UPDATE: My email is working again.
I am currently without (my normal) email, due to an extended wide-area power outage with my email provider. In the meantime you may use my gmail address, brock.ticeNO@SPAMgmail.com (remove the no spam part).
Alternatively you can call me. 651-967-7961.
With all of this election hoopla going around, all of the claims by candidates, debates, and invective, it’s difficult sometimes to figure out what candidates really represent.
Or, it was. All you have to do (assuming they already hold a political office) is check out Project Vote Smart.
Just punch in the name of the representative of interest, and you get a categorized list of their voting record, ratings according to various interest groups, campaign finance information, and more. Mysteriously-named bills are explained with summaries.
To get you started, here are some links directly to voting records and interest group ratings:
If you are not familiar with screen (and you use the UNIX command line regularly), you are missing out. I’ve added a new command-line tools section to my tools page. The screen bit, with a link to a good tutorial, is here.
I recently discovered an interesting piece of open-source software, the CESE single-cell simulator. It’s based on Java and runs on a number of platforms.
The point of this simulator is strictly to run single-cell electrophysiological models. It comes with a few of the staples in the field (like the Luo-Rudy dynamic model), and you can buy more recent/complex models from a company called Simulogic. Alternatively, there are directions on the site for designing your own models.
Unfortunately, the program currently displays the output of all of the selected variables on the same plot, rather than breaking the plot into several panels, one for each current. The latter is the way we typically look at model data. Furthermore, I don’t see a way to import experimental data traces for comparison. I also had some rendering issues with pull-down selectors in Mac OS X’s Java implementation.
We currently have our own single-cell simulator with an ugly but functional GUI, linked to the ionic models in our tissue simulator. However, it might be nice going forward to make our models compatible with CESE, and to work with the CESE developers to improve the view mode. It would be nice to have CESE as a standard platform for model development.
If you want to download it and try it out, you just need a working Java installation, and you can get CESE itself here. Check the built-in help for a tutorial.
Have you used CESE before? What did you think? If you download it and try it out, please post something about your experience here as well (or email me).
lovely
Originally uploaded by rebekahsquare
This would have made a great Valentine’s Day Hearty Friday. If, you know, it had been on Friday.