Besides another critical review of the impact game this month in LJ, I found a ever more devastating paper at the University of Konstanz – click for the Babelfish translation. Continue reading Stagnancy at terrific speed or the impact of impact
I have never heard a formal lecture answering this question even after many years in epidemiology. It should be parsimonious of course to avoid too many missings but seems largely a subjective approach to keep or drop a variable. It was therefore quite helpful to find now an online lecture that exemplifies a sound approach – check out unc.edu/courses/2006spring. I already used anova to compare models (at least since my move from SAS to R) while using AIC is something that I am adding now to my toolbox. Continue reading What is the best logistic model?
Life after GWAS comments
Allen Roses, director of the Deane Drug Discovery Institute at Duke University, noted that GWAS has “largely disappointed its most enthusiastic proponents Continue reading Forget about genes V
I haven’t found any replacement yet for Sigmaplot that is offered only as a native Windows application. Even buying a copy of Aabel didn’t bring me back the fast and intuitive plotting capabilities. Running Sigmaplot under Parallels is a pain using too much of the system ressources while Crossover failed to start up even after following these step-by-step instructions. Finally, with Crossover 8, it seems that a win98 bottle can run Sigmaplot 9!
Macosxhints provides a nice solution that I have only slightly edited here
|wj_ppt.txt|
et voilÃ
I have recently argued that much of the”obesity epidemic (which even expands now due to the economic crisis) is being due to processed food that fools our sensory system. A new paper (doi:10.1089/omi.2008.0031) now gives me some more support
Taste perception plays a key role in determining individual food preferences and dietary habits. Individual differences in bitter, sweet, umami, sour, or salty taste perception may influence dietary habits, affecting nutritional status and nutrition-related chronic disease risk. In addition to these traditional taste modalities there is growing evidence that “fat taste†may represent a sixth modality. Continue reading Fat receptor leading to obesity?
In principle, there are two methods marrying R and Plink – either by Applecscript or by TCP IP. I prefer the last one; the Plink website now as a nice documentation how to do that. Unfortunately I didn’ get the Rserve process running under OS X. Here is the trick – add the correct “args” option from the example below.
Being asked to give another presentation on whatesoever topic and to deposit my slides on whatsoever intranet, the famous quote of John Sweller came to my point
It is effective to speak to a diagram, because it presents information in a different form. But it is not effective to speak the same words that are written, because it is putting too much load on the mind and decreases your ability to understand what is being presented.
So, as I tend to use only slides with cartoons and figures (but no bullet points which are in my notes only) these illustrations are rather useless as a stand-alone file at any Ilias platform. In other words
if your presentation visuals taken in the aggregate (e.g., your “owerPoint deck”) can be perfectly and completely understood without your narration, then it begs the question: why are you there?
I remember a lecture by my doctoral advisor who came in the lecture room with just 1 glass slide in his shirt pocket … More intelligent comments about that issue at presentationzen.com
A slide set that I would have liked as a trailer for my recent talk about science and religion…
Here comes probably one of the first papers that say NO to a gene for depression. As expected it is a meta-analysis:
Contrary to a previous report, an analysis of 14 previous studies does not find an association between a serotonin transporter gene variation, stressful life events, and an increased risk of major depression … “A more serious concern … is that the findings of this [Caspi et al] and other nonreplicated genetic associations are now being translated to a range of clinical, legal, research, and social settings such as forensics, diagnostic testing, study participants, and the general public. It is critical that health practitioners and scientists in other disciplines recognize the importance of replication of such findings.”
no stool test;-) nothing!
“the possibility does not necessarily lead to materialization”
This seems to be a question with not so many good answers. “The origins of genome architecture” (Sinauer, 2007) has a nice chapter on “Genes in pieces” covering
Mechanisms about intron gain center about AGGT tetramer duplication that result in new splice sites —AG|gt … ag|GT— with the segment in lower cases being the new intron. (What I found a funny fact, when working for the first time with genomic sequences around 1994 is the “codon ignorance” and “domain ignorance” of introns while on the other hand allowing for alternative splicing). Another mechanism of intron gain may be transposable elements although retrotransposons cannot deliver introns as they are spliced out. More likely are already released introns and ectopic reintegration. Another (not mentioned mechanism) could be random mutations activating cryptic splice sites.
The key question remains Continue reading Why do we possess introns?
A new review [Allergy (2009) vol. 64 (3) pp. 348-353] examines the evidence that
(1) failure to up-regulate the interferon gamma (IFNg) response during infancy is an important determinant of the risk of allergic disease
(2) expression of the IFNg gene in naive T-cells is regulated by epigenetic mechanisms, and
(3) failure to up-regulate IFNg gene expression of naive T-cells associated with low early life microbial exposure.
If we replace “microbial exposure” with Continue reading 1, 2, 3
When I could not replicate results from original data of a recent study I thought this to be my private problem. It seems, however, that I am not alone here when reading another reanalysis attempt:
We reproduced two analyses in principle and six partially or with some discrepancies; ten could not be reproduced.
Continue reading I can not confirm that
I have just finished the revision of a paper describing the history of allergy development. While a temporal coincidence (introduction of vitamin D) will not provide any proof, the absence of such a coincidence (like key features of the hygiene hypothesis) is a rather strong argument Continue reading Pasteur and the hygiene hypothesis