I find it handy to have a quick link in appointments to the recent correspondence. Unfortunately there is no easy way to do that. Continue reading Mac OSX: Create a symbolic link to Thunderbird Emails in an Ical Appointment
Category Archives: Software
Change location
Here is another tech tip to overcome a frequent task – resetting printers and mailers when moving a Macbook around the world: Location X is a perfect solution with a built in autolocate function (depending on airport network! which is superior to IP detection)
Unfortunately Continue reading Change location
Adding books to an Endnote library
Being tired from entering several books into an Endnote library, I found a better way – just enter “GKV” as the remote library where you can select ISBN search…
Tear Down the Walls
What happens when looking at that video?
The neuroanatomy view this week in Nature
we predict[…] a macroscopic signal visible to functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in humans. We then looked for this signal as participants explored a virtual reality environment, mimicking the rats’ foraging task: fMRI activation and adaptation showing a speed-modulated six-fold rotational symmetry in running direction. The signal was found in a network of entorhinal/subicular, posterior and medial parietal, lateral temporal and medial prefrontal areas. Continue reading Tear Down the Walls
Human language, DNA language?
A new paper in PLoS ONE argues that human languages may adapt like biological organisms. By doing a large-scale analysis of over 2,000 of the world’s languages the authors find striking relationships between the demographic properties of a language—such as its population and global spread—and the grammatical complexity of those languages. Languages with the most speakers (like English) were found to have far simpler grammars than languages spoken by few people and in circumscribed regions. This reminds me to bottlenecks in population history (and founder effects for certain DNA variants) while the authors describe this phenomenon as “Linguistic Nicheâ€. A Hardy Weinberg Equilibrium of declension types?
PLINK: Bug or feature?
I am struggling now for 4 weeks with some unusual behaviour in PLINK that gives me different results with a trait of the alternate phenotype files either by calling that trait directly
plink –file mydata –tdt –pheno pheno2.txt –mpheno 1
or from a loop over all traits
plink –file mydata –tdt –pheno pheno2.txt –all-pheno
It seems that I am working with different numbers at both occasions – click to enlarge the log Continue reading PLINK: Bug or feature?
(Happy) New Year Backup
As the Time Machine harddisk (that I am using for my Macbook Air) turned out to be read only for unknown reasons, I decided to buy a new 500 GB unit with 2.5” for 60 € and format it for dual use. Continue reading (Happy) New Year Backup
WordPress 2.9.1 hangs with several standard plugins
It took me some time to figure out that the most recent update produced several problems – either the blog is unreachable or some pages like “edit post” do not work anymore. In my setup this concerns the following plugins here Continue reading WordPress 2.9.1 hangs with several standard plugins
Careful control of stratification
A careful control of population stratification removes most “significant” SNP associations – shown again at the Genetic Analysis Workshop 16 Continue reading Careful control of stratification
SQLite and a graphical ER diagrammer for OS X
I am looking for some time for a MS-Acess like graphical interface addressing my large SQLite databases. Having tried out now more than dozen different packages, I found only one that fills my needs and even that only by 80% – RazorSQL.
Writing complex SQL queries is possible hwith an “autocomplete” function Continue reading SQLite and a graphical ER diagrammer for OS X
Two new bioinformatics services
The first one is Anno-J, an excellent way to show your own annotation track that has some benefits compared to Ensembl or the Genome Browser.
The second one Continue reading Two new bioinformatics services
The art of a clean Mac OS X desktop
I spent considerable time this week as my MBA showed major quirks – the finder’s trashcan did not respond, clicking on the finder in the dock suddenly opened a second icon, while the finder crashed frequently. Running harddisk maintenance, correcting access rights, deleting several plists, experimenting with safe mode, even deleting PRAM and NVRAM – nothing helped until Continue reading The art of a clean Mac OS X desktop
How to speed up online banking with a billing “tweed”
It would be nice to have billing details somewhere online while just typing in some Amadeus like 6 digit code to move the data into the online banking page. This not so much a security issue as such a billing tweed should vanish after 4 weeks Continue reading How to speed up online banking with a billing “tweed”
Justice for Alan Turing
Petitions #10 has the full details:
2009 has been a year of deep reflection – a chance for Britain, as a nation, to commemorate the profound debts we owe to those who came before … we have this year a chance to mark and celebrate another contribution to Britain’s fight against the darkness of dictatorship; that of code-breaker Alan Turing … Continue reading Justice for Alan Turing
First major publisher releases article metrics
From a press release
Today, the open-access publisher the Public Library of Science (PLoS; www.plos.org), announces the release of an expanded set of article-level metrics Continue reading First major publisher releases article metrics