AimeeKok
commented
9 months ago Hi Olivier,
some feedback for Assignment 2: I would recommend using GitHub for version controlling your notebooks (it is not overkill :P), though searching back through old commits can also be a hassle if you don't write proper commit messages (I'm very guilty of that lol). I'm not sure how iCloud specifically works, can you access it like a folder on your laptop? Because in that case you can set up a daily automatic backup to any other location (your OneDrive folder e.g.) with a backup tool like borg (Pietro showed me this, might be nice!)
EstherPlomp
maartjespaans
Introduction
Hi, my name is Olivier and I am a PhD student in theoretical biophysics at the Bionanoscience department.
Describe your research in 2-3 sentences to someone that is not from your field
I use tools from information theory and statistical physics to understand biological systems, particularly gene expression. The expression of genes needs to be regulated precisely, especially when these genes encode proteins that are important for an organisms to develop in a healthy way. How do organisms maintain this regulatory precision, despite the noise in molecular signaling networks?
My research entails the following aspects:
Reflections on the importance of RDM videos
I do share the anxiety that a small mistake in one's research leads to catastrophic consequences. I wouldn't want to be deceived by a mistake I made myself. This is, of course, where Open Science and reproducibility plays an important role -- one can always prove you had good intentions, plus having more eyes on the back-end of the project may prevent these mistakes in the first place. Further, losing data is always a scary concept but in principle everything I do should be backed up in the cloud. But perhaps during this course I will learn how to minimise this risk even further.
What would you like to learn during this course?
I find it difficult to organise my data and scripts in a way where I keep what is important, and remember what everything was for. Especially in early stages of research projects, one might try many things that you may not use in the end. But I'll still keep all the scripts in case it's useful later. I now have folders called "old" in most of my projects' directories that keeps all the out-dated things, but obviously this isn't a super clear way of keeping track. I do find myself digging in this folder surprisingly often, so I would like to learn a better way of handling this. Further, I'd be interested to learn how to better share and communicate code/data with collaborators.
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