I find it handy to have a quick link in the appointments to the recent correspondence. Unfortunately there is no quick way to do that. (Show me more…)

Here is another tech tip to overcome a frequent task – resetting printers and mailers when moving a Macbook around the world: Location X is a perfect solution with a built in autolocate function (depending on airport network! which is superior to IP detection)

Unfortunately (Show me more…)

Being tired from entering several books into an Endnote library, I found a better way – just enter “GKV” as the remote library where you can select ISBN search…

What happens when looking at that video?

The neuroanatomy view this week in Nature

we predict[...] a macroscopic signal visible to functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in humans. We then looked for this signal as participants explored a virtual reality environment, mimicking the rats’ foraging task: fMRI activation and adaptation showing a speed-modulated six-fold rotational symmetry in running direction. The signal was found in a network of entorhinal/subicular, posterior and medial parietal, lateral temporal and medial prefrontal areas. (Show me more…)

A new paper in PLoS ONE argues that human languages may adapt like biological organisms. By doing a large-scale analysis of over 2,000 of the world’s languages the authors find striking relationships between the demographic properties of a language—such as its population and global spread—and the grammatical complexity of those languages. Languages with the most speakers (like English) were found to have far simpler grammars than languages spoken by few people and in circumscribed regions. This reminds me to bottlenecks in population history (and founder effects for certain DNA variants) while the authors describe this phenomenon as “Linguistic Niche”. A Hardy Weinberg Equilibrium of declension types?

I am struggling now for 4 weeks with some unusual behaviour in PLINK that gives me different results with a trait of the alternate phenotype files either by calling that trait directly

plink –file mydata –tdt –pheno pheno2.txt –mpheno 1

or from a loop over all traits

plink –file mydata –tdt –pheno pheno2.txt –all-pheno

It seems that I am working with different numbers at both occasions – click to enlarge the log (Show me more…)