Aloha! I'm sold... I'm going back to PSB next year. Hawaii in January is super -er, well, PSB is a great conference. They managed to get good rates for hotels - early January is not peak tourist season in Hawaii. The scheduling of sessions also allowed one lots of time to check out the local attractions. You can download (free!) copies of papers from the PSB website at http://www.cgl.ucsf.edu/psb/ I went to the Python tutorial (run by Jeffrey Chang at Stanford) where Loci was mentioned in the handout, along with Biopython, as Open Source projects using python. Jeffrey did such a good job, I walked out of there thinking "Gee, I could learn that..." For those doing phylogenetic analysis, check out http://wh.uwaterloo.ca/ Paul Kearney's undergrad presented their interactive tree-building program (InVEST). While it's not yet on their web page, this application is something to watch closely. There are calls for both Session Proposals and Tutorial Proposals for next year (also to be held on the island of Oahu). Session Proposals are due Feb 14, 2000. Short tutorial proposals are due March 13, 2000, with full proposals due June 5, 2000. I don't see the info for this on the website, but if anyone has ideas for sessions/tutorials and wants more info on requirements and responsibilities, let me know and I'll pass it along. Compaq underwrote much of the conference - Compaq and SGI provided computers for internet access (although, you can also get vacation accounts from local ISPs when one does not have access through conference machines). They had a spiffy brochure detailing the Sanger Centre's hardware (*drool*). There was a panel discussion on data mining... the general consensus is that the genetic data is only dripping through the pipeline right now... and until genetic databases become as large as United Airline's database, we cannot really complain about the complexity of our databases. On a related note, ISMB2000 (Aug 20-23, 2000, UCSD, LaJolla CA) has a couple of impending deadlines: Call for Papers - deadline is Jan 13 (changed from Jan 6, although not changed on the website); Call for tutorials - deadline for short version is Jan 15; Posters and Software demonstrations - abstracts due May 31,2000 More info at http://ismb2000.sdsc.edu Cheers, -j -------------------------- J. Steinbachs, PhD Computational Biologist Dept of Botany The Field Museum Chicago, IL 60605-2496 office: 312-665-7810 fax: 312-665-7158 http://cb.fmnh.org --------------------------