Note to James Ashford about his future
@jelashford James, I see that you followed me. After a bit of tracing, I see some of your interests, not much about your work, and a note you are looking for a job. I do not have any paid open positions now. Suggest you cross-link your pages at https://github.com/JELAshford, https://www.rdm.ox.ac.uk/people/james-ashford, https://twitter.com/jelashford and create a tool that makes it easy for your or anyone to gather and crosslink and maintain their full footprint on the Internet. Probably should use browser Javascript since that is the only globally supported language, albeit ugly to use in many browsers, operating systems and devices. Your GitHub projects are not clearly documented, at least make sure they all link back to your “footprint page” explicitly and from your footprint page a link to all your online content. ALL. This is not hard, just a bit tedious. If you enable a global community to self-organize, then it can grow and do many things.
I see at https://github.com/JELAshford where you say you are interested in gathering, cleaning and helping people (yourself included) to use data related to genetics and DNA. I encourage you to search Google for (site:nih.gov “omics”) where you will find about 551,000 entry points. My view from the Internet Foundation is that NIH has many efforts, not integrated at NIH.gov level, and on the Internet (“omics”) shows 49.8 Million entry points. That is something that is small enough to gather without huge resources, and if you automate it, and use low cost open AIs, you can not only provide a global service to gather, index, summarize, report statistics and encourage collaboration and standards – you can meet many people and groups.
One person can change the world. If you wait for others to help you, you will wait forever. So pick topic(s) you think you can be interested for the rest of your life and devote your life to making those topic footprint on the Internet clear to yourself and all of the 8 Billion humans now, and future generations.
I have years of notes related to DNA on the Internet, but my interests currently is on ( “metabolomics”) 35.1 Million. If you look closely at the 3D structures of the metabolites in the scattered databases and scattered efforts, they mostly found what was available and re-posted it. But what is needed is to gather the open methods, refine all the 3D structures, link to the metabolic models and integrate it at least.
There are millions chasing the GPT AI bandwagon. If you get involved with that you are likely to get trampled by bullies who have lots of money, brag and self-promote a lot. It is fundamentally flawed because the raw data is not being openly and carefully and “globally collaboratively” standardized, verified, indexed, accessible itself as a database using many good traditional methods. That information is not traceable through the many too rushed GPT AI processes, and that whole effort is self-serving, not aimed to share and encourage all humans in all countries.
I see where you said you are working on ( “replication timing” ) 837,000 entry points. ( “replication timing” site:ox.ac.uk ) has 233 entry points. You might want to check to see how to detect mutations and correct them in real time industrial processes. Many countries are going to have to shift to other means of producing nutrients than “find land, plant seeds”. I think you can put a “clean and standardize the input streams”. Making high quality raw streams can help establish new global industries.
Your urls for the Sahakyan Group are way too long. Put the full names in the page title, and keep the URLs short and easy to share. https://www.rdm.ox.ac.uk/about/our-divisions/nuffield-division-of-clinical-laboratory-sciences/nuffield-division-of-clinical-laboratory-sciences-research/sahakyan-group-integrative-computational-biology-and-machine-learning is not a good link on several counts. Your individual profile pages should all link to Twitter (https://www.rdm.ox.ac.uk/people/aleksandr-sahakyan) but if you made “Internet footprint pages” for each person, they can stay integrated with their groups the rest of their lives. It always saddens me to see good groups not keeping connected with robust and stable systems. The most wonderful ideas, papers, tools and synergies are mostly lost now because of lazy Internet methods. The National Science Foundation (@NSF ) funds many things and then does not have any mechanism to assure all of them share in global open formats. Having “real time Internet footprints” for all people and groups would help. Google Scholar and countless duplicated efforts all try to “do it themselves” and mostly never reach global scale, because they spend millions on geneating paper and pennies on sharing real content – with themselves, global collaborators and 8 billion humans who are probablly smarter and more efficient as a whole.
I am rather tired, so I apologize if this is a bit rambling. I would normally spend tens of hours tracing a group, reading the papers, investigating their topics, looking where they are stuck or missing big pieces. But I simply cannot do that anymore. I will be 75 in a couple of days and cannot do what reliable open AIs ought to be doing anyway.
You can have greater impact enabling on the Internet, than any amount of effort to “do research” the way it is implemented in the world today.
( site:ox.ac.uk ) has 3.25 Million entry pages.
( site:ac.uk ) has 200 Million
( site:ac.* ) has 620 Million
(site:edu) has 1230 Million
And those “education” nodes are not working together at global scale to give a complete lifetime knowledge and support to all humans. High priced education is too much memorization. The human brain cannot, at a global species level, store and retrieve knowledge reliably and efficiently.
Now I am really tired. I have worked every day for the last 25 years to see why all the global topics and global opportunities never converge to benefits for all humans. It has many reasons, mostly the assumption that only humans can store memories. We have machines for motors, and we can have machines for remembering. The education sites on the Internet are the worst organized and maintained of all kinds of sites, with great potential. If they would quit duplicating globally on every topic.
Best wishes,
Richard Collins, The Internet Foundation
