What I have been doing at work
Aug. 6th, 2008 02:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
snousleI don't write much about work because it's kind of obscure and much of it I'm not allowed to talk about. But here is a fairly good article that talks about my specialty for the past eight years, the analysis of whole-genome association studies. My role has chiefly been in the nuts and bolts of data processing: image analysis, pattern recognition, and so forth, but I also have been somewhat involved in the population genetics, experimental design and significance testing aspects. There's a LOT of software involved - our 100-person company has usually maintained a team of about twenty people for data analysis and quality control, and the extreme size of the datasets means that we end up writing pretty much all our own software from scratch.
What the article describes as cutting edge is stuff we were doing about four years ago; these concepts take a long time to percolate into the literature, particularly since some of them involve convincing scientists that their results are poo-poo, and they don't like to hear that. Unfortunately, the pressure to publish has resulted in a lot of very weak papers in this field that ignore statistical complications such as ethnicity. One thing which has been nice about our work is that, rather than bow to that pressure, the company has always been receptive to critical assessments of the data, and is more interested in having correct results than lots of publications. The downside, of course, is that we get overlooked in articles like this, despite being the unquestioned pioneers in the field. Oh well.
What the article describes as cutting edge is stuff we were doing about four years ago; these concepts take a long time to percolate into the literature, particularly since some of them involve convincing scientists that their results are poo-poo, and they don't like to hear that. Unfortunately, the pressure to publish has resulted in a lot of very weak papers in this field that ignore statistical complications such as ethnicity. One thing which has been nice about our work is that, rather than bow to that pressure, the company has always been receptive to critical assessments of the data, and is more interested in having correct results than lots of publications. The downside, of course, is that we get overlooked in articles like this, despite being the unquestioned pioneers in the field. Oh well.
