Flip the Conference

People who are a fan of the khan academy might know about the concept of "flipping the classroom". The simple idea of this technique is having students watch lecture videos as homework and do problems in the classroom, rather than the reverse.

I wonder whether this same method could be applied to conferences, which often result in long, dull talks followed by interesting questions and discussions. One could imagine recorded talks made available to conference attendees a few days in advance followed by a conference entirely devoted to activities designed to promote interaction between researchers, such as poster sessions, discussion panels, small workshops and even debates. Why spend a day watching a big screen in front of the lecture hall in some convention center when we can just as easily do that in our bathrobe at home?

TCGA Datasplosion

I'm at the TCGA meeting in Washington DC, and am being blown away by the enormous amount of data and complicated analysis of that data. It's phenomenal how much sequencing, morphometric and related data have been accrued in a wide variety of tumor types. The analyses are pretty interesting, but it's also surprising how much previously known biology comes out again and again. I can't tell if people are reporting results that we already know because it's safer, or because there's not much new in the data. Either way, it's clear that for these results to be useful we will need much more clinically relevant annotation and many more tumors. In a future where all patients have sequenced tumors, perhaps we will see much more clinically applicable conclusions.