If you are writing some kind of online diary your mood is already surveilled by wefeelfine.
However, if you are an allergic patient, you may be interested in a new project of the German Pollenstiftung that runs an online pollen diary. We have pollen counts for a long time but we do not know so much about thresholds and individual variation.
Continue reading We feel good
As I could now get an update for my quicktext plugin, I finally switched to Thunderbird 3. I like the new clean interface and the immediate access to many folders.
The only question that I have – is there any way to force the “new email window” into a tab?
What’s possible and what’s unlikely to be possible: sportsscientists.com discusses the recent watt burst of the TdF winner at the Verbier climb. Continue reading VO2max of 99.5ml/kg/min and 440 Watt?
A new Science paper is worried about internet neutrality:
… Researchers who support “network neutrality” have become worried that the Internet may lose its innovative edge. They are concerned that control could be shifting from the edges of the Internet toward the service providers at the center, which would allow the providers to have “gatekeeper” capacity and would contradict the Internet’s “end-to-end” principle . This core tenet states that control over information flows should take place, to the extent possible, at the end points of the network…
While politicians are still debating on that issue, Continue reading Internet neutrality
Only recently I learned about the “mere exposure” effect (author’s website) / paper)
Participants named landmarks shown on photographs. In two experimental conditions, the photographs also unobtrusively showed posters depicting the logo of either a lemon candy or a peppermint candy; in a control condition, no posters were shown. Later participants could choose between the two products as a reward. Participants who had been exposed to the lemon logo and control participants chose the lemon candy more frequently, whereas for participants who had been exposed to the peppermint logo, this preference reversed: they chose the peppermint candy more frequently.
I think that’s a great study. I am wondering, however, about the impact on current science. Continue reading Mere exposure effect, peppermints and your next experiment
As I am currently in London, here comes only a quick link for all R users. It goes to crantastic, a community site for R packages where you can search for, review and tag CRAN packages.
Yea, yea.
Finally, here is a technical solution to a proposal that I made here earlier
Ok, we are aware that recovery is always possible with cut & paste into other applications or printing a text -so we may better think about some watermarked graphics. “Don’t ever say anything on e-mail or text messaging that you don’t want to come back and bite you.”
NI has an editorial on hyping research
Although these attention-grabbing headlines might help sell papers and increase traffic to newspaper websites, such reporting is irresponsible to the public and to science in general. Even if the article itself is more balanced, it must be remembered that many readers never get much beyond the headline. The net result is the public comes away with much misinformation.
Continue reading Attention grabbing headlines
Here is another reference to an earlier paper
Although a disease can be causally genetic, intensified mapping efforts have so far been unable to identify genes that account for more than a small fraction of the familial risk, perhaps because the responsible variation arises by somatic mutation Continue reading Sequence, sequence, sequence it
None of us, I think, in the mid-’70s, when “The Selfish Gene” was published, would have thought we’d be devoting so much mental space now to confront religion. We thought that matter had long been closed
is a commentary from Edge 294. Although even more British colleagues were dedicating chapters to that Dawkins meme I always found it stupid difficult to materialize a DNA regulatory unit by a personality trait – introducing another “Darwinian fairytale” (Stove). Continue reading Selfish gene – bad weeds grow tall
We had a lunch discussion on that topic this week – of course, investigating the computer of a person running amok will reveal some (Counterstrike type) games due to his isolation. But such games are also on million of othercomputers who do not run riot and who get relaxed by playing games.
Nevertheless I read this week about the aggressive behaviour of teens who were not allowed to play the whole night World of Warcraft. So, there seems to be clear links Continue reading Do computer games lead to aggression?
I am a great fan of DNA pooling (mainly for cost reasons). During our recent experiments we have lost the identity of a single DNA source by pooling. Then we found that the source DNA may be tagged with a unique oligo allowing the assembler to reconstruct the DNA source from the pool. He comes another variation of The Sequencing Game
The pooling of DNA sequencing samples is not new, but current protocols rely on bar coding each sample with a short oligonucleotide, which is then used to associate a read to the correct sample. This approach is laborious, however, as a unique tag has to be created for each sample. The new method creates pools of samples, and then associates a bar code to each pool, rather than to each individual sequence.
There is a new website showing the history of some memes. I wish we would have something similiar at Pubmed. The vitamin hypothesis at least seems to take off (with the data for 2009 being a projection).
Dr. Zamel, one of the PIs of the Tristan da Cunha study pointed me today to the interesting 30 min BBC documentation online at Allergy Canada
Allergy Island is an exclusive documentary on the history of asthma in Tristan da Cunha and the discovery of the gene related to asthma in that highly inbred community by the expedition that I did in 1993. I went in May 2008 to Tristan da Cunha with the BBC crew to film both parts for the entire month.