Author: Michael Moorhouse File Type: pdf Review...such a helpful and relevant book...I am following [an] MSc distance learning course in Bioinformatics...I would have been at a complete loss without your book! (Susan Tzotzos MSc, PhD, Vienna, Austria) From the Back CoverBioinformatics, Biocomputing and Perlpresents an extended tutorial introduction to programming through Perl, the premier programming technology of the bioinformatics community. Even though no previous programming experience is assumed, completing the tutorial equips the reader with the ability to produce powerful custom programs with ease.Working with Data applies the programming skills acquired to processing a variety of bioinformatics data. In addition to advice on working with important data stores such as the Protein DataBank, SWISS-PROT, EMBL and the GenBank, considerable discussion is devoted to using bioinformatics data to populate relational database systems. The popular MySQL database is used in all examples.Working with the Web presents a discussion of the Web-based technologies that allow the bioinformatics researcher to publish both data and applications on the Internet.Working with Applications shifts gear from creating custom programs to using them. The tools described include Clustal-W, EMBOSS, STRIDE, BLAST and Xmgrace. An introduction to the important Bioperl Project concludes this chapter and rounds off the book.Each chapter contains a series of maxims designed to highlight key points and there are exercises to supplement and cement the introduced material. Source code, related links, errata and presentation materials are provided at glasnost.itcarlow.ie~biobookindex.html (in PowerPoint format).

Author: Richard Powers File Type: epub A dazzling new novel by the author of Galatea 2.2 and GainIn a digital laboratory on the shores of Puget Sound, a band of virtual-reality researchers races to complete the Cavern, an empty white room that can become a jungle, a painting, or a vast Byzantine cathedral. In a war-torn Mediterranean city, an American is held hostage, chained to a radiator in another empty white room. What can possibly join these two remote places? Only the shared imagination, a room that these people unwittingly build in common, where they are all about to meet.Adie Klarpol, a skilled but disillusioned artist, comes back to life, revived by the thrill of working with cutting-edge technology. Against the collapse of Cold War empires and the fall of the Berlin Wall, she retreats dangerously into the cyber-realities she has been hired to create. On the other side of the globe, Taimur Martin, an English teacher recovering from a failed love affair, is picked up off the streets in Beirut by Islamic fundamentalists and held in solitary captivity.A mesmerizing fiction that explores the imaginations power to both destroy and save, Plowing the Dark recasts the rules of the novel and stands as Richard Powerss most daring work to date.**Amazon.com ReviewNo one who enjoyed Richard Powerss remarkable breakthrough novel, Galatea 2.2, will be surprised that he has returned to the richly promising realm of cyber-invention, one of our ages few remaining frontiers and a siren call to restless intellects. In Plowing the Dark, an old friend recruits a disillusioned New York artist named Adie Klarpol to work on the Cavern. TeraSys, a Seattle-based company, is building this virtual environment at great expense in the hope that it will lower its enormous tax liability as well as, in the long run, provide the template for all such virtual playrooms. Millions of dollars of funding, Adies friend Steve tells her when she arrives on the job, and nobody around this dump can draw worth squat. Suitably impressed by the Caverns programming, and slowly absorbing its dazzling capacity to project vivid and convincing illusions, she sets herself the task of creating a faithful 3-D version of Rousseaus Dream. Her painstaking efforts in the Realization Lab are aided by a host of supporting characters, one of whom, Spider Lim, proves so sensitive that he gets a bruise from bumping into one of Adies virtual tree branches. And when the central female figure appears among the foliage, Lim is irresistibly drawn in, marveling that blockquote their first successful leaf, twirling in the Cavern darkness, had led to this--this pale, lentil body turning in his minds dark. This scapular profile, these tow-line braids. Her hips fell somewhere on the Limacon of Pascal. The squares of her breasts abscissas and ordinates summed to an integer. This was the math of women, a field hed given up studying, female equations whose complexities had long ago surpassed his ability to differentiate. blockquotePowerss lush language corresponds to Adies vision of Rousseaus jungle, and in turn to Rousseaus own ecstatic vision. Yet there is also something elegiac in the authors lavish descriptions of the Caverns miracles, as if he were offering a late, last flowering of words before the cultural ascendancy of the image. Great, quotable chunks weight every page. Even readers fond of extravagant prose may find Powerss verbal persistence wearying, though it argues that there are still contradictions and subtleties of mind that no image can track. --Regina MarlerFrom Publishers Weekly A groundbreaking literary novelist and MacArthur genius grant winner, Powers (Galatea 2.2 Gain The Gold Bug Variations) takes on virtual reality, global migration, prolonged heartbreak, the end of the Cold War and the nature and purpose of art in his ambitious and dazzling seventh book. Like most of Powerss previous works, this novel weaves together two sets of characters. One comprises artists and programmers at the Cavern, a pioneering virtual-reality project sponsored by a Microsoftesque company. As college students in the early 1970s, painter Adie Klarpol, writer Steve Spiegel and composer Ted Zimmerman shared a house, an art scene, a complex erotic entanglement and a sense of limitless potential. When the novel opens, its the mid-80s, and Steve is a programmer he convinces Adie to flee New York City and commercial art for Washington State and the Cavern. We follow Adie as she learns about new media and about her new, multiethnic colleagues, each with his or her own emotional problems. As Adie and Steve rediscover high art and each other, both must return to the charismatic Ted and his painful fate. Powerss other plot concerns Taimur Martin, an American teacher taken hostage in Beirut. Taimur spends most of the novel in captivity, thrown back on memory and imagination his harrowing second-person narration transforms outward monotony into inward drama, building up to some of Powerss best writing to date. Powerss fans love his gorgeous, allusive (if sometimes florid) prose, and his digressions into the sciences both features, largely missing from Gain, re-emerge here to spectacular effect. Taimurs life and Adies link up only thematically--they never meet instead, Powerss dramatic prose and his intellectual reach makes their symbolic connection more than enough to propel the novel toward its moving close. (June) 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.