Mailund on the Internet

My internet provider, TDC, now offers a new service: for internet subscribers with at least 1Mbit/s, a large selection of their online music show is now free.  Great, you think, at least so did I, so I quickly went to their webpage and signed up (which was a bit of a hassle, but I managed).  Only to discover that all the music is in DRM protected WMA files.  Just great! Those only play in Windows Media on Windows, not on Linux and not on Mac, the two operating systems I use.  The service is absolutely useless to me!

I am used to Linux being ignored, but I thought I would be at least somewhat better off now that I am using Mac as well, but I guess not.

Today we (Carsten Wiuf and myself) held the exams for our Systems Biology class. This is the first time we teach this class, so we weren't quite sure how to evaluate it.

The class was a theoretical introduction to systems biology -- the full name of the class is Mathematical Models in Systems Biology -- and we have covered some simple ODE modelling of systems, some stochastic modelling using stochastic Petri nets and implemented bits and pieces in R.

To test that our students knew how to do all three, we wanted to cover all three at the exam, so we did the following: each student got a small system to model, both deterministically as ODEs and stochastic as SPNs, and then they should explain what the system did (qualitatively, at least) and finally show that it behaved the predicted way by implementing it.

All in all I think it went pretty well.