morrow@murdu.OZ (Christopher Morrow) (01/18/89)
What with waiting out here in the antipodes for a new version of Maniatis (Molecular Cloning: A laboratory manual) to be published and seeing alternative texts appearing I suggest that bionet think about establishing a newsgroup for techniques similar to alt.gourmand on usenet. Alt.gourmand is a moderated newsgroup (that is all published items have been reviewed by a moderator) that publishes food recipes. It was set up by Brian Reid as an experiment. The idea was that modern technology was going to make the world into a global village: computer programmes could possibly help do this. The suite of programmes allows formatting and printing of recipes in a device independent manner (ie it does not matter what machine or printer you have). Brian will only post recipes that he thinks are interesting and the submitter has tried themselves. Well, My suggestion is that a similar group be set up for Molecular biology recipes. Information included could be the technique, materials, suppliers, handy hints and advantages. Readers could print off those techiques that the thought of use in the standard format and put them in their Lab technique folder. Imagine having a laser printed protocol that everyone could read. Even the lab boss! Chris Morrow A Vet on UNIX Check out Alt.gourmand. It has an archive and even recipes for stout.
sys_ms@bmc.uu.se (Mats Sundvall) (01/19/89)
In article <1510@murdu.OZ>, morrow@murdu.OZ (Christopher Morrow) writes: > > Well, My suggestion is that a similar group be set up for Molecular > biology recipes. Information included could be the technique, > materials, suppliers, handy hints and advantages. Readers could print > off those techiques that the thought of use in the standard format and > put them in their Lab technique folder. Imagine having a laser > printed protocol that everyone could read. Even the lab boss! > > Chris Morrow > A Vet on UNIX Nice idea. But how do you make all type in a standard format? Or is the reformatting done by the moderator? -- Mats Sundvall Biomedical Center +46/18174583 University of Uppsala Mats.Sundvall@BMC.UU.SE Sweden psi%24020019700620::MATS
kristoff@NET.BIO.NET (Dave Kristofferson) (01/20/89)
Chris, We have a newsgroup for posting molecular biology "recipes" already. As you get your postings via USENET, you should look at bionet.molbio.methds-reagnts. This is the USENET counter part of the Internet/BITNET METHODS-AND-REAGENTS bulletin board. Messages can be posted on this USENET group or by mailing to any of the following addresses: methods-and-reagents@net.bio.net methods@net.bio.net methods-and-reagents@bmc.uu.se methods@irlearn.ucd.ie methods@daresbury.ac.uk Now some may object that almost nothing along the lines that you request has happened here yet, and they would be correct. A lot of people do request information, and then get personal e-mail replies that are never posted to the bulletin board. EVERYONE PLEASE, if your response is of general interest (not just "I can give you a stab of such-and-such.") simply include the bulletin board address when you reply or use a REPLY ALL feature if you have one in your mail program (replies to all addresses listed in the message) to copy (cc) the bulletin board on your response. USENET software automatically posts follow-up messages to the newsgroup if you use the appropriate command. Of course, this alone will not start everyone posting their favorite protocol on the network. The funding agencies have given us enough money to put the mechanism in place for scientists to use, but we still don't have the in-house staff to "moderate" this kind of effort. We have to rely on public-spirited volunteers which in a competitive area like science may be hoping for too much. Being a Peace Corps volunteer a long time back, I know that if people get off their duffs and try to cooperate sometimes they are surprised by how many fold their efforts can be multiplied. At the expense of sounding biblical (a real no-no in these arenas :-)!), you might be surprised that if a few people actually took a little time to type up just one of their favorite techniques and submitted it to the bulletin boards, then others might follow suit, i.e., the old "casting your bread upon the waters" technique. Now how would one sort through the information posted in such a random fashion? Software for newsreading is still varied and of uneven quality. On BIONET, users can access the bulletin boards both at login and through the MM mail program. That program has the command headers text xxxxx where xxxxx is any keyword. The command is used after the MM> prompt and will display the numbers of all messages in the newsgroup that contain the given keyword. There are other options such as headers subject xxxxx and headers from xxxxx which display messages containing xxxxx on the Subject: line or from user xxxxx. The full range of options can be explored by entering headers ? at the MM> prompt. This facility provides users with fairly powerful access to relevant information. If your local software does not have such capabilities then the proper course to take is to ask someone at your computer center to upgrade it if possible. I know that this takes time; I've been working on this system for over two years now but the progress compared to two years back is noticeable. "Ask not what the networks can do for you ... etc." Dave Kristofferson BIONET kristoff@net.bio.net