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Showing posts from December, 2008

Bruker Execs to Take Salary Cut in 2009

A few of Bruker’s top executives will take pay cuts in the range of 10 percent to 25 percent in 2009, the firm reported in a filing today with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. The 2009 salary for Bruker Chairman, President, and CEO Frank Laukien will decrease 25 percent to $318,750 from his 2008 salary of $425,000. CFO and Treasurer William Knight will receive a 2009 salary of $288,000, down 10 percent from his 2008 salary of $320,000. Brian Monahan, corporate controller and EVP of Bruker Daltonics, will receive a 2009 salary of $180,000, down 10 percent from his 2008 salary of $200,000. The firm said in the filing that the salary reductions were temporary, but it didn’t provide any other details. At the end of October, Bruker reported flat third-quarter revenue growth. During its Q3 conference call Laukien noted that beginning this past summer the firm began taking steps to reduce its operating and interest expense and reduce its exposure to currency fluctuations. “We expec

Google Shutters Its Science Data Service

The Google Datasets Project Comes to An End Google will shutter its highly-anticipated scientific data service in January without even officially launching the product, the company said in an e-mail to its beta testers. Once nicknamed Palimpsests, but more recently going by the staid name, Google Research Datasets, the service was going to offer scientists a way to store the massive amounts of data generated in an increasing number of fields. About 30 datasets — mostly tests — had already been uploaded to the site. The dream appears to have fallen prey to belt-tightening at Silicon Valley's most innovative company. "As you know, Google is a company that promotes experimentation with innovative new products and services. At the same time, we have to carefully balance that with ensuring that our resources are used in the most effective possible way to bring maximum value to our users," wrote Robert Tansley of Google on behalf of the Google Research Datasets team to i

Happy Birthday XML

This comes as a tribute to XML on its one decade milestone! As anyone with kids—or a good memory—knows, when you cross the "double digits" birthday threshold, it’s a big deal. This year, XML crossed this threshold on Feb. 10, and this got me thinking about questions that I might ask this 10-year-old in order to gain perspective on its past and future. I know I’m late, but XML is nothing if not flexible. It assured me that even a belated party is better than none, especially if I invited Alexander Falk, founder and CEO of Altova (its flagship product XML Spy is one of our favorites) and a real XML aficionado ( www.xmlaficionado.com ). I began with this: "XML, you’re much more famous than your parent SGML, and your sibling HTML 4.01 was deprecated in favor of an XML standard, XHTML. Techies worldwide have heard about you, and mighty standards battles have been waged about you. However, growing is easy the first 10 years, but soon you’ll have to be able to point to practic

Invitrogen’s Acquisition of U of Houston Startup VisiGen Pays Dividends for School

VisiGen Biotechnologies , a University of Houston gene-sequencing outfit acquired by Invitrogen in October for $20 million, represents the university’s biggest return on a spinout to date, and could eventually become one of its biggest overall tech-transfer wins, the school said last week. As a result of VisiGen’s acquisition, UH, which held an undisclosed equity stake in the startup, will receive nearly $500,000 from the initial installment of the deal. Plans for follow-on installments were not disclosed. An indirect benefit comes from the fact that approximately half of VisiGen’s current employees are UH graduates, the school said. Several of the scientists that founded the company will now continue to research second-generation sequencing techniques in their UH laboratories. Whether this research eventually sparks additional collaborations between VisiGen and the university is now up to Life Technologies, the biotech tool giant that resulted from Invitrogen’s multi-billion-dolla

Web 2.0 and Semantic Web for Bioinformatics

Here is a hand picked item, one of my favorites among the recent blogs that came across. This articles reflects and talks about many things which i have appreciated in the recent times and have blogged in the past web 2.0 .... Why should a (bioinformatics) scientist learn web development ? Up to now bioinformatics research with genomics datasets, has been happening like that: you download the data from a website of a big-iron institution ( NCBI , TAIR ), set them up locally, BLAST ‘em, MySQL’em, parse them with Perl script, and do all other sorts of un-imaginable things. Even though bioinformaticians might be un-aware of the term, part of the local processing that happens with the data is a mashup. This term translates to the combination of pieces of data from different sources, something akin to what has been happening on the web (see also Web 2.0 or programmable web ). In no way this is close to the myriad of Web 2.0 mashups that exist out there, created using APIs offered openly

BioInformatics National Certification (BINC) Examination

University of Pune (UoP), on behalf of Department of Biotechnology (DBT), Government of India, will conduct the BioInformatics National Certification (BINC) examination. The objective of this examination is to certify bioinformatics professionals, trained formally as well as self-trained. Eligibility Graduate in Science, Agriculture, Veterinary, Medicine, Pharmacy, Engineering & Technology are eligible to appear in the examination. They need not have any formal training, viz. certificate, diploma or degree in Bioinformatics. Students in final year of Bachelor’s degree are also eligible to apply. Application and syllabus The online application begins on 1 December 2008 and will continue until 16 January 2009. The examination fee is Rs 600 for general category, Rs 450 for reserved category and US$ 100 for foreign students. Please visit the website ( bioinfo.ernet.in/binc ) for detail information. Syllabus consists of four sections: biology, physical and chemical sciences, IT, and bio

India Fights Back - WE NEED ACTION

Let us force the international community to persuade Pakistan to declare that their nuclear arsenals are not any more in state’s control and that any time they may fall in the hands of terror outfits camped in POK and also declare regions infested by terrorist training camps as federally uncontrollable regions. PAK has to pay for this.. The babus are answerable! We will not forget...WE NEED ACTION...The email campaign... Mumbai: We Will Not be Divided. Sign the petition 'Rebuild India' Mission - Article Repository