Animal Breeding and Genetics Hub

After a some time I am here again to write a few lines.

I was busy recently to set up the Animal Breeding and Genetics Hub website together with Gregor Gorjanc. This was in fact the direct consequence of my previous post where I outlined the idea. The blog post went straitly to Facebook with an additional message/question if somebody is interested in this. Gregor was answering quite quickly, so we started to build the project right there.

The site was officially announced via AGDG and DAD-Net mailing lists with the announcement text, as shown here. This triggered almost immediate response. People started to show up in surprisingly big numbers. I really did not expected something like that. I could not do anything else just stare to the map showing the incoming connections. The feedback was very positive as well. It was a great feeling!

The first picture shows the incoming connections on 3rd March 2011 at 11.07, just 8 minutes after the initial post appeared on the AGDG mailing list (The entire traffic is through AGDG, as the message on DAD-Net appeared just early afternoon.) The picture below shows the current status, as of 13th March 2011. 

Animal Breeding in the Digital World - Year 2

It has been almost a year I have presented my view on the animal breeding in the context of our age, in particular the opportunities of social media and services available on the Internet. This led to the blog post Animal Breeding in the Digital World.

Nothing really happened since then. I was using the same services, discovered some more, but nothing really happened in terms of making a team devoted to get various sources of information together on a page/service/resource accessible to everybody. There are many sites that deal with information that might be of interest of people interested in animal breeding (various aspects from development to genomics). But the situation is that there is no "collection" which could be used a a central place for the navigation in relevant and interesting sites, even when you don't know what are you looking for. Of course there are blogs such a Gregor's, International Agriculture and Development, a bunch of FAO sites and many many other, but I think these are "well hidden" from the sight of animal breeders. I am pretty sure that there are many interesting places I don't know about.

I always thought it would be nice to create such a place. With some planning and a few people it could be a decent place to look for other interesting sites. Sort of an "Animal Breeding Hub". I think about this some time now, but I never said it out loud... But now I am going to try to get some people together who might be interested. Don't know what is going to happen. We will see...

Time management

One of the best presentations I have ever seen. Actually I watched it multiple times, and tried to follow the advices as well. I implemented the structured to-do list some months ago, and it seems to work fine. At least makes me think how important the respective tasks are. 

Here is the video on Youtube:



There are some other blog posts with similar topic. I am sure that there is a lot more in this topic out there, so if you know about something, just comment below.

So the posts:

• Where does your time go?
• Are you spending your time on what matters to you?
• My "unproductive" half hour

Dropbox startup

Today I got an invitation for a service called Dropbox from Gregor. It is basically an online storage/backup service and a possible way to share files. Part of my work is programming in Fortran and R, what I do on my office computer and laptop. Because of this I have my files on both of them, often in a different stage, so I always had to think which one is newer, or even if I knew, I had to send it via email or USB drive to the other computer... And as soon as I did some modifications, the version on the other computer was already obsolete...

This is now officially over.

This wonderful application created a folder on my computer, and whatever I move in there appears also on my other computer as well. It is just beautiful :) ! It also has an undelete and undo option, which might come handy in the future.

What I also did is that I set the working directory of R directly to this share folder, so any time I write a piece of code, it is saved, backuped and transferred to my other computer, but also accessible from any other place. Everything with one click.

The service is free offering 2GB of storage space at the beginning. If you want to try it out, you can consider to do it via this invitation link, which gives you (and me) an extra 250MB storage space. This is an obvious "candy" from the developers for getting more users in, but in this case it is really worth it.

See the introductory video on Youtube: