One of the nice things about OPIG, is that you can talk about something which is outside of your wheelhouse without feeling that the specialists in the group are going to eat your lunch. Last week, I gave an overview of the Hubbell group‘s Nature paper Synthetically glycosylated antigens for the antigen-specific suppression of established immune responses. I am not an immunologist by any stretch of the imagination, but sometimes you come across a piece of really interesting science and just want to say to people: Have you seen this, look at this, it’s really clever!
Continue readingAuthor Archives: Eoin Malins
Out of Band Management
We’ve all had things go wrong with computers, however when they go catastrophically wrong, there’s often little you can do other than to be physically on site to reinstall. This doesn’t have to be the case though. Most PCs have a tiny secondary processor which can allow full remote control of a computer that’s crashed, unresponsive or even switched off.
Continue readingLucubration or Gaslighting?
Or: The best lies have a nugget of truth in them.
Lucubration – The action or occupation of intensive study originally by candle or lamplight.
Gaslighting – Psychological abuse in which a person or group causes someone to question their own sanity, memories, or perception.
I was recently having a play with Google Bard. Bard, unlike ChatGPT has access to live data. It also undergoes live feedback and quality control. I was hoping to see if it would find me any journals with articles on prion research which I’d previously overlooked.
Me: Please show me some recent articles about prion research.
(Because always be polite to our AI overlords, they’ll remember!)
Monoclonal antibody PRNP100 therapy for Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease
Recently, University College London Hospitals (UCLH) received a “Specials License” to allow the treatment of six patients suffering from Creutzfeldt–Jakob Disease (CJD), by way of a novel antibody known as PRN100. The results of this treatment have now been published in The Lancet.
There is currently no cure for CJD, yet over 100 people per year develop it either spontaneously or through external means including (but not limited to) growth hormones, cataract surgery or infected neurosurgical implements [1]. “There is no UK legislation which implements a compassionate use programme as set out in Article 83 of the relevant EU regulation. But the UK has implemented an exemption process known as the “Specials” in light of the requirement to be able to deal with special needs.” [2]
As there is no known cure, the request for use of PRN100 was put before the court as in Law “Some treatment decisions are so serious that the court has to make them.”
Continue readingLe Tour de Farce v9.0
With many tours (Farcical and otherwise) restricted due to Covid, 2022 celebrated the resurrection of OPIG’s glorious Tour de Farce. This year’s route was nine miles and an unusually conservative four pubs.
After listening to Lewis’ conference prep talk, we left the Statistics Department around 5pm for a leisurely trundle through Mesopotamia, The Oxford Psychopath, Old Marston and out to our first rest stop, The Victoria.
Continue readingGoatcrashing OPIG
Today’s group meeting was the GOAT (Greatest Of ALL Time) as we were honoured with the presence of Daisy (professional internet goat) from Cronkshaw Farm.
Solving WORDLE with grep
People seem to have become obsessed with wordle, just like they became obsessed with sudoku. After my initial burst of “oh a new game!” had waned, I was left thinking “my time is precious and this is exactly what we have computers for”. With this in mind, below is my quick and dirty way of solving these. I’m sure the regexp gurus amongst you will have a more elegant solution.
Step 1: Make sure you’ve got /usr/share/dict/words installed. This is just a huge list of words in a specific language and for me, this required installing the British words list.
sudo apt-get install wbritish
Step 2: Go to wordle
Step 3: Pick a random 5-letter word as your starting point. This is where grep and /usr/share/dict/words comes in:
Continue readingA handful of lesser known python libraries
There are more python libraries than you can shake a stick at, but here are a handful that don’t get much love and may save you some brain power, compute time or both.
Fire is a library which turns your normal python functions into command-line utilities without requiring more than a couple of additional lines of copy-and-paste code. Being able to immediately access your functions from the command line is amazingly helpful when you’re making quick and dirty utilities and saves needing to reach for the nuclear approach of using getopt.
Continue readingEnhance your presentation by using virtual webcams and scene transitions
If you haven’t checked out Matt’s post on using OBS for recording video, I highly recommend doing so. OBS is a terrific way to present your work online. It can provide (amongst many, many other things) the ability to create live picture-in-picture scenes, so you can move through your powerpoint deck whilst overlaying video of your tiny talking head in the corner.
Continuing on from Matt’s post, I’d like to promote the OBS virtual camera plugin and Touch Portal.
Every company, department or course has its own favourite video conferencing application and whilst they all have their strengths, consistency is not one of them. If you want to consistently display your presentation and your live video regardless of the platform in use, this quickly gets into the “messy” territory. This is where the virtual camera comes in.
The right tool for the job – The Joy of Excel
Excel’s pervasiveness has resulted in it being used (correctly or incorrectly) in just about every area of science.
Unfortunately, Excel has some traps for the new player and unless you’ve fallen for them before, they are not entirely obvious. They stem from the fact that Excel will try to help the user by reformatting data into what it thinks you mean.
Continue reading