There's something oddly fitting about a Werner Herzog trading card sitting on top of a medal awarded for pain research.

I also particularly liked Gwendal Restoux's (INRAE) talk on genetic resources and potential strategies to make use thereof, and Anna Wolc's (Hyline, Iowa State) thorough update on the state of machine learning for poultry breeding and management.

And Tanmay Debnath (University of Edinburgh) talked about ML for phenotyping of the tibia.

Outwith of our project, there were more contributions about the keel, with genetic parameters from Pascal Duenk (Wageningen), and a poster on keel ossification from Lisa Hildebrand (FLI).

We had a pretty strong lineup from our department and the international FFAR keel bone project:

I talked about our genomic selection efforts, Khrystyna Kurta about genome-wide association and bone composition, and Moh Sallam about ML and new phenotypes for the keel.

(It doesn't help that Prisma's import publications function has been broken since what, 2019? Please, pretty please with sugar on top, let us enter the publication list as a pdf like VR does.)

This year, the profile was cut down to a small text box, and we're back to list of 10 publications to be entered in Prisma. Gone are the ambitions to include more stuff than publications; it's now not even clear whether preprints count.

Last year's call introduced the academic profile for describing the merits of applicants in a broader way than before, including a wider understanding of an academic contribution than just a publication list. It came with a prescribed template, which was unfortunately quite awkward and bad.

On that note, it's time to seriously learn Bibtex, so I can let go of the Zotero plugin and rid myself of Microsoft Word.

Sad but probably justified! :(

My next lecture in the course is QTL, so it's still there, but it has morphed, and a lot of it is about molecular trait mapping, eQTL and that stuff now.

Researchers should feel this often in contact with the literature. "There are tons of research about this ... but to different ends, and from other perspectives."

She illustrated this with an anecdote about getting to know roaches (the fishes), wanting to know about their behaviour and learning, and going to the library to find only books about catching and cooking fish.

Then philospher Jonna Bornemark talked about a model of knowledge (by her and Nicolaus Cusanus), going from sensations and drives through imagination, instrumental knowledge, intellectual critique, the absence of knowledge (the highest form of knowledge) and then back around again.

This course (Genome Analysis for MSc students) is always fun. When I came in to talk GWAS, my colleague had this on the board and a linkage map of the chicken Z chromosome on the projector. :)