biology

Jim Kent

Jim Kent is a biology topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Jim Kent rather than just read about it. In short: William James Kent (born February 10, 1960) is an American research scientist and computer programmer. He has been a contributor to genome database projects and the 2003 winner of the Benjamin Franklin Award.

Key takeaways

Jim Kent belongs to biology; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Jim Kent to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Jim Kent from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

William James Kent (born February 10, 1960) is an American research scientist and computer programmer. He has been a contributor to genome database projects and the 2003 winner of the Benjamin Franklin Award.

Early life Kent was born in Hawaii and grew up in San Francisco, California, United States.

Computer animation Kent began his programming career in 1983 with Island Graphics Inc. where he wrote the Aegis Animator program for the Amiga home computer. This program combined polygon tweening in 3D with simple 2D cel-based animation. In 1985 he founded and ran a software company, Dancing Flame, which adapted the Aegis Animator to the Atari ST, and created Cyber Paint for that machine. Cyber Paint was a 2D animation program that brought together a wide variety of animation and paint functionality and the delta-compressed animation format developed for CAD-3D. The user could move freely between animation frames and paint arbitrarily, or utilize various animation tools for automatic tweening movement across frames. Cyber Paint was one of the first, if not the first, consumer program that enabled the user to paint across time in a compressed digital video format. Later he developed a similar program, the Autodesk Animator for PC compatibles, where the image compression improved to the point it could play off of hard disk, and one could paint using "inks" that performed algorithmic transformations such as smoothing, transparency, and tiled patterns. The Autodesk Animator was used to create artwork for a wide variety of video games.

Involvement with the Human Genome Project In 2000, he wrote a program, GigAssembler, that allowed the publicly funded Human Genome Project to assemble and publish the first human genome sequence. His efforts were motivated by the research needs of himself and his colleagues, but also out of concern that the data might be made proprietary via patents by Celera Genomics. In their close race with Celera, Kent and the UCSC Professor David Haussler quickly built a modest cluster of 50 commodity personal computers running a Linux-based operating system to run the software. In contrast, Celera was using what was thought then to be one of the most powerful civilian supercomputers in the world. Kent's first assembly on the human genome was released on June 22. Celera finished its assembly three days later on June 25, and the dual results were announced at the White House on June 26. On July 7, 2000, the Santa Cruz data was made publicly available on the World Wide Web while the research paper describing this publicly funded genome was published in February 2001 special issue of Nature, in parallel with Celera's results in the journal Science. In 2002 Tim O'Reilly described Kent's work as "the most significant work of open source development in the past year". While all of Kent's genomics software is open source in the sense that the source code can be downloaded and read for free, and all of the software can be freely used for academic, nonprofit, and personal use, some of it requires a license, either from UCSC or from Kent Informatics Inc., for commercial use. After GigAssembler, Kent went on to write BLAT (BLAST-like alignment tool) and the UCSC Genome Browser to help analyze important genome data. Kent continues to work at UCSC primarily on web tools to help understand the human genome. He helps maintain and upgrade the browser, and has worked on comparative genomics, Parasol, a job control management software for the UCSC kilocluster, and the ENCODE Project.

References

External links O'Reilly Interview with Jim Kent Wired article on Jim Kent

Illustrations

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Jim Kent

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Jim Kent claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In biology, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Jim Kent before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Jim Kent ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Jim Kent

In research: Jim Kent appears in biology research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Jim Kent in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Jim Kent is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics 1960 births, 21st-century American biologists, American bioinformaticians, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Jim Kent outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

Affiliate

Preply — study more efficiently by working with a personal tutor. 50% off.

How to study Jim Kent in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Jim Kent means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Jim Kent out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Jim Kent in simple terms?

Why does Jim Kent matter?

Because it connects several biology ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Jim Kent?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Jim Kent.