a prosaic quotation from the recent Nature correspondence section that highlights why genetics has been leading us into nowhere.
Our lives are unrepeatble experiments lacking a control. Myriad external factors interact with genetic and epigenetic factors and with chance to determine whether we are well or ill, smart or dull, successes or failures.
Yea, yea.
A new paper – the second bioinfomatics approach following the groundbreaking work by Perez-Iratxeta – is now coming up with some interesting remarks beyond IL-13 and TGF-ß1 Continue reading Where is the asthma gene?
I am currently playing with MACH and SNPMStat to impute marker based on public datasets. I do not have any opinion about the usefulness of this approach – largely due to the fact that ~10% of my allele coding is different to the public hapmap data. Continue reading How to impute marker genotypes
… or your gel scans with fingerprints seem to be the only secure way to prevent later photoshopping. Engadget has all the details of a new Canon patent, yea, yea.
Welcome Just Science Participant! Here is an extra primer how to store your references from the scientific papers that you are reading. In 1983 I was writing on cards, moved to a simple 4-column-database in 1989, used Endnote in 2005 and eventually moved to Zotero in 2007. Zotero is an open source database that sits as a plugin in your Firefox browser [download link]. The neat thing Continue reading More Zotero support
No idea, why this version hasn´t been as rigorously tested as earlier versions. There are numerous changes to the main tables that come without any warning – numerous incompatibilities even with disabled plugins and the first time that I am really in trouble with WordPress. Fortunately I was working with backups and did a pre-flight. This is what I recommend Continue reading WordPress 2.1.x to 2.3.x upgrade – so many problems
More recently I tested another emulator being useful for several genetics programs running under unix*: virtualbox by innotek. I am still struggling with the network adapter and mounting hda1 as writable but everything already works. Continue reading More virtual computer worlds
I started with the Khoury manuscript, replaced it with the Terwillinger book and are finally using this one.
It costs about 63$.
Sorry about the many abbreviations here – I promise to switch back to science with the next blog entry. When I had to install iTunes last year Continue reading iPOD goes TC
This is about Gaggle that I came across only very recently in a new Cell paper on predictive models of transcriptional control. It is not about Google; is it really true Continue reading Gaggle not Google
Over the last weekend I worked on redesigning my workflow of handling PDFs while taking into account the many new capabilities of the Zotero literature management. Continue reading A workflow for managing PDFs with Zotero
There are many ways how to accidentially duplicate files: storing multiple mail attachments, copying or restoring files to a wrong directory. Here is a simple way Continue reading A little gift from Science Surf
— an important question for a science blogger. The answer is yes, at least in principle, as you can see from my screenshot: I am able to drag and drop a reference from the Zotero list view into the Scribefire edit pane. As the reference appears there in full text only, I have already submitted a support request at the Scribefire site as. I think we need to implement DOI support and I will look into the possibility to write a Zotero plugin. A quick fix to reformat the dropped reference would probably be a simple bookmarklet.
BTW The Endnote import into Zotero works best with the “Refman” option on the UPPER RIGHT BAR in Endnote selected before starting the text export. The resulting text file then can be flawless imported in Zotero if it contains less than 100 or 200 references.
Zotero is a browser plugin that I am currently exploring as it can recognize PUBMED or PLoS entries and knows about Endnote/Refer/BibX export in UTF-8 format. The Open Office 2.1 insert reference macro produces a runtime error here and importing 100 references freezes my computer for about 5 minutes. Nevertheless Zotero follows a promising concept and holds much premises for the future; just discovered that data are stored in “…\zotero\zotero.sqlite”, great! one of the best available databases. This is the reason why I will
yea, yea.
As there is no central Zotero server, I wonder how I could access my local installation from different sites. The recommended portable Firefox is not really an universal solution. As with other open source databases, surrounding code of SQLITE is getting commercialized but there seems to be a free? sqlite server for download.
This is a more philosophical remark on science publication: With a technical sound solution for online referencing I expect that science blogs will get more influence while printed papers will loose their importance. Post publication peer review (attached comments) is certainly as good as pre publication peer review (that kills many new ideas, always delays publication and costs a lot of money better spent for research). You can cite me for that idea ;-)