French audio and podcasts
Archives
All posts for the month June, 2010
This entry does not explain about improving English: this is just nothing more than random thought about the determinant factors beyond each individual skill.
Factors that affects English proficiency
1. Economic incentive
a) markets (demand)
b) development (supply)
2. Size of population who speak a language
3. Linguistic similarity
4. Cultural similarity
5. Education system
6. History
7. Geographic location
I was wondering how Danish papers described the game. This one I found was impartial. After all there was no dubious call favoring Japan. Continue Reading
The society are getting more complex day by day and its future even 10 years from now seems like millions light years away. Here is a simple question I like to know. In this uncertain time, how do high school teachers in any field keep themselves motivated to teach students who seem to have no interest in a subject? Motivating students with practical real life experience? As teachers deepen their knowledge of a subject, they may feel contempt toward students who, in teacher’s mind, do not understand even basics of a subject. A teacher cannot build a castle without its foundation. Any case, it seems I cannot be a high school teacher. But there is no easy solution to high schools whose students want to be anywhere but in school. The education system in Holland may give us some insight.
Here are this week’s journal picks.
If you want to get involved selecting papers then please e-mail journal_picks@sanger.ac.uk and we’ll get you started. It doesn’t take much time!
You can see all the picks in citeulike:
http://www.citeulike.org/group/10570
—————-
*Bioinformatics*
—————-
MizBee: A Multiscale Synteny Browser (http://dx.doi.org/doi:10.1109/TVCG.2009.167)
Miriah Meyer, Tamara Munzner, Hanspeter Pfister et al. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, Vol. 15, No. 6. (23 October 2009), pp. 897-904.Whole exome capture in solution with 3Gbp of data (http://dx.doi.org/doi:10.1186/gb-2010-11-6-r62)
Matthew Bainbridge, Min Wang, Daniel Burgess et al. Genome Biology, Vol. 11, No. 6. (2010), R62.
A new mechanism for generating broadband pulsar-like polarization
Authors: Houshang Ardavan, Arzhang Ardavan, Joseph Fasel, John Middleditch, Mario Perez, Andrea Schmidt, John Singleton
(Submitted on 2 Mar 2009)
Abstract: Observational data imply the presence of superluminal electric currents in pulsar magnetospheres. Such sources are not inconsistent with special relativity; they have already been created in the laboratory.
Here we describe the distinctive features of the radiation beam that is generated by a rotating superluminal source and show that (i) it consists of subbeams that are narrower the farther the observer is from the source: subbeams whose intensities decay as 1/R instead of 1/R^2 with distance (R),
(ii) the fields of its subbeams are characterized by three concurrent polarization modes: two modes that are ‘orthogonal’ and a third mode whose position angle swings across the subbeam bridging those of the other two,
(iii) its overall beam consists of an incoherent superposition of such coherent subbeams and has an intensity profile that reflects the azimuthal distribution of the contributing part of the source (the part of the source that approaches the observer with the speed of light and zero acceleration),
(iv) its spectrum (the superluminal counterpart of synchrotron spectrum) is broader than that of any other known emission and entails oscillations whose spacings and amplitudes respectively increase and decrease algebraically with increasing frequency,
(v) the degree of its mean polarization and the fraction of its linear polarization both increase with frequency beyond the frequency for which the observer falls within the Fresnel zone. We also compare these features with those of the radiation received from the Crab pulsar.
I am not familiar with Belgian history and its current problems and it seems it is too touchy issues to bring this up with people. So I am just investigating what is going on. Sure I can understand the problems better if I can understand Dutch but my Dutch is limited to familiar science topics. But it seems that the eventual split is possible even though it will not strengthen neither part; but it will satisfy the nationalism of some Flanders. How deeply is the passion rooted? The problem seems to be extremely deep. I just realized that it is almost impossible for Americans, Canadians and in some sense Japanese to understand the complexity of European histories. Japanese history is mostly internal up to 150 years ago except several very ancient critical events. US and Canada both experienced civil wars but not as bad as other countries. Continue Reading
Journal of Negative Results in BioMedicine is ready to receive manuscripts on all aspects of unexpected, controversial, provocative and/or negative results/conclusions in the context of current tenets, providing scientists and physicians with responsible and balanced information to support informed experimental and clinical decisions.
Abstract: The drug concentration was slightly higher than mice under investigation could tolerate therefore all individuals did not survive for two weeks…
I am not an expert in learning another language and do not understand people’s language here in Antwerp for now. So I have urgent need to learn French and Dutch. In this regard, other people are providing extremely useful tips.
