It was another busy week. Randy and I worked on getting a new activity set up for the intro labs. Students will draw a tissue type and a protein from a hat (or hats). Based on the tissue type, they will select a set of transcription factors and try to find a promoter (from among a set we provide) that they believe will be expressed in the tissue they've selected (this is a bit overly simplistic). They'll be using 
JASPAR (which is really cool). Once they've found a promoter that looks like it will work, they'll need to splice with the coding sequence for their protein and then annotate the whole thing (using APEto indicate the transcription factor binding sites and the start codon of the coding sequence. We're still getting everything nailed down, but it should be fun. Or, if not fun, at least a good exercise.
I met with Peter today to give him a quick tour of the ADTC Website. He was pleased and, after sorting out the final addresses, made ready to have it go live. I finished sorting the addresses into the new mailing lists this evening and sent out an announcement. Now we'll see if we can actually get people to use the site. I'm quite pleased with Drupal. Between ADTC and EUSA, I've done quite a bit of hacking on it (in the source and themes) and the code is not hard to follow and relatively easy to hack and extend. I think I'll be proposing we use Drupal more for the Biology Department to start replacing static sites.
It's been an intense week. A bunch of people are dealing with various kinds of uncertainty and coming in to talk through their stresses: job searches, teaching issues, personal problems. I appreciate that a number of folks seem to find me approachable -- someone who can listen and emphathize. I really love the people I work with. It's a very special community and I'm glad to be a part of it.
Tom Morley is going to attend the GV summit. We got everything squared away over the course of the week. I checked the participant list: Tim was marked as "linguist". I noticed that Tom Steinberg from pledgebank was also listed and remembered I'd seen that Tim had just finished translating the Esperanto version of PledgeBank. I mentioned this to him and we agreed to try to get some pledges in that he could point to. I signed up for one of his pledges and need to think of a pledge of my own that I can submit. Maybe something about local groups.
Thank goodness it's finally the weekend! There are only another couple of weeks of the semester, but it's going to be seriously trying. But then there's intersession. Ah, Intersession! A week to catch your breath, a week to catch up with people, a week to work on stuff, and then a week where you realize "Sanktan MERDON!! Classes start NEXT WEEK!!!" Ah, Intersession... :-)
StevenBrewer