "safe to turn off" screen before cutting its own power.
For months I'd go to "turn it off" then have to wait for it to do its boot cycle (ah the old RAM check...) before I could shut it down again. Eventually learned I could hold the power button to force it off.
Sensor on the back is great when holding your phone but a real pain when it's sat on your desk and you don't want to have to pick it up to quickly reply to a message.
Sensor on front is great if phone is on a desk or (depending on size of phone) got both hands free.
It's not quite like the old days of nokias where you could pop the battery off in half a second and have the new fully charged spare on in the same amount of time. The longest part of the process was the phone booting back up again.
I had user training for a new piece of warehouse management software last year.
It consisted of someone coming in saying "it's a bit like the old software", me pointing out I'd never used the old software (cost per user licence and very low chance of me actually needing it).
He then promptly clicked through some unintelligible things on screen, declared that to be training and left.
I didn't have to worry about the poor training though because the implementation of the new software was so bad and buggy that they stopped trying to use it after 2 days. When I left 8 months later they still hadn't got it up and running.
I can totally understand the "hang on to get your pound of flesh" out of the previous employer. I was moving jobs and a combination of timing and sheer bloody mindedness meant that I wanted to get my bonus from the previous employer even though I'd be earning twice as much at the new place. I didn't believe they deserved to hold on to my bonus money. They wouldn't re-invest it in the business or employees, it would just go towards the director's annual Bentley upgrade.
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