www.cell.com/current-biology shows humour
Human emotional expressions, such as laughter, are argued to have their origins in ancestral nonhuman primate displays. To test this hypothesis, the current work examined the acoustics of tickle-induced vocalizations from infant and juvenile orangutans, gorillas, chimpanzees, and bonobos, as well as tickle-induced laughter produced by human infants.
Thenew book by Gibson “It Takes a Genome: How a Clash Between Our Genes and Modern Life Is Making Us Sick” raises some interesting points (from the Amazon review)
Our genome is out of equilibrium, both with itself and its environment. Simply put, our genes aren’t coping well with modern culture. Continue reading Clash between our genes & environment
was an earlier title of a BBC documentation about gene methylation. While running today an analysis of segregating methylation marks, I have major difficulties to find out the status of the human epigenome map. The Sanger site seems to be down for a long time, there aren’t any updates of the AHEAD consortium, the site of the Epigenetics Society is largely uniformative, methDB gives me “information about the research situation in France and why French scientists are in conflict with the current government”, an EU network excellence has only a fashionable website while another EU project is even not fashionable. Or do I miss something??
A new study of 5 year old children relates their current allergy symptoms to LOW maternal intake of vitamin D from food (which is strange within the context of current cohort studies that show a INCREASED risk by vitamin D supplement use).
As this is a diabetes study, the sample is highly biased Continue reading Neverending story – vitamin D in pregnancy
It would be interesting to follow up this historical (1571x cited) paper on mechanisms of consumer choice. Are there similar mechanisms in science consumation e.g. the price we are willing to pay after having read an abstract?
We have learned new genomics and metabolomics (etc not to confuse with economics!) while even complete websites are now dedicated to the omics explosion. What I do not understand is the increasing omics use in completely unrelated fields like humanomics – a good or bad omen?
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…