Per tradition, Russ Altman gave his "Translational Bioinformatics: The Year in Review" presentation at the close of the AMIA Joint Summit on Translational Bioinformatics in San Francisco on March 26th.  This year, papers came from six key areas (and a final Odds and Ends category).  His full slide deck is available here.

Data “janitor-work” The New York Times recently ran a piece on wrangling and cleaning data: “For Big-Data Scientists, ‘Janitor Work’ Is Key Hurdle to Insights” Whether you call it “janitor-work,” wrangling/munging, cleaning/cleansing/scrubbing, tidying, or something else, the article above is worth a read (even though it implicitly denigrates the important work that your housekeeping staff does). It’s one of the few “Big Data” pieces that

At the moment, the world is obsessed with “Big Data” yet it sometimes seems that people who use this phrase don’t have a good grasp of its meaning.  Like most good buzz-words, “Big Data” sparks the idea of something grand and complicated, while sounding ordinary enough that listeners feel like they have an intuitive understanding of the concept.