There’s been a lot of talk recently about social networks geared for life scientists. This includes the rise of sites like Epernicus, a blog post on network portability on Nascent, and discussion of topics like shared author IDs in the Science Apps room on FriendFeed.

Today, another new site is percolating to the surface of the twitterverse: Biomedexperts. Disclaimer: I have no idea if there is supposed to be a space between those words, ala the logo for AmericanAirlines.

The cool thing about Biomedexperts is that the basis of their network is built on relationships from the published literature.

Unfortunately, I think that this strategy is blind to some of the most important types of scientific relationships: your colleagues that you might interact with on a day-to-day basis but you don’t write papers with. These are the people you bounce ideas off of, the people who help you piece together a PAGE gel after it’s dropped to the floor, the ones who feed your mice when you’re on vacation, and the ones who read your manuscript with a critical eye.

One solution might be to exploit true intellectual lineages. These are often created in niche fields by interested parties in order to create a family tree of sorts of a research area.

The C. elegans community is a perfect example. Begun in the mid 1970s by Sydney Brenner, the community now tallies at several 1000s of investigators studying directed problems in C. elegans, and tens of thousands more who use the system periodically. Because of the need to learn specialized skills for maintaining and studying the organism, most researchers associated with the community are connected in some way to the Ancestral Brenner (if you will).

In fact, these connections have been tracked by the community creating a sort of intellectual pedigree (albeit with large amounts of inbreeding). Roles like undergraduate, graduate, post-doc, RA, PI, and types of associations like collaboration or sabbatical have been duly noted. The end result? A structured, computable intellectual lineage represented as a directed acyclic graph, presented here as a graphviz graph. The perfect foundation for a social network…

If you aren’t familiar with the work of Ben Fry (blog), you really owe it to yourself to spend a few hours surfing around his work. His work is beautiful and inspirational. Don’t miss his Ph.D. dissertation.

Ben is the author of the recent O’Reilly text Visualizing Data (review coming soon).

I first came across Ben’s work at the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum in NYC. If you are ever in New York, the Cooper Hewitt is a great way to soak up great design.

I’ve used pretty much every time tracking, billing, and invoicing tool available for the Mac.

But hey, enough with the desktop apps already. I’m an on-the-go guy and need a mobile, web-based solution. With rounded corners, too, please.

Here are two options that I’ve discovered.

14dayz.com

Goofy name, but feature rich. Gratis and paid plans available, restricted by the number of projects you can maintain at once and the types of reports that are available. Looks helluva lot like 37 Signal’s project management tool Basecamp. Intuitive interface with appropriate (albeit sometimes flakey) ajax. Generates simple and generic invoices. Export to PDF and CSV available with paid plans, which start at a reasonable 5 bucks a month.

Toggl.com

They’ve got the name sans final “e”. That’s a good start. Again, both free and paid plans. I found the free plans to be nearly useless since reports don’t calculate a sum for billable hours unless you upgrade to a paid plan. And at 19 smackers a month, it ain’t cheap. Still, looks promising.

Know of other good (free) web-based time-tracking tools?

Several years ago, WormBase began collecting detailed intellectual pedigrees for members of the community. To display the large degree of collaboration within the community, I created a directed acyclic graph for the 2005 C. elegans meeting that displays the following relationships:

• PI <-> Post doc
• PI <-> Grad student
• PI <-> Masters
• PI <-> Undergraduate
• Worked with
• Collaborated with

About the image

The Y-axis displays years, with the apex of the graph positioned at 1970. Only individuals that have bibliographic or lineage data contained in WormBase as of 5/2005 are displayed on the graph. Individuals are placed on the Y-axis according to the year the first entered the community. This is determined as the earliest year of either the first paper or meeting abstract published or drawn from
lineage data, if it exists. The position on the X-axis is arbitrary, calculated using an energy minimization algorithm to restrict the number of intersecting lines.

Key

Viewing the image

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Downloads

EPS (encapsulated postscript)
SVG (scalable vector graphics)