Posted on January 25th, 2009 by neil. Categories: General.
Damn jet lag, I’m sat in my hotel room (it is dark outside) at 5am writing a bit of advertising material and code, drinking Diet Coke. I’ve heard people say ‘if we were meant to fly, god would have given us wings’, I claim ‘if we were meant to fly god would not have invented jet lag!
Regardless, it is good to be in Palm Springs at the LabAutomation 2009 show - it is my favourite show and there is always a lot to do. For us, we have a Ziath presence on two stands, an innovation award which we were proud to have won and also with our N. American distributors - Biosero. In addition, I am also chairing the informatics track - we have fantastic session chairs from across industry and academic They have selected some excellent presenters for presentations and we also have a round table chaired by an ex-ALA president and influential figure - Reinhold Schaefer.
Even though the news is constantly filled with stories of companies going bankrupt and people losing their jobs I feel it is important to attend conferences and shows. I’ve often heard companies and individuals say ‘we cannot afford to invest in new items’. I understand that concern, however I have typically noticed that innovation and development of processes actually reduces costs. Imagine if we were all still performing high-throughput screens in 96 well plates. That would make the ‘credit crunch‘ deficit seem tiny in comparison.
So, there is no better place to seek out the new (and old!) technologies and products to help save money and increase productivity than a show like LabAutomation 2009. If you cannot make it then hold on as I’ll be trying to get some time to walk around the show and will try to pick my top 5 ‘new things’ that I can find on the exhibition floor.
If you are at the show then drop by the Ziath stand or the Biosero stand to say hello to me and/or Tim. We will be wearing suits so you can simply laugh at us!
Posted on January 7th, 2009 by neil. Categories: General.
It’s been a while since I wrote so as a small precursor; here is something before a proper article! One way to drive innovation and move things forward is to increase usability. In the usability world there is an index which measures how many clicks of the mouse button (or button pushes) it takes to do something, the lower the better. Basically the idea is to remove those infuriating message boxes which just say ‘Click OK to continue’. However Apple have turned this on their head as shown below:
Posted on November 21st, 2008 by neil. Categories: General.
I have recently flown from Germany to England on a business trip, being the high-flying executive that I am I flew EasyJet from Berlin to Bristol. In case you are not familiar with EasyJet (i.e. from the US) they are similar to Southwest Airlines. The trick that these low-cost airlines did was to examine the airline business and aggressively trim the excess fat from the system. That is why EasyJet seats don’t recline, you don’t have a reserved seat (no seat booking system to design and maintain) and you pay for your food.
These are the obvious things, however one thing that struck me is the infrastructure behind it, one advantage of flying from Berlin Schoenefeld is that the planes pull right up against a large bank of windows. As soon as the plane stopped and turned off it’s engines out of nowhere came about 8 vehicles within 30 seconds for fuel, bags, stairs for passengers and a tow truck. The smoothness and routine by which this happened is a perfect example of reducing costs by increasing efficiency.
Here comes the analogy, high throughput screening is kinda like this, if the sample is the plane then the biology, the informatics, the equipment, the consumable, the reagents and a bunch of people to make all that work are the vehicles that all need to converge at exactly the right time to ensure a successful assay (well assays). I constantly hear of people claiming ‘high throughput screening is to rote for me’. That depends, it is high pressure work and if you have the kind of brain where you like to see things work and work well then it is anything but rote - personally I get bored by doing bench science with a multi-channel pipette! Instead having the ability to compared the science, engineering, informatics and logistics and then to work well in a team with such a diverse group of experts leads to an immensely rewarding work day (when it works well ).
So, if you work in high-throughput science (not just screening), then sit down and draw a small diagram of what it takes to achieve a day’s successful screening - it is quite staggering and something to be proud of. After that pause, we can all go back to swearing at the blocked tips on our Evo/Janus/Cybiwell and cursing the assay developer who wanted to use Dowex in their 2,000,000 sample assay (it has the consistency of sand - worse than SPA beads!).
Posted on November 14th, 2008 by neil. Categories: General.
I have been interviewed by the LabMan at the Association for Laboratory Automation. You can read or listen to it here - I apologise, in advance for the English accent .
Posted on November 7th, 2008 by neil. Categories: General.
I just got this link of a friend of mine who works for google so he is in the know of what is good and what is not when it comes to YouTube videos, unsurprisingly he occasionally finds pure gold. The following video shows what you friends and family think if when you say that you work in robotics!
Posted on November 5th, 2008 by neil. Categories: General.
Well, I woke up (I live in Europe) to find that the US has a new president - no hanging chads, no dodgy voting machines; just a plain victory. So, where can I find the entertaining stories - cue Sun. A senior exec at Sun, Johnathon Schwarz wrote this in his blog:
“On behalf of Sun Microsystems, I would like to offer my sincerest congratulations to President elect Barack Obama. What an extraordinary accomplishment.”
