Where did August go?

Usually August is a quiet month outreach wise at the NGS but this year it seems to have been the complete opposite.  The SeIUCCR summer school is fast approaching and I've been busy sorting out registrations, accommodation and queries for that.  The summer school was massively oversubscribed with 4 people applying for each place.  Demonstrates that there is quite a demand out there for training in e-infrastructure across institutions in the UK!  Thankfully all speakers and delegates appear to be sorted so perhaps now I can breathe a sigh of relief.  If you were not able to get a place at the summer school keep an eye on the NGS website and mailing list as the material from the course will be made available online.

In other news there is a new NGS user case study up on our website.  This time Maria Holstensson from the Institute of Cancer explains how she is using NGS resources to improve cancer treatment for children.

Children with neuroblastoma who are being treated with targeted radionuclide therapy can have their treatment monitored with gamma camera images. These images are used to calculate the amount of drug taken up by the tumour and to estimate the radiation dose. However the image quality can be poor due to scattering and interference. Maria Holstensson from the Institute of Cancer is looking at tackling this problem.

It never fails to amaze me the range of research carried out on NGS resources.  We have users from every area from linguistic analysis to high energy physics and we are always looking for more.  There are now 23 user case studies on the NGS website and I hope that they demonstrate that e-infrastructure is for everyone and not just those from physics or computing research areas. 

This may be a good time to mention an interesting blog post from Steve Crouch over on the Ask Steve blog from the Software Sustainability Institute (SSI).  He's been musing on communications between developers and researchers - do they really speak the same language?  Comments will no doubt be welcome!