How to Learn a Foreign Language by Steve Kaufmann
http://www.pickthebrain.com/blog/learn-foreign-language/
Learn a Foreign Language
1) Spend the time!
2) Listen and read every day!
3) Focus on words and phrases!
4) Take responsibility for your own learning!
5) Relax and enjoy yourself!
Steve Kaufmann is a former Canadian diplomat, who has had his own company in the international trade of forest products for over 20 years.
http://www.thelinguist.blogs.com/
The cost of language learning.
And I need to check more of his entries …
Learning language learning from bilingual countries
It seems some people will learn another language only at a gun point; only necessity and self-induced motivation make them learn. But teaching classes in another language in early grades may also help, if they can put enough language footprint in pupil’s brain that may last forever even though it may remain passive knowledge.
I luckily lived in two (almost) bilingual countries; Canada especially in New Brunswick that is officially only a bilingual province and also Belgium where politics of the separation is getting messy. In both places, many people find that bilingual education is labor and useless not pleasure since they are not fluent even after many years of learning in school. Or frankly many people do not see any use of another language in their life. This is particularly true for anglophones, which is a term not so commonly used out side of Canada.
I need to check how people think about this in Belgium. Belgium is officially bilingual… No. Officially trilingual. Dutch, French and not English but, guess, German. (I assume Belgium got German part for the compensation for the war, but I may totally wrong.) Many Flanders think English is more useful than French. But as I said many times I think Belgian’s English skill is less than that of Dutch, Swedish, Danes though I never been to these countries. Many Flanders people in big shops will speak perfect English even though I doubt they can engage in a deep complex discussion in English on the spot; speaking English is still labor for many people here since Flanders are proudly Dutch speaking after all, after years of long language discrimination and trivialization by French-Belgians.
Any case, it is wise to speak English at shops in Flanders than in French. Many times I heard clerks were saying that their English is better than their French. These people understand it but just cannot say much in French.
And if you speak German, you may kick out from a shop since generally people here may not have good impression of German because of the wars. You will not, of course but you may get a hug by a few right wing Flanders separatists who had corroborated with German during the WWII… There is very complicated history behind this and I will cover this in more detail. I am not sure what will happen to the German part if Belgium separates. I assume it will come with Flanders.
http://thelinguist.blogs.com/how_to_learn_english_and/2010/05/french-immersion-in-canada—does-it-work.html#comments
I am citing comments and please see the originals.
“As a Canadian who does not live in Quebec of NB I find Found French to be a total waste of my time.” Continue Reading
RATT: rapid annotation transfer tool aka Big Brother Annotator
RATT is software to transfer annotation from a reference (annotated) genome to an unannotated query genome.
It was first developed to transfer annotations between different genome assembly versions. However, can also transfer annotations between strains and even different species, like Plasmodium chabaudi onto P. berghei or Salmonella enterica onto Salmonella virchow. RATT is able to transfer any entries present on a reference sequence, such as the systematic id or an annotator’s notes; such information would be lost in a de novo annotation. Furthermore, RATT checks whether gene models have changed between the two sequences and can correct changed start and stop codons, or frameshifts.
Please visit the http://ratt.sourceforge.net page for examples.
Algorithm based automatic contiguation of assembled sequences (ABACAS)
ABACAS is intended to rapidly contiguate (align, order, orientate) , visualize and design primers to close gaps on shotgun assembled contigs based on a reference sequence. It uses MUMmer to find alignment positions and identify syntenies of assembly contigs against the reference. The output is then processed to generate a pseudomolecule taking overlaping contigs and gaps in to account. MUMmer’s alignment generating programs, Nucmer and Promer are used followed by the ‘delta-filter’ utility function. Users could also run tblastx on contigs that are not used to generate the pseudomolecule.
abacas.pl -r -q -p [Options]
IMAGE (Iteratively Mapping and Assembly for Gap Elimination) is a top secret pipeline to improve existing capillary/454 genome assembly using Illumina reads. But it is not a secret any more.
http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/image2/
http://ratt.sourceforge.net
http://icorn.sourceforge.net
http://abacas.sourceforge.net/
You might just want to check Velvet EBI page by Daniel. You can also find further tips within the package and more tips from the user group.
Thank you Daniel. I think he is now in UCSC. He provided me important tips in the discussion group before.
(from a user-discussion group)
Dear Velvet users,
it’s my pleasure to announce the 1.0.01 release of Velvet!
Thanks to the Columbus module, Velvet now doubles up as an assisted assembler. In other words, if you already have sequences to guide the assembly (regions, contigs, exons, anything really), you can map the reads onto these sequences (or onto a reference genome if more convenient) and feed the reference along with the alignment files to Velvet.