Fair enough, I thought - we’re quite glad about it over in Ziath land, then I nearly spluttered my morning tea (European and British ) over my laptop when I read the next quote:
I would also like to extend my congratulations to his web team for having chosen MySQL as the platform behind their election web site, BarackObama.com
I doubt that the democratic political parties are using barcoded tubes but if you do then Ziath can sell you decoding software, maybe we have the same magic charm as MySQL!
Posted on November 4th, 2008 by neil. Categories: General.
I was browsing the web checking for references to our revised DataPaq Google AdWords campaign (if you thought cell phone companies had complicated pricing models, they have nothing on Google!) and came across a company (TubeWriter) which was listed alongside us. They have a device which prints on tubes for the lab - so what I hear you say. Well this is the cool bit, the device is a 3 axis machine (I assume stepper motors) that holds a modified pen to write (rather than print but if I had said write before then the suspense would have been gone) on the tube. It reminds me of the old logo robots which I used to play with at school.
I think that this is a neat idea, if you wanna print on a tube or plate - there are no messy inks or propellants/chemicals which make you feel drunk ill. So, I thought I’d pass on a YouTube video of their product to you:
Posted on October 21st, 2008 by neil. Categories: General.
I was reading an article about the iPhone from Apple and then read an interview in Spiegel and followed this up by watching a TV detective show. All of them mentioned Occam’s Razor which, simply stated, says that ‘All other things being equal, the simplest solution is the best’. I was reminded of this while reading about a frustrating problem that was being experienced by a fellow automation expert at Anglia Ruskin University who had a bizarre problem with an assay. Jon Alden of Konnis provided a good suggestion of reagent vessel choice - I hope that this is the right answer as it is ‘Occam’s Razor’ once again.
So many times have I run into something like the problem previously mentioned, although we like to say that we, as automation scientists, take the variability out of the assays with our machines that is not totally true. In fact if it were then we would not be needed - while it is true that some variables are reduced - others are introduced by the subtle parameters of the machines we are using. These variables are present on the bench but a failed experiment is often suspected of being due to other parameters than a pipette losing or gaining a few uls here of there of reagent. I suspect that these parameters are what determines a good bench scientist - Occam’s Razor once more.
I will touch upon the problem caused by removing variation at some point in the future but until then I would remember to take a look at things from face value and never ever assume anything – there is a quote from a film about assumption being something but the language is too strong to quote here. Even if you don’t assume, study the bench protocol carefully (do the experiment yourself if you can), use your lucky screwdriver on the machine and so on; you’ll still probably have an intractable problem from time to time- that is where working in teams and using the LRIG bulletin board can make a difference. Solving difficult problems is fun, that is why we like Sherlock Holmes!
Posted on October 9th, 2008 by neil. Categories: General.
I found a website called Kronomy which allows you to enter photos throughout your life and build up a kinda life story. While walking to work this morning (the autumn has made the vista by the Elbe in Dresden beautiful) I thought; I wonder if I can do that with laboratory automation? So I built something up which shows laboratory automation equipment and a timeline when equipment was launched. It is only sketchy right now and some of the times are a guess. If you have new items and/or can fix some of my guesses then please write in the comments or email me.
Posted on October 6th, 2008 by neil. Categories: General.
At the ELRIG conference, we were in the innovation zone which was a group of start-up companies. We had a hall to our own which meant that we could chat while delegates were in the talks. In the spirit on start-up togetherness, I thought I’d let you know who was there and what they do:
Us! We launched DataPaq which went down a storm. In addition we had the best chocolate in the room .
To those of you that know him, this is a new company started by Haakon Howard, a long time presence in the industry - Haakon has started up his own company. They distribute products such as dispenser, readers and cabinets and Haakon is always good to deal with.
Again I know these guys as I use to work with them at a previous company. They showed a really cool phenotype screening automated video microscope and had a picture of a zebra fish embryo. As well as looking good they had green lights which beat the normal boring blue (they told me the lights were functional rather than decorative).
These guys work in system control and modeling. They showed a really neat way to build a virtual system to proof out a setup before it is built. I could have done with this many a time before when I used to work at Glaxo.
The Edge Software Consultancy has project and data management for the lab. The product looks good and one thing that is interesting is that they write their software using a new programming language called ruby and their product is dual licensed; an open source version and an enhanced paid-for version. This is a model which is used in a lot of places and it is good to see the real world sneaking into life science informatics!
Biostatus - the strapline for this company is ‘a passion for cell-based science’. They provide research tools for cell based assays/biology.
—
That’s a round up of the people I spoke to; I am generally very much
in support of innovation zones (not just because Ziath benefits). As
Laboratory automation becomes an increasingly mature market, we need new
start-up companies to continually raise the game as happens in other
mature market sectors. In addition, for the conference organisers, the
innovation companies of today are the gold sponsors of tomorrow!!
).
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