Blog

Here we are in that funny week at the end of the year, when the projects have mostly wrapped up and we take a breather and look at both the year behind and the year ahead. In short, 2018 has been an amazing, exciting year with a lot of work and a lot of success.… Read More »2018 in Review

If you missed our presentation at the North Shore Technology Council’s First Friday event, you can check out the slides on SlideShare. We co-presented with Huseyin Mehmet of Zafgen, Inc. Huseyin talked about what we do for them, from cross-dataset analysis to technology recommendations to app development. I talked about what you should look for… Read More »Taking your bioinformatics to the next level

Want to learn more about computational biology in a therapeutics context? I’ll be co-presenting with Huseyin Mehmet of Zafgen next Friday, December 7th at the Woburn Trade Center. We’ll be talking about making effective use of computational biology data for drug discovery and development, and also describing how the collaboration between Diamond Age and Zafgen… Read More »We’re presenting!

It’s Thanksgiving Day, and I’d like to take a minute to say “Thank you” to the people who have made Diamond Age possible, starting with our customers. We’ll have a proper ‘Customers’ page up here soon enough, but in the meantime, thank you to Decibel Therapeutics, Voyager Therapeutics, 1CellBio, Aquinnah Pharmaceuticals, and Zafgen, Inc. As… Read More »Thanksgiving 2018

Source control is not just for software engineers. Using the tools that coders have written to support their work can make a computational biologist’s life massively easier. You’ll find that having a versioned, trackable backup of your analytic scripts is a lifesaver, over and over again. Backups. If you are checking code into a get… Read More »Three reasons to use Git for bioinformatics projects

It’s that time of year again, folks: Bioinformatics Christmas. Or is it rather Thanksgiving, where the whole family gets together whether we like it or not? Either way, I’ll be there next week, bells on and business cards in hand. I’d love to catch up with you, if you’ll be there. Send an email or… Read More »BioIT World 2018

The world of quantitative biology is large, diffuse and sometimes overwhelming. It’s hard sometimes to even figure out what someone means when they say “bioinformatics”. This can make it hard to figure out what part of the field someone works in. One way to break it down is to describe bioinformatics as the building of… Read More »Bioinformatics vs Computational Biology

Most of us in the biotech space are fully onboard with the concept of reproducible research. Who thinks it’s a bad idea to be able to trace back from our results to the data and methods that produced them? The trick, of course, is in how to do it. In the lab, there’s a strong… Read More »The Compiled Thesis: why computational biologists should use self-documented analysis

I’ve been asked before to explain how repeated measurements can impact statistical models. We often bake repeated measurements – more than one measurement take on the same person, the same experimental animal, etc – into our experiments. They can give us more confidence in noisy data. The downside is that they do need to be… Read More »The Sketchy Data Collector and the Problem with Repeated Measurements

What on earth do people mean when they tell you they’re going to “fit a model”? Let’s start with what a model is. A model is a description of a system, usually expressed as an equation of some kind. Let’s say we have some data – measurements of variables x and y. We think that… Read More »What does it mean to fit a model, anyway?