Tobe, Welt und springe

Bach cantatas are at a nice page of cs.ualberta.ca incuding my favorite BWV 227

Trotz dem alten Drachen,
Trotz des Todes Rachen,
Trotz der Furcht darzu!
Tobe, Welt, und springe,
Ich steh hier und singe
In gar sichrer Ruh.
Gottes Macht hält mich in acht;
Erd und Abgrund muss verstummen,
Ob sie noch so brummen.

How to speed up online banking with a billing “tweed”

It would be nice to have billing details somewhere online while just typing in some Amadeus like 6 digit code to move the data into the online banking page. This not so much a security issue as such a billing tweed should vanish after 4 weeks Continue reading How to speed up online banking with a billing “tweed”

Unscientific World

A review of “Unscientific America” on p 678 in Science Magazine 7 Aug 2009 finds

According to Mooney and Kirshenbaum, atheistic scientists such as Richard Dawkins and P. Z. Myers [who runs the immensely popular science blog Pharyngula] drive people away from science by forcing them to choose between the facts and their faith.

evo-devo-dis

I am curently working on a new lecture series on that topic – having a gut feeling that the evolutionary history will explain how and why we get diseases. Some German magazines (“Fehlkonstruktion Mensch” DER SPIEGEL 40/2009) even write about that topic quoting a forthcoming book of Ganten / Deichmann / Spahl). I will rely, however, mostly on Continue reading evo-devo-dis

Lets not call it “gene-environment-interaction” anymore

(reminescence)
Gene-environment-interaction is a large bubble in complex disease research area with a label that is itself questionable. Genes do not interact with the environment (or only indirectly); the environment does not interact with genes (situations like epigenetic modification or induction of mutations are at least not meant here).
What is being meant by “gene-environment-interaction”, could be described as “genetically conditioned environmental influence” (GCEI) but not as GxE interaction… BTW is there any online list of GCEIs?

Allergy prevention – the European guidelines

Here is an ad for our new paper on infant feeding and allergy prevention

… although all authorities agree that breast milk is the food of choice for infants, the evidence that it prevents allergic outcomes is contradictory, with different studies showing, protection, no effect and even increased risk…
… due to inconsistency of findings, there is no clear-cut evidence that the early use of cow’s milk hydrolysate exerts a preventive effect Continue reading Allergy prevention – the European guidelines

Born to run

There was a news item in the Jan issue of NGR

Born to run? A DNA test to identify future sports stars. The latest personal DNA test to hit the US market, from Atlas Sports Genetics in Colorado, promises to “determine if a child would be best at speed and power sports such as football or sprinting, or endurance sports such as running”

What a nonsense! It would be even deleterious if anybody would be influenced by any genetic test to decide on physical fitness.

First major publisher releases article metrics

From a press release

Today, the open-access publisher the Public Library of Science (PLoS; www.plos.org), announces the release of an expanded set of article-level metrics Continue reading First major publisher releases article metrics