I had the chance to install now the new PLINK GWAS software for a further analysis of recently published ORMDL3 asthma data. It seems that PLINK is some software that I was looking for a long time (paper link|download link). There are great and foolproof functions to check the validity of your data. I discovered for example unnoticed stratification in the German case-control sample by first and second component of the MDS analysis Continue reading Blink Plink
Cha cha cha
SPIEGEL online points to a retrospective of former SCIENCE editor Daniel Koshland on the science typologies challenge, chance and charge.
Challenge – putting the pieces together like the discovery of the DNA structure of Watson & Crick.
Charge – solving longstanding ubiquitous problems like gravity laws by Newton, a rare event.
Chance – events like the development of PCR by Mullis.
I could add cha-uvinism (ignoring previous work), cha-os (also called creativity), cha-racter (???), cha-rity (work for nothing), cha-rade (also called congresses), cha-pter (many to write), cha-lk (many lectures), cha-nge (not really), cha-mpion (a few), cha-ir (less), cha-ff (most), cha-rts (hundreds), cha-t and cha-rivari (always), yea,yea.
Saturday night fever
New work in mice published in nature neuroscience now show that ordinary fever is caused by prostaglandin E2 stimulation of EP3 prostaglandin receptors in the median preoptic nucleus of mice. EP4 seem to mediate hypothermic response, leaves you to choose not only ambiyour desired body temperature
I had a dream tonight
I had a dream tonight. I do the final revision of a paper following many months of work and submit it to an internet server. Only 30 minutes later the first science journal agent contacts me offering immediate publication. More and more offers arrive and I finally decide to hand it over to nice publishing company that will pay so much money to continue my research.
I woke up and Continue reading I had a dream tonight
Catch you
Some of you may remember my recent post how to secure your laptop. There is now also an excellent way to secure your car, boat, or whatever you like. You even don’t need to be a gadget afficionado Continue reading Catch you
Calendar sharing – 2 way
In a previous post we have create calendar snippets in ics format. PHPicalendar is the ultimate solution to stitch these calendar snippets together to a workgroup view.
I am using the built-in RSS feed to be noticed about any forthcoming events that are not sitting in my own calendar.
There is only one drawback: phpicalendar doesn’t offer any possibility to import back any new meeting into Sunbird or Outlook. By using the following patch of events.php it may, however, send you back an .ics file (that can opens Sunbird automatically if configured correctly) by just clicking on any new event.
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If your calendar ics are really up to date, you may want to change $actual_calname in ical_parser.php to
$actual_calname = getCalendarName($filename) . ‘ (-‘ . round((time() – filemtime($filename) )/100000) . ‘ days old)’;
< I often only have time to read abstracts >
Sciencesque has an anonymous update of the impact factor and peer review discussion Continue reading < I often only have time to read abstracts >
An alternative to Pearson R^2
There is a nice online example of four datasets that show exactly the same variable mean AND Pearson R^2 although they look quite different!
I show here an alternative R solution for the correlation ratio eta that may help if you are dealing with such data.
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Sweave – seamless statistics and document automation
The R Munich user group likes Sweave. Here are 3 screenshots how to create a seamless R + Open Office integration (which works also for Word documents if you have installed the ODF converter plugin). First create your document
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the document
save it, open R and execute
Your document will then look like
Error prone
Single use email
It’s quite easy nowadays – install this new Firefox plugin and click “random email”. Read your inbox by clicking “check”. Take care as everything is being lost if you delete cookies!
Sex and drugs and rock and roll
We should have listened to our parents — but so far I did not see a major adverse potential of cannabis. This might have been wrong having heard last year the terrible story of a friend who lost her son by drug induced psychosis. Last week I even learned that this may be Continue reading Sex and drugs and rock and roll
An editor is one who separates wheat from chaff and then prints the chaff I
Here is a little tale that could have happened every day. An author sends a major paper to a major journal. The major journal has a major editor that asks other major reviewers before writing a major email. Continue reading An editor is one who separates wheat from chaff and then prints the chaff I
Human parthogenesis
Stem cell researchers now believe that the human ES cell line SCNT-hES-1 (you may renember Hwang who claimed having first cloned a human by somatic cell nuclear transfer) is derived by parthogenesis – the result of a dividing human oocyte.
They test the origin of the Hwang cells by genome-wide SNP analysis as the initial DNA fingerprint was doubtful Continue reading Human parthogenesis
Allergy transplantation
A new paper in Transplantation takes up an old question – can you passively transfer asthma or allergy? It seems so – the current study reports in 5 of 42 patients elevated IgE plus allergy symptoms. This is in line with earlier reports. Sorry to say — you can get allergy also by bone marrow transplantation.
Addendum 10/6/08
Blood
A total of 16 nonallergic recipients with allergic donors were reported to develop allergic disease posttransplant, however, conclusive information was available for only 5 cases. Allergic disease was reported to abate in 3 allergic recipients with nonallergic donors, however, conclusive information was available for only 2 cases. Problems in interpreting the reports include incomplete data on allergic disease in the donor or recipient pretransplant, not knowing the denominator, and the lack of controls. In summary, review of the literature generates the hypothesis that allergic disease is transferable
Addendum 14/7/22
Ann All Asthma Immunol