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[University Rankings]

Results from a large (11,050) survey in Sweden, "... researchers on average rated themselves as better than other researchers in their field at following good research practice, and rated researchers in their own field as better than researchers in other fields ..." — A. M. Lindkvist et al, 'Bounded research ethicality: researchers rate themselves and their field as better than others at following good research practice', Sci. Reports, 14 (3050), [www], 2024. #academia #ethics #research

"Unseen images^* of code breaking computer that helped win WW2. GCHQ has released never before seen images of #Colossus, the UK's secret code breaking computer credited with helping the Allies win World War Two. ..." — [bbc]^*. #Colossus #Enigma #Ultra #WW2 #BletchleyPark #GCHQ

"AI cannot patent inventions, UK Supreme Court confirms ... upheld earlier decisions in rejecting a bid to allow an artificial intelligence to be named as an inventor in a patent application. ..." — [bbc] #AI #UK #IPO #patent #law #invention Note, this is specifically about whether or not the AI itself can be named as an inventor, not what an AI might do.

Various University world rankings are out [www]. (Are they being gamed? Just remember Campbell's / Goodhart's law!-) #academia #university #rankings #Shanghai #THES #QS

Had another go at [Insitu Merge] in linear-time and O(1)-space. Hopefully this one is better. #insitu #merge #merging #algorithm

P. R. Amarasinghe et al, 'Getting ‘φψχal’ with Proteins: Minimum Message Length Inference of Joint Distributions of Backbone and Sidechain Dihedral Angles', #Bioinformatics, 39(s.1), pp.i357-i367, doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/btad251, June 2023.

"The tendency of an amino acid to adopt certain configurations in folded proteins is treated here as a statistical estimation problem. We model the joint distribution of the observed mainchain and sidechain dihedral angles (⟨φ,ψ,χ₁,χ₂,...⟩) of any amino acid by a mixture of a product of von Mises probability distributions. This mixture model maps any vector of dihedral angles to a point on a multi-dimensional torus. The continuous space it uses to specify the dihedral angles provides an alternative to the commonly used #rotamer libraries. ... Our models are computationally inexpensive to sample from and are geared to support a number of downstream studies, ranging from experimental structure refinement, de novo protein design, and #protein #structure prediction. We call our collection of mixture models as PhiSiCal (φψχal)" #protein #structure #rotamer #bioinformatics

Why oh why is Apple's 'Photos' app for iOS and OS-X such an awful piece of software apparently unable to do elementary things such as sort the pictures in a slideshow by filename or even play a slideshow in the same order on two different devices? #Apple #Photos #iOS #macOS #imac #ipad

Converting an integer, possibly a very large one, a very bigInt, into its English name is an interesting little exercise, for example, 123456789012345678901 → one hundred and twenty three million four hundred and fifty six thousand seven hundred and eighty nine million twelve thousand three hundred and forty five million six hundred and seventy eight thousand nine hundred and one. Surprisingly the use of the word "and" is perhaps the hardest thing to handle.
See toWords() in bigInts.js at [Arithmetic], #integers #bigInt #names #numerals.

D. R. Powell, L. Allison, T. I. Dix, 'Modelling Alignment for Non-Random Sequences,' in Advances in Artificial Intelligence, Springer, LNCS/LNAI, vol.3339, pp.203-214, doi:10.1007/978-3-540-30549-1_19, 2004.

Addresses the problem of aligning biased and/or repetitive DNA sequences:   "... a new and general method, modelling-alignment: Population models are incorporated into the alignment process, which can (and should) lead to changes in the rank-order of matches between a query sequence and a collection of sequences, compared to results from standard algorithms. The new method is general and places very few conditions on the nature of the models that can be used with it. We apply modelling-alignment to local alignment, global alignment, optimal alignment, and the relatedness problem." #sequence #alignment #bioinformatics
Also see software.

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