A recent interview of Jane Glitschier in PLoS genetics with Tom Cech nicely shows the relationship of truth and research: “There is a search for absolute truth in research. You never get there—but there are criteria by which you judge how close you are. You’re always criticizing yourself and criticizing your colleagues, and they’re criticizing you. And there is a test, very often, that you can do to decide who’s right.”

Addendum

Here is a difference between science and religion — Jesus told his disciples, “I am the way and the truth and the life” (John 14:6). Yea, yea.

A new study now shows directly that personal exposure of particles is linked to asthma symptoms. Children carried pollution monitors in their backpacks on the way to school where PM2.5 ranged from 20 to 50 micrograms per cubic meter. Although only around 10 percent of the total mass of particles was diesel soot, it was this that was most closely linked to the children’s asthma. This nicely complements results of our study in Munich in 1989/1990 which was the first survey indirectly linking car exhaust and airway symptoms in children. Mechanisms how this happens are not very well known – for a discussion of the biphasic response see our paper of a mouse model, yea, yea.

During my professional career I have never been told how to make good graphics although extracting essential information from datasets is an advanced (and necessary skill). Fortunately, however, there are some excellent books that cover graphical display. The first one I came across was Michael J Campbell and David Machins’ “Medical Statistics – A commonsense approach” (see pages 44ff and 58 for “increasing data ink”) that gives a lot of useful advices how to improve figures. The next book that I found influential was Bill Cleveland’s 1993 book “Visualizing Data” who introduced into R and S multidimensional lattice graphics (also covered 2005 in “R Graphics” of Paul Murrell published by Chapman & Hall/CRC). I used this technique extensively in my 2005 PLoS paper on the worldwide distribution of allergy. At the moment I am reading the new book “Graphics of large datasets” by Antony Unwin, Martin Theus, Heike Hofmann which seems to be finally the masterclass of displaying data. Yea, yea.

Addendum 1

An examples how to improve a barchart (yes – I resisted to start with a 3D barchart but the cluttering colors and grids are hopefully good to see).

Addendum 2

A new Nature Nascent entry: “The way we present genomic and proteomic data on the web sucks”

I visited the Deutsche Museum yesterday, where one of best attractions is the Foucault pendulum a 30 kg weight at a 60 m rope (the original at the Panthéon was 67 meter long and weights 28 kg). We could see, that the pendulum swings on a an elliptic course, hitting the conses always from the back. As we were told, the deviation of the pendulum is a function of latitude. The horizontal axis is the latitude from 90 degrees to 0 degrees latitude. The vertical axis shows the rate of precession in degrees per hour; positive for clockwise precession, negative for counterclockwise precession (the Coriolis effect seems to have a minor role). I wondered what might be the reason for the spin or chirality seen so often in nature. Most DNA has a right-hand screw (nevertheless there are hundreds of images on the net and many scientific papers) that show left-handed DNAs). Yea, yea.