Pre-game announcements!

Greetings, loyal readers! You might remember that a few months ago we showed you the q-bingo game card that we brought to the last q-bio conference, and asked for your ideas on what terms are popular (or perhaps overused) in systems biology so that we could use them in future games. I can now announce that we have used your ideas in the set of playing cards for this year's conference!

If you're at the conference and want to play, come to Poster Session 1 tomorrow (Thursday) and stop by poster #11 (hint: it's very violet) to pick up your card AND to learn about some exciting research that will be coming out in just a few days. See you there!

If you're not coming to the conference (or even if you are), you can still join the fun by following us on (our new) Twitter: @qbiology.

Etymology. (Not to be confused with entomology.)

It's time I explained where the name of the blog, "q-bingo", comes from.

It started last year at the q-bio conference, which is a conference focused on quantum quixotic quantitative biology. Like all fields, quantitative biology involves a certain amount of jargon and buzzwords, and certain words crop up more often than they would in everyday conversation.

And where would you hear those words most often? Conferences, of course. In fact, you might start keeping track of how many times certain words come up, and wonder if anyone else is keeping track too...

And thus, q-bingo was born. Simply cover a square whenever you hear a word used in a talk, and when you fill a straight line shout "q-bingo" straight away. Yes,  right there during the talk. [Disclaimer #1: I made this suggestion fully aware that my own talk would be punctuated by a few "bingo"s. Disclaimer #2: There are other examples of such games.] Conference organizers and attendees seemed to love the idea. Sadly, the game didn't quite get off the ground due to the issue of having to print 200+ of these things for everyone at the conference. 

On the other hand... At an immunology meeting, I wouldn't necessarily find it noteworthy or funny that people use specialized words like "clonotype" and "Fab fragment". So why did these words jump out at me?

• I think part of the reason is that some of these words are used to create a certain impression rather than to communicate information. For example, the word "complexity" is often to used to throw a veil of sophistication over something, without explaining what makes the topic complex. Same with "network" and "circuit", to some extent. 
• Other words, like "incoherent" (as in incoherent feed-forward, which is a simple pattern of interactions/influences) can mean vastly different things to other scientists and to the general public. 
• A few words aren't actually objectionable or amusing - they capture ideas that people are excited about at a particular time. There were several talks about the importance of "single-cell" measurements because of cellular "heterogeneity". 

I want to hear your feedback. Are these just buzzwords, and should we try to use them less? Or are they signs of a young-ish field finding its own language? And of course... if you have ideas for q-bingo words, let me know in the comments because we might need them again this year. 

The Center for Nonlinear Studies

In 2007, the q-bio Conference was inaugurated through the initiative of the Los Alamos Center for Nonlinear Studies, which is also known as CNLS. A few days ago a nicely produced YouTube video about CNLS became available, and the Center's sponsorship of the conference is mentioned. The video might be of interest to past or future attendees of the q-bio Conference who want to know more about CNLS, which supports a postdoc training program in the area of quantitative biology. The current director of CNLS is Bob Ecke, who is featured in the video. Bob was instrumental in obtaining the funding needed to launch and then sustain the conference series, as well as the affiliated q-bio Summer School. Bob is retiring soon and 2014 may be the last year that we will see him at the conference, where he usually welcomes attendees to New Mexico and says a few words about CNLS. If you happen to see him, or even if you don't, and you appreciate the conference and summer school, it would be nice to let him know. I expect that he would appreciate hearing about the impact of CNLS on q-bio scientists and their research.