In love with the Gun i.e., Gewehr.J.E. - PART ONE

Where there is blood there is life and where there is a woman there is love. No matter how much I deny the fact that science is my only love, and shall be till eternity, if Z were here today she’d jive seeing the woman in me that has now come out and for whom science is no more the only love, but a scientist has snatched the crown.

I had written my dissertation and had nothing else to do those days but to scrape up the ashes of it, finding my own mistakes, knowing them again, writing, cutting, re-writing. It had been my baby and was delivered while I endured all the conventionalities of childbirth from cramps to green puke, in every non-physical way possible. Mary was the first, but not by any means the last to experience the marvel often associated with her. We all dissertation-writers were.

I wrote my dissertation and plagiarized during the process to feed the fetus so it’ll come out perfect, referencing on the way to rectify my inevitable and innocuous sin. Frank et al., Radivojac et al., Xu et al., Xue et al., Ahmad et al., Matunis, Melchoir, Terrell, Voronoi, Gramatikoff, Shinbo, Schwartz, Kawashima and among them was Gewehr, J.E., Someone, M. and Someone-else, R., 2007. Bioweka – Extending the Framework of… and so on and so forth till we reach the page number of the publication which is not- though it was once- my concern anymore.

Problems are like viruses and the solutions that we put up for them are fairly similar to vaccines which may sometimes be nothing more than attenuated or tortured viruses themselves. An insignificant problem to solve a significant problem, I must say. Let’s just say that my dissertation was the whale, an extremely big problem which I solved by cooking up tiny problems of weather data for WEKA, reducing or increasing the number of instances I used in the data. Sometimes when the attenuated virus [which here is the protein/peptide data I was working with] wouldn’t do I simply killed it altogether. I forged data. It was surprising how the best accuracy was always achieved with forged data, over-estimation they call it for prediction models. My forgeries changed me to a pro at what I did. I knew Waikato Environment of Knowledge Analysis in and out. Atleast ‘in and out’ to a level that a below-average first-timer bioinformatician is supposed to know. The teeny counterfeits in data helped me know where the bigger problems in my project lay and on completion there was not a shred of fake or redundant data. Squeaky clean you can say.

There was a time when I wouldn’t sleep for many nights in a row, staying up working on something. It wasn't all when I had already spotted, caught, cut, grilled and eaten the big-fat-whale. Waikato Environment of Knowledge Analysis, or WEKA, was not my problem anymore, BIOWEKA was! Gewehr, J.E., with his supervisor Zimmer, R. Did I hate them? I did, till then I wasn’t sure of their sexes so I sometimes cursed them as men, sometimes as women. The link of BIOWEKA’s availability teased me with its name: sourceFORGE. The thing was out of my reach until finally I gave up the idea of it and completed by dissertation without any such thing. [To be continued..]

Dedicated to Madee http://madeehahassan.blogspot.com/