http://www.illigal.uiuc.edu/web/duque A blog about science, technology and other geek stuff. Thu, 12 Nov 2009 21:41:58 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Yesterday several sources published news about the discovery that two mutations (out of 740 units) in the gene FOXP2 may be responsible for our ability to speak. FOXP2 association with speech was reported in 2001, after a study in a British family with speech problems on more than half of ... http://www.illigal.uiuc.edu/web/duque/two-single-mutations-may-be-responsible-for-our-ability-to-speak/ I am on the wave. I did not start waving about anything useful yet and therefore, google wave still just an useless toy for me, but I can see that it has potential to be useful and chaotic. A lot more potential to be chaotic than useful, but it is still ... http://www.illigal.uiuc.edu/web/duque/i-am-on-the-wave/ If you are interested in neuroscience but do not have too much time to dedicate to the subject I highly recommend the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s 2008 Holiday Lectures in Science. The holiday lectures in science are usually composed of four lectures on a specific topic presented by HHMI investigators from ... http://www.illigal.uiuc.edu/web/duque/very-quick-and-very-good-introduction-to-neuroscience/ I just finished the following iTunes U course: http://deimos3.apple.com/WebObjects/Core.woa/Browse/yale.edu.1900004221 It is very good. Very interesting both in the biological stand point and in the engineering point. It also reminded me of my advisor David Goldberg several times, and of his view of what it means to be an engineer. The only problem ... http://www.illigal.uiuc.edu/web/duque/another-recommended-lecture-from-itunes-u/ Just finished watching Intro to Biology From MIT http://bit.ly/1Vvji1 (iTunesU). Highly recommended (and free). http://www.illigal.uiuc.edu/web/duque/recommended-course-for-your-ipod/ Pier Luca Lanzi, from the Politecnico di Milano university made his lectures on data mining available on the web trough Vimeo. It is a good resource if you whant to learn some principles of data mining. The lectures can be found here. You can also visit Pier Luca's website here. http://www.illigal.uiuc.edu/web/duque/data-mining-course/ In the past weeks, we talked about the question of Why Semantics (here) and how to build scientific ontologies (here). Now it is time to start building our own ontologies using Protégé. Protégé is an open source tool to build OWL ontologies and it can be found here, under downloads (here) ... http://www.illigal.uiuc.edu/web/duque/semantics-roadmap-getting-you-hands-dirt-with-protege/ Genetic Algorithms are actually my primary research interest (not semantic web) but I have been in the field for quite long time and I haven't looked on basic/interesting stuff for a while. My plan is to start blogging more about GAs in the near future but for now I have ... http://www.illigal.uiuc.edu/web/duque/a-crazy-mix-between-gas-and-rdf/ Continuing the series of videos about semantic technologies, a good suggestion is this video (here) . In this video Barry Smith walks through some basic concepts of ontology engineering and scientific ontology. The Basic Formal Ontology and the RCT Trial bank are used as a base for a Clinical Trial ... http://www.illigal.uiuc.edu/web/duque/semantics-roadmap-introduction-to-ontology-building/ Message in a Bottle or: How can the Semantic Web Community be more convincing? http://videolectures.net/iswc08_decker_mib/ Stefan Decker, DERI Galway Description Enormous resources are poured into projects like the Large Hadron Collider, the Hubble space telescope, or the Iter fusion reactor. Computer science resources pale in comparison – the European Semantic Web effort is tiny ... http://www.illigal.uiuc.edu/web/duque/another-interesting-video-about-semantic-web-technologies/