OpenLab

Introduction

My name is Pawel Szczesny and this is my research notebook.

It serves a different role than my blog. My blog contains rather defined and reworked ideas and texts, while this notebook is a dump of short notes, scraps of ideas and unorganized thoughts on the things that I am working on. Entries, while organized in chronological order, might be frequently updated.

How is this site organized?

Basic structure of the notebook reflects the categories on my blog. So:

• complex systems (biocomplexity) is a category containing notes on high-level description of biological complexity; it differs from systems biology, as it is more general and on the higher level
• bioinformatics – I?m working on different areas of bioinformatics: I analyze proteins, work in next generation sequencing (the focus is metagenomics) and develop small tools to capture evolutionary aspects of protein functionalities
• memetics – language is one of the limiting aspects of understanding the world; in general I?m more interested in capturing how acceptance of certain ideas develops in research community
• photography (visualization) – I?m interested in visualization and photography (especially using non-standard techniques, such as night or infrared photography)
• open science – this area covers all kinds of intersections between web technologies and science; openness is a main subject in here, even if it does not fit conceptually
• strategy – another not so well described bucket; I?m more of a tactician than strategist (everybody is a strategist right now) and I?m not really interested in strategy (where to), but in tactics (how to)
• synthetic biology – this is high-level biological programming notebook
• systems biology – my main subject of research interest; in essence, I?m interested in understanding how complex organisms function, using systems biology modelling as a tool

Some entries will not fit into any of aforementioned categories, therefore they will have their own section called (of course) ?dump?.