The Lancet has a comprehensive review of bipolar disorders- finally I learned about the distinction between type I (includes mania) and type II (hypomania). BTW the author thinks that there is no sound evidence for the DSM-IV priority for mood changes; Kraepelin had no priority for mood, thinking or activity altering changes after all). Continue reading Hypomania
A new major release of my favorite software is definitely worth another entry here. Besides many other features there is now a new function to add tags to emails – quite important if you need to assign emails to different projects. Furthermore (virtual) search folder are now cached for speed, many thanks, yea, yea.
Following the last Microsoft patch day, my laptop started with this quite unusual error message Continue reading A patch of the patch of the patch of the …
Süddeutsche Zeitung reports that the Hanna-Arendt Institute for Research on Totalitarism has dismissed its director as three quarter of the scientific staff now voted against him. This seems to be a quite unusual case that the scientific staff has such a strong voice – I can’t renember so many other cases in the hierarchical academic system.
Karfreitag / Good Friday 2007. When digitizing old slides, I found these interesting ones – they show the large ward at the hospital at Beaune in the Bourgogne. The hospices de Beaune were founded in 1442 by Nicolas Rolin. A M.A. thesis at the university of Tübingen has more details – charity as part of the social status (page 26) and a reason why the initials of Nicolas Rolin (and his third wife) Continue reading La grande salle
Sorry, can’t tell you anything about user dungeons and don’t have any second life avatar (only various nicknames at various sites). Has anybody experience with science there?
Even universities are jumping in this field for example the UIC with Virtual Reality for Virtual Eternity. Continue reading My avatar
sorry for that but running a server without any ad clicks is difficult…
When getting important documents for review I usually check them for plagiarism. One of the best address seems docoloc – try it out, they have Continue reading More on plagiarism
The great pyramid of Giza by Cheops (Khufu, ΧÎωψ) is a true mystery. SPIEGEL online now reports another attempt to explain how the pyramid has been constructed. A French architect believes Continue reading Let us build a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven
is another attempt to explain why replication fails frequently in genetic epidemiology. Zöllner and Pritchard write in the AJHG (their server is currently down)
For a variant that is genuinely—but weakly—associated with disease, there may be only low or moderate power to detect association. Hence, when there is a significant result, it may imply that the genotype counts of cases and controls are more different from each other than expected. Consequently, the estimates of effect size are biased upward. This effect, which is an example of the “winner’s curse” from economics depends strongly on the power of the initial test for association. If the power is high, most random draws from the distribution of genotype counts will result in a significant test for association; thus, the ascertainment effect is small. On the other hand, if the power is low, conditioning on a successful association scan will result in a big ascertainment effect.
I haven´t fully understood the following argumentation, but promise to revisit it some times later, yea, yea.
indexed.blogspot.com has many interesting data visualizations – I like them!
A more serious approach for interpreting health statistics can be found in the Lancet. Continue reading More statistics
Curative medicine contributes only 10% to 40% to individual health (figures are depending on models and methodology according to a recent commentary in the Deutsche Ärzteblatt, for milestones check the BMJ) – a reason why I finally decided to become an epidemiologist. Continue reading Gary Taube’s limits and my interest in molecular epidemiology
Science has an interesting paper that relates to an earlier post here and a central question in immunology. How do T cells differentiate int both short-lived effector cells (that combat infections) and long-lived memory cells. Continue reading Divide and conquer
Science magazine today reports another ego trip.
A U.S. company [454] has begun to trickle out information on a unique DNA study it calls “Project Jim,†a crash effort to sequence the entire genome of a single individual. The results are likely to be made public this summer. Anonymity is out of the question: It has already been announced that the genome belongs to James D. Watson, winner of the Nobel Prize and co-discoverer of DNA’s structure. Watson won’t be alone: Harvard Medical School has approved a plan by computational geneticist George Church to sequence and make public the genomes of well-informed volunteers—including his own. And J. Craig Venter says his nonprofit institute will soon release a complete version of his genome.
My daily newsletter says that Roche is going to acquire 454 for $155M and plans to use the sequencer for IVD applications, I hope they will forget “Project Jim” somewhere on a harddisk.
.. another thoughtful essay by Sean Eddy in PLOS Computational Biology cites the NIH Roadmap Initiative
The scale and complexity of today’s biomedical research problems demand that scientists move beyond the confines of their individual disciplines and explore new organizational models for team science. Advances in molecular imaging, for example, require collaborations among diverse groups—radiologists, cell biologists, physicists, and computer programmers.
which sounds great like all interdisciplinary science but has also all the drawbacks (“to temper the wind to the shorn lamb” seems to be the English translation of the German “weakest ring of the chain”).
Progress is driven by new scientific questions, which demand new ways of thinking. You want to go where a question takes you, not where your training left you.
Sure, the game is more about interdisciplinary people than interdisciplinary teams
A motley crew of misfits
and not EU accountants drive progress.