see also www.thelastlecture.com

There is a great new proposal (although it will be never accepted in the scientific community)

Compile an ‘alternative’ CV of failures. Log every unsuccessful application, refused grant proposal and rejected paper. Don’t dwell on it for hours, just keep a running, up-to-date tally. If you dare — and can afford to — make it public. It will be six times as long as your normal CV.

tbc…

During a correspondence with a colleague about the validity of genotyping rare variants I became aware of a paper in Science that I missed initially. It is about genetic signatures in longevity:

Using these data, we built a genetic model that includes 150 single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) and found that it could predict EL with 77% accuracy in an independent set of centenarians and controls.

That’s an extremely difficult enterprise given our recent results of the heritability of life span. But that’s not the point, reading now the editorial expression of concern by Bruce Alberts.

In their study, Sebastiani et al. used a number of different genotyping platforms and neglected to perform data quality-control steps, which resulted in their reporting several false-positive single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) associations. In particular, one of the platforms used in their work, the Illumina 610-Quad array, has been shown in unpublished studies by other investigators to produce artifactual genotype data at a subset of SNPs.

No idea, what’s bad with the Illumina (Show me more…)

That’s something that I just read in the DHV newsletter 11/2010 – teaching science in the church :-)

Studierende der Universität Kassel lernen auch auf Kirchenbänken. 20.616 Studierende sind derzeit eingeschrieben. Das sind 1.000 mehr als zu Beginn des vergangenen Wintersemesters und damit mehr als je zuvor. Hörsäle, Mensen und Seminarräume platzen aus den Nähten. Die Hochschulleitung hat daher zusätzliche Räume im Stadtgebiet angemietet. Hierzu gehören ein Hörsaal im Klinikum, Räume in Schulen und zwei Kirchen.